Billy Brown wrote:
>> Similar issues have been considered. For example, here is an exerpt from
>> http://www.extropy.org/eo/articles/vc.html#hanson
>
>Yes, I've read the Singularity debate. My argument is a rather different
>one that your comment about IQ enhancement, and it leads to different
>conclusions.
>
>If you make an AI that increases its own IQ by 1%, that tells you nothing
>about how difficult the next 1% improvement will be. It could be 10%
>harder, or 0.5% harder, or not any harder at all. The only way to find out
>is to try it and see what happens.
This is what I was saying, for example, in saying "they assume this `make myself 1% smarter' task stays equally hard, as the engineer becomes smarter."
>Now, this does not mean that the whole thing is a game of diminishing
What is the "recent history" that shows a "trend"
>returns. Recent history demonstrates that if you research enough different
>things, you can create a situation in which the ability of your society to
>make technological advances increases faster than the difficulty of taking
>the next step. A reasonable extrapolation of the trend would predict a
>century or two of steadily-accelerating progress before things begin to
>change so fast that an unenhanced human can't cope.
>Intelligence enhancement (IE) of any kind would, however, add a new
I think you mean T to be an inverse of tech sophistication.
You are assuming that progress comes mainly from researchers.
>dimension to this saga. Roughly speaking, the our rate of progress is
>determined by:
>
> R * P * I
> Progress / unit of time = -----------
> T * C
>
>Where R represents the resources available to each researcher, P is the
>population of researchers, I is the average intelligence of the researchers,
>T is our current level of technological sophistication, and C is a measure
>of the time and effort required for researchers to communicate.
>Most of the
You might see if these claims can be illustrated in the context of a
specific mathematical model of these processes.
>increasing rate of change in recent times comes from a slow geometric
>increase in both R and P, and a steady drop in C. Since the changes in R
>and C are both due to technology, the whole process tends to feed on itself.
>Meaningful IE would make I increase in roughly the same fashion as R. Not
>only would this dramatically speed up our rate of advance, it would also
>increase the rate at which our rate of advance speeds up.
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/ RWJF Health Policy Scholar FAX: 510-643-8614 140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 510-643-1884