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OPSavolainen's avatar

I agree with the titular point.

Anyway, here's a wild idea:

Maybe the car is just going downhill at a speed determined by gradient and wind resistance, and pressing the pedal just produces more noise and hot exhaust? It would be no surprise to find moral failures where there is a narrative of progress but no real way to make gains.

In other words, maybe development of technology is a process independent of the scale of research effort. More effort is just pumping against the bottleneck of natural timescales like maturation of tech, having an idea and communicating it to others, building, saving, depreciation, setting up experiments etc. Obviously human generation time, too! As long as you have some demographic margin of safety so that you don't lose technology to random drift, like the Tasmanians did, population size does not matter. Who could with a straight face maintain that with 10x the population, steam age would have lasted just a couple of decades?

People are not special precious pointwise fountainheads producing unique innovations in an exploding chain reaction. They are going to think about the same things, have the same experience and schooling and tools and do redundant work. Good ideas, viable ways forward from the state of the art at a given time, are finite.

An example to illustrate the idea that technology develops autonomously and humans are just a medium: Let's say I'm doing some carpentry and I'm trying to find a solution to some problem. I could ruminate about it in bed at 2 AM, but most progress happens when I walk into the toolshed and let the tools suggest their solutions. Most likely the first attempts have disappointing results, I have to try a few things. The available technology dominates the process. Adding more people and experience to the toolshed might produce a better idea quicker, but diminishing returns strike very fast.

There's also the truism in software development that adding more workers rarely makes things happen any faster. Same thing here?

I bet you could construct a saner model of progress than what Bloom and Jones used. Do not think it's hard to do.

I know next to nothing about AI but I think the above points also work against a knowledge explosion resulting from running massive numbers of LLMs (+"scaffolding") in parallel.

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anzabannanna's avatar

> Maybe the car is just going downhill at a speed determined by gradient and wind resistance

Culture and ideology (ie: scientism, fundamentalism, insularity) provide substantial resistance.

> People are not special precious pointwise fountainheads producing unique innovations in an exploding chain reaction.

Not yet anyways...but there was a time not that long ago where we weren't jetsetting around the world for relatively paltry sums of money.

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