Re: Zones of Thought (was Zindell's _The Wild_)
Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Wed, 13 Nov 96 17:24:07 PST
Eliezer Yudkowsky writes:
> One hundred percent absolutely correct! The Powers will think faster
>than we are, be smarter. How in the world do you imagine that they'll
>get to an "intermediate level" and just *stop* there? The essence of the
>Singularity is that a smarter being has an increased capacity to invent
>still smarter beings; that's why everything goes to infinity.
Whether smarter beings can create still smarter beings at a faster
rate than lessor beings can improve on themselves depends on how the
difficulty of the task of getting smarter scales with intelligence.
It could be that the task gets harder so fast that smarter beings take
*longer* to get still smarter. We know far too little to say that
this isn't the case.
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/