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As my physics professor said, "the intelligence of committees adds like resistors in parallel".* There are 8 billion of us, but it's hard to get us all pulling

As my physics professor said, "the intelligence of committees adds like resistors in parallel".* There are 8 billion of us, but it's hard to get us all pulling in the same direction: we're limited by communication bandwidth, distrust, incentives to defect and freeload, ~20 years of education to get up to speed, duplication of efforts, and other organizational difficulties. Meanwhile, we're manufacturing about 50 million discrete GPUs per year, which is about the same as the number of humans we add per year (60 million and falling). Obviously it's not simply 1 GPU per AI agent, but just in terms of rough trends, there you are. * See also: Kasparov Versus the World, in which grandmaster Garry Kasparov defeated the "superintelligence" of thousands of chess masters combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World

thechao 4y ago
We've got a Kasparov because there are N billion of us: he is the Chess superintelligence for humanity. Similarly, my aunt is the person helping him eat soy beans, through the proper investment & maintenance of her combine.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  Fair enough, but these N billion humans also comprise the "unimaginable super-intelligence" that fails to solve basic collective action problems like climate change and overfishing, and which fights immensely destructive wars with itself every generation. It's exactly what it says on the tin, the common greatness and stupidity of humanity that we are all familiar with from every day experience; there's no need to dress it up as a superintelligence to claim that AI will never be able to rival it. AI can certainly beat Kasparov at chess, and another N billion humans won't change that by producing a Magnus Carlsen. With our collective efforts we might produce a better Stockfish, but that rebuttal would be begging the question.

thechao 4y ago

We've got a Kasparov because there are N billion of us: he is the Chess superintelligence for humanity. Similarly, my aunt is the person helping him eat soy beans, through the proper investment & maintenance of her combine.

mitthrowaway2 4y ago
Fair enough, but these N billion humans also comprise the "unimaginable super-intelligence" that fails to solve basic collective action problems like climate change and overfishing, and which fights immensely destructive wars with itself every generation. It's exactly what it says on the tin, the common greatness and stupidity of humanity that we are all familiar with from every day experience; there's no need to dress it up as a superintelligence to claim that AI will never be able to rival it. AI can certainly beat Kasparov at chess, and another N billion humans won't change that by producing a Magnus Carlsen. With our collective efforts we might produce a better Stockfish, but that rebuttal would be begging the question.