3 ms·
An analogy might be made in terms of escape velocity. For the longest time, we hurled stones at targets in trees and towers. However, in the times leading up
by RickHull 12y ago
An analogy might be made in terms of escape velocity. For the longest time, we hurled stones at targets in trees and towers. However, in the times leading up to WWII, we (Germans, mostly) began to sense that we could launch objects at the Moon or Mars with plausibly incremental improvements. A tipping or inflection point is reached where things go all zoomy and nonlinear.
70 years later, we might be entering that era for intelligence. These sorts of things are not easily rejected by looking at historical trajectories.
- darkmighty 12y agoYou are using the historical trajectory of rockets in a way to prove your point :) But looking precisely at rockets, there was a boom in technology where the distances and velocities we could go increased exponentially until the tech matured, and now it's settled and still pretty expensive to go up there. In fact, this trend seems common with technologies (rapid growth until a wall is reached). I wish I had a link to the graphs I have in mind that make this argument.
- api 12y agoYou can scale a rocket by mostly just making it bigger. I'm not at all convinced you can do this with intelligence. It sssumes many things: intelligence is one thing, no new problems of a fundamentally different order appear with scale, and there are no scaling laws that apply to intelligence. Of those assumptions, the one that seems most common around here is that intelligence is one thing.