Daniel Kokotajlo

hell basket right it was just like there's the AIs cannot just like copy nanobots from aliens it's got to make them from scratch and then just on the Elon example it took them two decades of like countless experiments failing in weird ways you would not have expected um uh

And still, it's like, you know, rocketry we've been doing since the 60s, but maybe actually World War II.

And then just getting from a small rocket to a really big rocket took two decades of all kinds of weird experiments, even with the smartest and most competent people in the world.

I think I would probably need to sit down and just think about the numbers, but maybe 2040 or something like that.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And then you might argue, well, robots is more a software problem at this point.

And if like, if there isn't like, you don't need to like invent some new hardware.

It's so hard to reason about because if you asked if Constantine or somebody in like 400, 500 was like, I want the Roman Empire to have the Industrial Revolution.

And somehow he figured out that like you need mechanized machines to do that.

And he's like, let's mechanize.

It's like, what's the next step?

It's like...

Dude, that's a lot, yeah.

And we haven't really got into this because you're using the quote-unquote more conservative vision where it's not like godlike intelligence.

We're still using...

the conceptual handles we would have for humans.

But I probably do... I think I would rather have humans go back with their big picture understanding of what has happened over the last 2,000 years.

Like, me having seen everything rather than a super intelligence who knows nothing, but is just, like, in the Roman economy and they're, like, 1,000 next to this economy somehow.

Like, I think just knowing generally how things took off, knowing basically steam engine, dot, dot, dot, railroads, blah, blah, blah, is more valuable than...