Dwarkesh

We think it's going to hit bottlenecks.

Yeah, we think it's going to hit bottlenecks the same as all these previous processes.

The last time this hit a bottleneck, if you take the hyperbola view, is in like 1960 when humans stopped reproducing at the same rate they were reproducing before.

We hit a population bottleneck, the usual population to ideas flywheel stopped working, and then we stagnated for a while.

if you can create a country of geniuses in a data center, as I think Dario Amadei put it, then you no longer have this population bottleneck and you're just expecting continuation of those pre-1960 trends.

So I realize all of these historical hyperbolas are also kind of weird, also kind of theoretical, but I don't think we're saying anything that there isn't models for which have previously seemed to work for long historical periods.

Yeah, and then I think the addition to that is the question, then why do we have the intelligence explosion?

And the answer is a combination of that speedup and the speedup in serial thought speed.

Yeah.

You're comparing it kind of to two different things.

One of them is literal genetic evolution in the African savannah, and the other is the cultural evolution that we've gone through since then.

And I think there will be AI equivalents to both.

So the literal genetic evolution is that our minds adapted to be more amenable to cooperation during that time.

So

I think the companies will be very literally training the AIs to be more cooperative.

I think there's more opportunity for pliability there because humans were, of course, evolving under this genetic imperative that we want to pass on our own genetic information, not somebody else's genetic information.

You have things like kin selection that are sort of kind of...

exceptions to that, but overall it's the rule.

In animals that don't have that, like eusocial insects, then you just very quickly get, just through genetic evolution without cultural evolution, extreme cooperation.

And with eusocial insects, what's going on is that they all have the same genetic code, they all have the same goals, and so the training process of evolution kind of yokes them to each other in these extremely powerful bureaucracies.