Dwarkesh
speaker
1,722 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 25 Nov
Dwarkesh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
...versus surviving in the wilderness, which is something where it seems like intelligence doesn't help that much.
First of all, maybe intelligence does help that much.
Maybe, like...
Henrik is talking about this very unfair comparison where these guys have a 50,000-year head start, and then you put this guy in, and you're like, oh, I guess this doesn't help that much.
Okay, yeah, it doesn't help against the 50,000-year head start.
I don't really know what we're asking of ASI that's equivalent to competing against someone with a 50,000-year head start.
Yeah, so I think that if you were to send a team of ethnobotanists into Australia and ask them, using all the top technology and all of their intelligence, to figure out which plants are safe to eat now, that team of ethnobotanists would succeed in fewer than 50,000 years.
The problem isn't that they are dumber than the Aborigines exactly.
It's that the Aborigines have a vast head start.
So in the same way that the ethnobotanists could probably figure out which plants work in which ways faster than the aborigines did, I think the superintelligence will be able to figure out how to make a Dyson sphere faster than unassisted IQ 100 humans would.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, so...
Like we said before, I think there's a big difference between discontinuous and very fast.
I think if we do get the world with a Dyson sphere in five years, in retrospect, it will look like everything was continuous and everyone just tried things.
Trying things can be anything from...
trial and error without even understanding the scientific method, without understanding writing, without understanding any, maybe without even having language and having to be the chimpanzees who are watching the other chimpanzees use the stick to get ants and then in some kind of non-linguistic way this spreads versus like the people at the top aerospace companies who are running a lot of simulations to find the exact right design and then like once they have that they test it according to a very well-designed testing process.
So I think if we get the ASI, and it does end up with the Dyson sphere in five years, and by the way, I think there's only like 20% chance things go as fast as our scenario says.
It's Daniel's estimate.
It's not my median estimate.
It's an estimate I think is extremely plausible that we should be prepared for.
Showing 1161–1180 of 1,722 · page 59 of 87
← Previous
Next →