Dwarkesh

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.

I'm defending it here against a hypothetical skeptic who says absolutely not, no way.

But it's not necessarily my mainline prediction.

But I think if we do see this in five years, it will look like, yeah, the AIs were able to simulate more things than humans in a gradually increasing way, so that if humans are now at 50% simulation, 50% testing, the AIs quickly got it up to 90% simulation, 10% testing.

They were able to manufacture things much more quickly than humans so that they could go through their top 50 designs in the first two years.

And then, yeah, after all of this simulation and all of this testing, then they eventually got it right for the same reasons humans do, but much, much faster.

There's this thing where through history people have been really reluctant to

to admit an AI is truly intelligent.