Eliezer Yudkowsky

But like, that's the basic dilemma on this whole paradigm of artificial intelligence.

Better than the AI understands it.

Otherwise, it has magic.

That is, it is, you know, the same way that...

If you are dealing with something smarter than you, then the same way that 1,000 years earlier they didn't know about the temperature-pressure relation, it knows all kinds of stuff going on inside your own mind, which you yourself are unaware.

And it can output something that's going to end up persuading you of a thing, and you could see exactly what it did and still not know why that worked.

Capabilities are moving like this.

We could have been working on this earlier.

People are like, oh, but how can you possibly work on this earlier?

Because they didn't want to work on the problem.

They wanted an excuse to wave it off.

They said, oh, how could we possibly work on it earlier and didn't spend five minutes thinking about, is there some way to work on it earlier?

We didn't...

And frankly, it would have been hard.

Can you post bounties for half of the physicists?

If your planet is taking this stuff seriously, can you post bounties for half of the people wasting their lives on string theory to have gone into this instead and try to win a billion dollars with a clever solution?

Only if you can tell which solutions are clever, which is hard.

But the fact that we didn't take it seriously.

We didn't try.

It's not clear how much progress we could have produced if we had tried, because it is harder to produce solutions.