Scott Alexander

I have a good grasp of what's weird versus standard.

And people thinking about different futures with like digital minds and space travel are just engaging in silly speculation.

Like...

The point of the graph is, actually, there's been amazing transformative changes in the course of history that would have seemed totally insane to people multiple times.

We've gone through multiple such waves of those things.

Another thing also is I think people equivocate between fast and, or between slow and continuous, right?

So like,

If you look at our scenario, there's this continuous trend that runs through the whole thing of this algorithmic progress multiplier.

And we're not having discrete jumps from 0 to 5x to 25x.

We have this continuous improvement.

So I think continuous is not the crux.

The crux is like, is it going to be this fast?

And we don't know.

Maybe it'll be slower.

Maybe it'll be faster.

But we have our arguments for why we think maybe this fast.

So previously I talked about sort of three stages of our takeoff model.

First is like you get the superhuman coder.

Second is when you're fully automated AI R&D, but it's still at like basically human level, like it's as good as your best humans.

And then third is like now you're in super intelligence territory and it's qualitatively better.