Scott Alexander

Like, once you have, like, the fully autonomous robot economy, then, like, things may return badly for the humans if the AI is misaligned, right?

So we can argue, I want to just, like, argue about those things separately.

Yeah.

I feel pretty bullish on the robots.

Like we already have humanoid robots being produced by multiple companies.

Right.

And that's in 2025.

There'll be more of them produced cheaper and they'll be better in 2027.

And there's all these car factors that can be converted and blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I'm relatively bullish on the one year until you've got this awesome robot economy.

And then from there to the cool nanobots and all that sort of stuff, I feel less confident, obviously.

I like that analogy a lot, actually.

I think it's not perfect, but it's a decent analogy.

Imagine if a bunch of us got sent back in time to the Roman Empire, such that we don't have the actual hands-on know-how to actually build the technology and make the Industrial Revolution happen, but we have the sort of high-level picture, the strategic vision of we're going to make these machines, and then we're going to do an Industrial Revolution.

I think that's kind of analogous to the situation with the super intelligences, where they're like,

have the high-level picture of like, here's how we're going to improve in all these dimensions.

We're going to learn by doing.

We're going to get to this level of technology, et cetera.

But maybe they, at least initially, lack the actual know-how.

So there's this question of like, if we did the back in time to the Roman Empire thing, how soon could we bring up the Industrial Revolution?