Scott Alexander

And without people going back in time, it took 2,000 years for the Industrial Revolution.

Could we get it to happen in 200 years?

You know, that's a 10x speedup.

Can we get it to happen in 20 years?

That's a 100x speedup.

I don't know.

But this seems like a somewhat relevant analogy to what's going on with the superintelligences.

Yeah.

I don't know.

My guess is that the superintelligence would be better.

I think partly it would be through figuring out that high-level stuff from first principles rather than having to have experienced it.

I do think that a superintelligence back in the Roman era could have guessed that eventually you could get autonomous machines that burn something to produce steam.

They could have guessed that automobiles could be created at some point and that that would be a really big deal for the economy.

And so a lot of these high-level points that we've learned from history, they would just be able to figure out from first principles.

And then secondly, they would just be better at learning by doing than us.

And this is a really important thing.

If you think you're bottlenecked on learning by doing, well, then if you have a mind that needs less learning...

Less doing to achieve the same amount of learning.

That's a really big deal.

And I do think that learning by doing is a skill.