Response to: Evolution Provides No Evidence For the Sharp Left Turn, due to it winning first prize in The Open Philanthropy Worldviews contest.

Quinton's post is an argument about a key historical reference class and what it tells us about AI. Instead of arguing that the reference makes his point, he is instead arguing that it doesn’t make anyone's point - that we understand the reasons for humanity's sudden growth in capabilities. He says this jump was caused by gaining access to cultural transmission which allowed partial preservation of in-lifetime learning across generations, which was a vast efficiency gain that fully explains the orders of magnitude jump in the expansion of human capabilities. Since AIs already preserve their metaphorical in-lifetime learning across their metaphorical generations, he argues, this does not apply to AI.

This last paragraph makes an extremely important claim that I want to ensure I convey [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.