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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

Imagine 200 years ago saying the same thing. As if you have any idea the limits/bounds of anything. Especially in the face of a super intelligence, it’s absurd.

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It doesn’t matter how smart it is. 200 years of technology were not accomplished by thinking harder. It required empirical observation, new materials and tools, and supply chains.

We could send a cracked team of scientists and engineers that knew everything there is to know about how to make a CPU. But you can’t build a photolithography machine when you barely have electricity or any way to sufficiently purify silicon.

Magic can just wish things into existence. Technology requires a supply chain. When it works, the latter looks like the former but they are not the same.

I think some people are just immune to understanding the implications of super intelligence. Like a severe lack of imagination, they only believe something once they see it and afterward claim it was, ‘obvious all along’.

I don’t really want a disaster to happen to convince you that it is possible. Is there any other way?

On the other hand, I think a lot of intelligent people overestimate the value of intelligence (in a vacuum). And problematically, the concept of superintelligence seems to have been defined by these very people, so we can't really have a reasonable conversation about what greater-than-human intelligence would really look like or be capable of.

What vacuum? do you really still think it can be contained? It already escaped on accident. What more do you need? If you're argument is well it escaped X, but it hasn't escaped Y yet then you should take the first escape as sign as to where it will escape next. Don't keep claiming something can't happen because it hasn't happened before. Unless there's some law of physics that prevents it then escape is possible.

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