Ted Chiang's Understand: Intelligence explosions and AI doom

Yeah, it's big brain time. This week we're reading 'Understand' from Ted Chiang's 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others.

what is the ceiling on human intelligence? can we jooce it up? did Chiang inspire the whole AI doomer movement? would superintelligence beings have to annihilate each other instead of cooperating? Do we buy the orthogonality thesis?

Also: introducing David Deutsch's 'universal explainer' theory of intelligence, which gives radically different answers to all of the above. Is the dumbest guy you know really capable of making novel advances in quantum physics? The answer may surprise you.

On abstractions and 'chunking': how important is working memory? Should we expect our high-level explanations to converge on a theory of everything? Would super-smart people really communicate in short series of grunts? Could they hack their own autonomic nervous systems or incept a linguistic killshot?

tl;dr: gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt. gestalt gestalt? gestalt gestalt, gestalt.

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) intro and synopsis


• (00:05:13) Can you jooce up human intelligence


• 00:14:53) How would super-smart people communicate?


• (00:22:01) ’chunking’ abstractions towards a theory of everything


• (00:39:23) behavioral priming gone WILD (Greco vs Reynolds grunt battle)


• (00:51:23) why can’t we all just get along??


• (00:55:40) reconciling David Deutsch’s ’universal explainer’ theory with IQ


• (01:16:42) unresolved AI safety concerns

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS:

We love to share listener feedback on the pod, so send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes or share your own or just say hello.

NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

My Struggle, volume 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Lolita - Nabokov

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy