Conviction founder Sarah Guo argues slow real-world adoption will mask rapid AI takeoff, but Chris Painter warns agency bypasses physical barriers
Painter argues advanced agentic systems can bypass institutional delays
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a “fast” takeoff with slow diffusion (gated by atoms and institutions and people’s discomfort with change) looks, from the economy’s vantage, less discontinuous
@saranormous I think this is kind of confused about what a “fast takeoff” would mean. If you get true superintelligence, fast, with the ability to affect things in the real world, I think diffusion in terms of atoms stops being an issue, and society won’t be able to ignore the effect
a “fast” takeoff with slow diffusion (gated by atoms and institutions and people’s discomfort with change) looks, from the economy’s vantage, less discontinuous
@saranormous The situations where society intervenes to halt the impacts of superintelligence are probably also situations where there isn’t a a fast takeoff. You can maybe hide a tight-RSI-loop, I don’t think you can seriously hide an ASI for any important amount of time
@saranormous I think this is kind of confused about what a “fast takeoff” would mean. If you get true superintelligence, fast, with the ability to affect things in the real world, I think diffusion in terms of atoms stops being an issue, and society won’t be able to ignore the effect
@ChrisPainterYup How exactly will atoms stop being an issue? Interconnection queues, power generation, the physical labor for standing up datacenters, your semis/memory supply chain bottleneck of choice, and the lack of “the internet of data” for robotics are solved by improved cognition?
@saranormous The situations where society intervenes to halt the impacts of superintelligence are probably also situations where there isn’t a a fast takeoff. You can maybe hide a tight-RSI-loop, I don’t think you can seriously hide an ASI for any important amount of time
@saranormous Whether or not it looks continuous from the outside seems like the same Q to me as whether hardware or other economic factors will rate-limit takeoff
@saranormous I’m not saying they won’t be an issue, I’m saying that their being slow to scale either a) blocks a “fast takeoff” or b) you end up getting to ASI anyway and start getting massive effects that the economy can’t ignore without scaling hardware production massively
@saranormous I’m not saying they won’t be an issue, I’m saying that their being slow to scale either a) blocks a “fast takeoff” or b) you end up getting to ASI anyway and start getting massive effects that the economy can’t ignore without scaling hardware production massively
@ChrisPainterYup How exactly will atoms stop being an issue? Interconnection queues, power generation, the physical labor for standing up datacenters, your semis/memory supply chain bottleneck of choice, and the lack of “the internet of data” for robotics are solved by improved cognition?
@ChrisPainterYup I think we agree
@saranormous Whether or not it looks continuous from the outside seems like the same Q to me as whether hardware or other economic factors will rate-limit takeoff
@saranormous The technology changes first. The world catches up later.
@saranormous i think youre saying the speed bumps are part of the curve, not interruptions to it
which flips the urgency framing a bit?