Why do People Think Intelligence Will be "Easy"?

• 50%, 75%, 87.5%, 93.75%, ... are linear jumps in predictive accuracy (one bit each), but returns seem to diminish at an exponential rate
  • On the other hand 6.25%, 12.5%, 25%, 50% represent the same linear jumps, but this time with returns growing at an exponential returns
  • This suggests that the nature of returns to cognitive investment might exhibit differing behaviour depending on where in the cognitive capabilities curve you are
    • Though I've not yet thought about how this behaviour generalises to other aspects of cognition separate from predictive accuracy

But if you look at the length of a chain of reasoning you can do while staying under 10% error or something, then returns don't diminish at all in terms of predictive accuracy. Going from 99% to 99.9% accuracy lets you plan 10 times further ahead in the future with the same final accuracy.

Take for instance the accuracy of humans in classifying daily objects (chairs, pencils, doors, that sort of stuff), for which I'd think we have a greater than 99.9% accuracy, and I'm being conservative here, I don't misclassify every 1 in 1000 objects I see in daily life. If that accuracy dropped to 99%, you'd make noticeable mistakes pretty often and long tasks would get tricky. If it dropped to 90%, you'd be very severely impaired and I don't think you could function in society, seems to me like the returns scale with predictive accuracy, not the linear probabilities.

I think most people would agree that at some point there is likely to be diminishing returns. I, and I think the prevailing view on lesswrong, is that the biological constraints you mentioned are actually huge constraints that silicon-based intelligence won't/doesn't have. And the lack of these constraints will push off the point of diminishing returns to a point much past humans.

There are free-rider problems, size of the birth canal, tradeoffs with other organs and immune function, caloric limits, and many other things that constrain how smart it is locally optimal for a human to be. Most of these do not apply to AIs in the same way. I don't think this analogy is fruitful. Also, its medium of computation is very different and superior in many strategically relevant ways. 

Apriori, I'd expect that given how much human dominance is almost entirely dependent on our (collective) intelligence, our evolution would have selected strongly for intelligence until it met diminishing returns to higher intelligence.

This is a group selection argument. Though higher intelligence may be optimal for the group it might be more optimal for the individual to spare calories and free-ride on the group's intelligence.

In general, I think these sorts of arguments should be suborned to empirical observations of what happens when a domain enters the sphere of competence of our AI systems, and reliably what happens is the AIs are way, way better. I just listened to Andrew Price's podcast, who is an artist, and he was talking with a very gifted professional concept artist who spent 3 days creating an image for the same prompt he gave to the latest version of Midjourney.  By the end, he concluded Midjourney's was better. What took him dozens of hours took it less than a minute. 

This is the usual pattern. I suspect once all human activity enters this sphere of competence, human civilization will be similarly humiliated. 

Apriori, I'd expect that given how much human dominance is almost entirely dependent on our (collective) intelligence, our evolution would have selected strongly for intelligence until it met diminishing returns to higher intelligence

Evolution is not a magic genie that just gives us what we want. 

If there's strong evolutionary pressure to select for a given trait, the individuals who score poorly on that trait won't reproduce. The fact that we see big IQ differences within natives of the same country is a sign that the evolutionary selection for IQ isn't very strong.

Most mutations reduce the performance of an organism. If you have a mutation that makes it 1% less likely that a person reproduces it takes a lot of time for that mutation to disappear due to natural selection. 

Given that we see that IQ generally correlates with other positive metrics. I think it's plausible that more than half of the IQ difference between natives of the same country is due to such mutations that provide no fitness advantages. If you believe that there's very strong selection for IQ than you would expect even more of the IQ differences to be driven by constantly new appearing useless mutations.

In such a scenario I would not expect the smartest humans to have no useless mutations at all but just fewer than the average person. As our knowledge about genes and our ability to do gene editing without producing additional errors evolves it's likely that we will see experiments in growing humans that are smarter than anyone currently alive. 

Human brains already consume 15%-20% of the calories which is a lot more than most other mammals. It's not as easy to raise that amount given that it competes with other uses for energy.

Wikipedia suggests 50,000–150,000 years since human adopted language and thus intelligence became more important. That's not a lot of time to come up with alternative ways to organize the cortex to be more efficient. 

I don't know that intelligence will be "easy" but it doesn't seem intuitive to me that evolution has optimized intelligence close to any sort of global maximum. Evolution is effective over deep time but is highly inefficient compared to more intelligent optimization processes like SGD (stochastic gradient descent) and incapable of planning ahead.

Even if we assume that evolution has provided the best possible solution within its constraints, what if we are no longer bounded by those constraints? A computer doesn't have to adhere to the same limitations as an organic human (and some human limitations are really severe).

If you think (as many do) that there is a simple algorithm for intelligence, then scaling up is just a matter of optimizing the software and hardware and making more of it. And if the AI has the capacity to reproduce itself (either by installing itself on commodity hardware, or by building automated factories, etc) then it could grow from a seed to a superintelligence very quickly.

I don't know that I've seen any good models of compute/algorithmic improvement to future-optimizing power.  Predictive accuracy probably isn't the important and difficult part, though it's part of it.  We really have no examples of superhuman intelligence, and variation among humans is pretty difficult to project from, as is variation among non-human tool-AI models.

The optimists (or pessimists, if unaligned) tend to believe that evolution is optimizing for different things than an AI will, and the diminishing returns on brain IQ are due to competing needs for the biology, which probably won't apply to artificial beings.  

I haven't heard anyone saying it's easy, nor fully unbounded once past a threshold.   I HAVE heard people saying they expect it will seem easy in retrospect, once it gets past human-level and is on the way to a much higher and scarier equilibrium.

Any continuous differentiable function looks about linear once you zoom in far enough. I think that the intuition here is that the range of human intelligence that we are good at measuring subjectively is so narrow (compared to range of possible AI intelligence) that marginal returns would be roughly linear within / around that range. Yes, it will stop being linear further out, but it will be sufficiently far out to not matter at that point.

Two robots are twice as smart as one robot (and cooperation can possibly make it even better). Hence linear returns.

Did I completely misunderstand your question?