By Katja Grace, 18 January 2015 Here is a superficially plausible argument: the brains of the slowest humans are almost identical to those of the smartest humans. And thus—in the great space of possible intelligence—the ‘human-level’ band must be very narrow. Since
This page may be out-of-date. Visit the updated version of this page on our wiki. The range of human intelligence seems large relative to the space below it, as measured by performance on tasks we
We know of ten events which produced a robust discontinuity in progress equivalent to more than one hundred years at previous rates in some interesting metric. We know of 53 other events which produced smaller
Nuclear weapons constituted a ~7 thousand year discontinuity in relative effectiveness factor (TNT equivalent per kg of explosive). Nuclear weapons do not appear to have clearly represented progress in the cost-effectiveness of explosives, though the
In a small informal survey running since 2012, AI researchers generally estimated that their subfields have moved less than ten percent of the way to human-level intelligence. Only one (in the slowest moving subfield) observed acceleration.