The Daily View 2/9/2023: Biden, Bitcoin due to crash, AI Risk and IQ

It’s been a while since I checked Biden’s approval ratings. It’s still below 45%. Not looking good:

It looks bad, but on the other hand, Obama still won in 2012 by a large margin despite having a sub 50% approval rating for much of 2012:

Bitcoin getting ready to crash, too, sub 17k coming up:

Richard Hanania discusses AI risk: Can a Paperclip Maximizer Overthrow the CCP?

I agree such concern seem way overblown. The necessary hurdles for an artificial intelligence to become sentient in a human sense, let alone take over the world, seems relegated to the realm of science fiction. I think the AI risk argument assumes that the AI accidently destroys the world, but that too seems unlikely. If had to guess, the most likely worst-case scenario is probably a computer which oversees nuclear stockpiles that malfunctions and accidentally initiates a world war, although such systems for obvious reasons have some form of manual override.

He writes:

It seems to me that there is some benefit to more intelligence, that someone with an IQ of 120 is going to say something more sensible than someone with an IQ of 80. But I’m not sure a 160 IQ gets you more than a 120 IQ. Same if you’re trying to predict what world GDP will be in 2250. The problem is too hard.

I disagree here. The difference between an IQ of 120 vs. 160 is enormous. It does not scale linearly or even quadratically. It’s closer to exponential or maybe super-exponential. So a person with an IQ of 120 is not 20% smarter than someone with an IQ of 100 but more like 200% in terms of reasoning ability (or maybe even more). Not only that, but there are discrete ‘phase transitions’ in terms of understanding as IQ rises beyond certain thresholds. This means IQ is not necessarily additive: putting ten (or any number) of 100-IQ people in a room and having them brainstorm together will not necessarily equal a single 120+ IQ person, because the latter will make mental connections or inferences that will be completely outside of the realm of less intelligent people (in much the same way you cannot make a suspension bridge out of toothpicks no matter how many you have).

The AI wars are on: Google is developing its own chat bot, Bard, to take on Microsoft’s ChatGPT. I don’t think ChatGPT poses a threat to Google’s search dominance or revenue. Every few years the media runs with the same story about how Bing, Yahoo, or whatever will overtake Google or Facebook. And it never even comes close to happening. Not to mention, Youtube/video is far less amenable to AI compared to text. Same for 3rd party Google ads.