Artificial Intelligence vs. Intelligence Amplification, Part IV

My earlier speculations on AI vs. IA can be found here, there, and yonder.

In Part II, I gave as a reason to regard IA as more likely than Colossus, Skynet, or HAL 9000:

The theory that a few Great Minds can outdo a crowd of supposedly-lesser minds is one of the bases of central planning. The central planners supposedly know best. In the real world …

Along similar lines, attempts to keep undesirables out of the United States generally kept out people we can now recognize as assets.

In the Leviathan version of AI, democracies have generally been more successful than dictatorships. Similarly, attempts to regulate corporations (whether pro- or anti-corporate), have generally pushed business across the state or national boundary.

More recently, Robin Hanson in his series of posts on Overcoming Bias on “ems” has made it clear that he expects the next exponential mode to be a matter of an exponential growth in the number of emulated personalities (called “ems”). I had earlier thought he was theorizing a situation similar to that in “Slow Tuesday Night” by R. A. Lafferty.

I was a bit dubious about Hanson's theory on the grounds that I thought the surplus computing power would be more likely to go into amplifying ordinary human beings than into making more human personalities. I then realized that that was based on the theory that “a few Great Minds can outdo a crowd of supposedly-lesser minds,” which is the same theory that I rejected earlier.

Hmmmm… Maybe AI will be more important in the future than I had expected…