All Humans Are Very Stupid

When you see a human genius at work, you're not seeing them soar through concept-space like a condor. 🕊️

You're actually seeing them flap around concept-space like a chicken. 🐓

A whimsical scene close to the ground with a clear sky as the backdrop. Cartoonish chickens are flapping their wings haphazardly, barely lifting off the ground. They appear clumsy and comical, with exaggerated expressions and frantic movements. The setting is a grassy field, under a vast, mostly empty sky. This scene captures the humorous and chaotic nature of chickens trying to fly, with a few clouds floating lazily in the background.

None of us is equipped with a proper set of cognitive "wings". Yet we think we're equipped to dominate the cognitive sky, because we've only known the sky to be empty except for a few of us low-flying chickens. Chickens who imagine themselves as condors.

You're an ape species where some of the members (again, I point out - NOT EVEN ALL MEMBERS) got a bonus special ability to do a laborious version of broad-domain reasoning. It's a kludge that barely works, like flying on chicken wings, or playing the piano with your feet.

Ironically, the stupidest humans are the ones already wise about this. They correctly understand, intuitively, what it'll be like soon when humanity is NOT ABLE TO KEEP UP with even moderately smarter intelligences.

It’s been alarming to see how many smart technologists are too arrogant and unimaginative to fathom how outclassed they're about to be in every mental faculty.

I urge you to put yourself in the shoes of the stupid people in your life, instead of only comparing yourself to your smart peers. Then you can get an empathetic sense of how terrifying it'll be when every human genius is suddenly in a position of being stupider than that.

The above was a clip from my recent podcast with Theo Jaffee:

I recommend the full podcast for an overview of my thoughts about why AI’s capabilities will soon be much higher than humanity’s.