A Possible Path to ASI

And that brings us to the main idea here, which is the question of how to to move up in this chart. Procedurally—as a general approach. I think the answer is to emulate what we know works in humans—which I'll capture and simplify as the following: Sometimes the magic is in the imperfect copying. Have decent hardware (human brain, human evolution, etc. )Have lots of experiences, combined with training/educationFace challenges / problemsUse your hardware, training, and experience to try to solve those problemsLearn from the resultsTalk with other people who are doing the sameTake some of their ideas and copy them, modify them, or combine them with your ownSleep and/or take time away from the problem, and let your subconscious work on the problem without youContinue bombarding yourself with new inputs, through reading, conversation with others, etc.

Suddenly get inspiration for a new way to solve the problem, which you then go and try This is what I find so promising about this whole challenge of getting to AGI and ASI: It seems like the iterative process described above can be easily orchestrated and scaled using tech—including current AI. Not only scale what happens naturally, but with added variation. Accelerated evolution, basically. We basically take the human process of learning, thinking, combining and copying ideas, sleeping on them, trying them out, etc. —like we saw in The Enlightenment and like we see with places like San Francisco—and we automate the hell of it at scale.

This is a big part of what I'm doing with Substrate. We can collect ideas at scaleWe can collect problems at scaleWe can build AI that combines them with all sorts of randomness and errors to produce creative varianceWe can build a system for testing them against the problemsWe can build a system that interprets results and turns that into new ideas for top of funnelEtc. There are already lots of startups working on fully-automated labs working on this type real-world testing.