A point I’m skeptical on is that trying to preserve key information is likely to make much of a difference. I find it hard to imagine civilisation floundering after a catastrophic setback because it lacked the key insights we’d achieved so far about how to recover tech and do AI alignment and stuff.
On timescale and storage media, I’d guess we’re talking about less than a century to recover back (since you’re assuming a setback in tech progress of 100 years). That’s enough time for hard drives to keep working, especially specialist hardware designed to survive in extreme conditions or be ultra-reliable. We also have books, which are very cheap to make and easy to read.
On AI specifically, my sense is that the most important algorithmic insights are really very compressable — they could fit into a small book, if you’re prepared to do a lot of grunt work figuring out how to implement them.
We also have the ability to rebuild institutions while being able to see how previous attempts failed or succeeded, effectively getting ‘unstuck’ from sticky incentives which maintain the existing institutional order. Which is one factor suggesting a re-roll wouldn’t be so bad.
A point I’m skeptical on is that trying to preserve key information is likely to make much of a difference. I find it hard to imagine civilisation floundering after a catastrophic setback because it lacked the key insights we’d achieved so far about how to recover tech and do AI alignment and stuff.
On timescale and storage media, I’d guess we’re talking about less than a century to recover back (since you’re assuming a setback in tech progress of 100 years). That’s enough time for hard drives to keep working, especially specialist hardware designed to survive in extreme conditions or be ultra-reliable. We also have books, which are very cheap to make and easy to read.
On AI specifically, my sense is that the most important algorithmic insights are really very compressable — they could fit into a small book, if you’re prepared to do a lot of grunt work figuring out how to implement them.
We also have the ability to rebuild institutions while being able to see how previous attempts failed or succeeded, effectively getting ‘unstuck’ from sticky incentives which maintain the existing institutional order. Which is one factor suggesting a re-roll wouldn’t be so bad.