Continuing the takeoffs debate

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[Here's an intuitively compelling argument](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tjH8XPxAnr6JRbh7k/hard-takeoff): only a few million years after diverging from chimpanzees, humans became much more capable, at a rate that was very rapid compared with previous progress. This supports the idea that AIs will, at some point, also start becoming more capable at a very rapid rate. Paul Christiano has made an [influential response](https://sideways-view.com/2018/02/24/takeoff-speeds/); the goal of this post is to evaluate and critique it. Note that the arguments discussed in this post are quite speculative and uncertain, and also cover only a small proportion of the factors which should influence our views on takeoff speeds - so in the process of writing it I've made only a small update towards very fast takeoff. Also, given that Paul's vision of a continuous takeoff occurs much faster than any mainstream view, I expect that even totally resolving this debate would have relatively few implicatio...

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• [1] https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/Tpn2Fx9daLvj28kes/continuing-the-takeoffs-debate