Minds that Make Optimal Use of Small Amounts of Sensory Data

My moral – that even Einstein did not come within a million light-years of making efficient use of sensory data.

Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use for them; the physics of our universe is not that complicated in an absolute sense. A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis – perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration – by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.

They never suspected a thing. They weren’t very smart, you see, even before taking into account their slower rate of time. Their primitive equivalents of rationalists went around saying things like, “There’s a bound to how much information you can extract from sensory data.” And they never quite realized what it meant, that we were smarter than them, and thought faster.

Link: lesswrong.com