"Persevere." It's a piece of advice you'll get from a whole lot of high achievers in a whole lot of disciplines. I didn't understand it at all, at first.

At first, I thought "perseverance" meant working 14-hour days. Apparently, there are people out there who can work for 10 hours at a technical job, and then, in their moments between eating and sleeping and going to the bathroom, seize that unfilled spare time to work on a book. I am not one of those people—it still hurts my pride even now to confess that. I'm working on something important; shouldn't my brain be willing to put in 14 hours a day? But it's not. When it gets too hard to keep working, I stop and go read or watch something. Because of that, I thought for years that I entirely lacked the virtue of "perseverance".

In accordance with human nature, Eliezer₁₉₉₈ would think things like: "What counts is output, not input." Or, "Laziness is also a virtue—it leads us to back off from failing methods and think of better ways." Or, "I'm doing better than other people who are working more hours. Maybe, for creative work, your momentary peak output is more important than working 16 hours a day." Perhaps the famous scientists were seduced by the Deep Wisdom of saying that "hard work is a virtue", because it would be too awful if that counted for less than intelligence?

I didn't understand the virtue of perseverance until I looked back on my journey through AI, and realized that I had overestimated the difficulty of almost every single important problem.

Sounds crazy, right? But bear with me here.

When I was first deciding to challenge AI, I thought in terms of 40-year timescales, Manhattan Projects, planetary computing networks, millions of programmers, and possibly augmented humans.

This is a common failure mode in AI-futurism which I may write about later; it consists of the leap from "I don't know how to solve this" to "I'll imagine throwing something really big at it". Something huge enough that, when you imagine it, that imagination creates a feeling of impressiveness strong enough to be commensurable with the problem. (There's a fellow currently on the AI list who goes around saying that AI will cost a quadrillion dollars—we can't get AI without spending a quadrillion dollars, but we could get AI at an...

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