Quantity has a quality of its own

People love to argue about whether AIs could recursively self-improve their way to superintelligence, each improvement making the next one easier as progress accelerates. I'm unsure. It could be that progress stalls at near-human or somewhat superhuman levels, that the ultimate qualitative limits of intelligence are not particularly beyond the human-level, or that the quantity of AI researchers involved is so vast that substantially superhuman AIs are created without strictly entering a super-exponential regime. But honestly, I think recursive self-improvement is a little overrated. Even if human-level AIs do not rapidly lead to superhuman AIs, the vast quantities of them could be very dangerous. Arguments against recursive self-improvement provide little consolation here. Conversely, recursive self-improvement to superintelligence does seem particularly dangerous, and pausing or pacing it may be desirable. But stopping it may not be enough, because vast numbers of less-than-superintelligent agents could still be destabilizing and catastrophic. Soon after we build human-level AIs, we will be able to run hundreds of millions of them, and before long billions. At that scale, quantity