Ramez Naam

Futurist, author, and investor — one of Noah Smith’s go-to voices for technology forecasting. Best known for early and accurate predictions of the solar and battery revolutions, well before they were widely understood. Also an acclaimed science fiction author (the Nexus trilogy, which imagines nanotechnological telepathy distributed as a party drug). Has a Substack and is a member of the Singularity University faculty.

In Kyle’s corpus, Naam is the author of a guest post on Noahpinion making a data-driven skeptical case that the AI self-improvement loop is 5–10× too weak to cause a runaway intelligence explosion — notable because the skepticism comes from one of the world’s most prominent techno-optimists. He distinguishes five types of recursive self-improvement and argues we have solid evidence only for the lowest-autonomy varieties.

Where this appears

• Where’s the “Intelligence Explosion”? (Ramez Naam, Noahpinion) — guest post on Noahpinion making the skeptic’s case against fast AI takeoff