CL

Chris Leong

Organiser @ AI Safety Australia and NZ
6924 karmaJoined Sydney NSW, Australia

Bio

Participation
7

Currently doing local AI safety Movement Building in Australia and NZ.

Comments
1183

For the record, I see the new field of "economics of transformative AI" as overrated.

Economics has some useful frames, but it also tilts people towards being too "normy" on the impacts of AI and it doesn't have a very good track record on advanced AI so far.

I'd much rather see multidisciplinary programs/conferences/research projects, including economics as just one of the perspectives represented, then economics of transformative AI qua economics of transformative AI.

(I'd be more enthusiastic about building economics of transformative AI as a field if we were starting five years ago, but these things take time and it's pretty late in the game now, so I'm less enthusiastic about investing field-building effort here and more enthusiastic about pragmatic projects combining a variety of frames).

Feels like Anthropic has been putting out a lot of good papers recently that help build the case for various AI threats. Given this, "no meaningful path to impact" seem a bit strong.

I've only just CTL-F'd the report so I could have missed something, but I guess the key question for me is what does a multilateral project mean in terms of security/diffusion of the technology?

My intuition is that preventing diffusion of the tech in a multilateral project would be hard, if not impossible and I see this as consideration as something that could kill the desirability of such a project by itself, even if there are several other strong arguments in favour.

I know you mention this in the potential future work section, but I do think it is worthwhile editing in a paragraph or two on why you think we might want to consider this model anyway (it's impossible to address everyone's pet objection, but my guess is that this will prove to be one of the major objections that people make).

I expect that some of the older EA's are more senior and therefore have more responsibilities competing against attending EA Global.

I have neither upvoted nor downvoted this post.

I suspect that the downvoting is because the post assumes this is a good donation target rather than making the argument for it (even a paragraph or two would likely make a difference). Some folks may feel that it's bad for the community for posts like this to be at +100, even if they agree with the concrete message, as it undermines the norm of EA forum posts containing high-quality reasoning, as opposed to other appeals.

I think it's worth bringing in the idea of an "endgame" here, defined as "a state in which existential risk from AI is negligible either indefinitely or for long enough that humanity can carefully plan its future".

Some waypoints are endgames, some aren't and some may be treated as an endgame by one strategy, but not by another.

It's quite unclear that attempts to "boost scientific and technological progress" are net-positive at this point in time. I'd much rather see an effort to shift science towards differential technological development.

It's very hard to say since it wasn't tried.

I think incremental progress in this direction still would be better than the comparative. 

The section "Most discussions about AGI fall into one of three categories" is rather weak, so I wouldn't place too much confidence in what the AI says yet.

I agree that the role that capitalism plays in pushing us towards doom is an under-discussed angle.

I personally believe that a wisdom explosion would have made more sense for our society to pursue rather than an intelligence explosion given the constraints of capitalism.

Well, there's also direct work on AI safety and governance.

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