I think I agree with everything you list. But I also think that the extinction risk (especially from misaligned AI?) and the loss of the trillions of potential people is the slam-dunk case for longtermism that is usually espoused. And PAV dramatically affects that case.

Mitigating extinction risk also seems a lot more tractable to me than doing something about s-risk. With S risk seems so much harder to make predictions about what would influence what in the long-ish run. But we have a pretty good sense of things that reduce near term x risk… preventing dangerous bio research etc.

(Setting aside the non-identity problem ... which I think is pretty plausibly solvable) ...

I recall reading others saying that total-population utilitarian is very much pivotal to the case for prioritizing the mitigation of x-risk relative to near term interventions.

So it's true that LT interventions are not all irrelevant with the PAV, but the leading intervention/ToC seems to be dramatically less of a slam dunk.

The ai voice is growing on me. I like that it announces indented lists etc. It’s nearly as comprehensible as a human, with only occasional glitches.

But I still find it less pleasant. Miss the human touch.

Good points. Some counter-points:

1. We can narrate all posts on the Forum with AI for the same price as a few posts a week with professional human narrators

I assume that AI narration will converge to being close-to-costless at some point, so definitely that should be available. But these are not mutually exclusive -- I think we should have some human narration; it need not be professional. People seem willing to record some stuff for free, and often do a decent job (or at least a job that I personally prefer to the AI, not all will though.)

2. Most engagement on posts happens in the first few days of publishing (definitely within the first week), which makes coordination to publish a human narration tricky

But A. I'd rather us encourage longer more extended discussions and returning to the issues, rather than feel a rush to respond right away. Most posts are not time sensitive.

B. People get value from listening even if they don't respond in a comment

3. We expect AI narration to get better and better - already we think Type 3 Audio's service is better than the NonLinear service (my subjective opinion, and largely because Type 3 is just using newer APIs)

True. I assume it will get so good (and apps to enable text to speech) at some point that people do it all themselves, and curate it all the way they like. At that point the 'human readings' might still have a use, though, for people who really like the human touch (but I'm not sure).

All these factors make the threshold pretty high to keep paying for human narration. That said, we can definitely support people who narrate their own posts to override AI narration.

If cost of human narration is crowding out 'much more AI narration' than I would agree. But as AI narration becomes fairly costless than maybe it's not a tradeoff.

I'd also suggest maybe supporting (i.e., hosting) narrators who do a decent job of narrating others' posts as well.

I think there should be a platform where humans can narrate this stuff.

I think that people like doing it (people even volunteer) and people like listening to it. So it's win-win to keep such a platform open.

I was fearing that.

How will you know whether the preference is strong enough to justify human narration?

If I can at least see which are which that would help.

I find myself far more interested in and attracted to the human narrations.

If I’m super interested in the post I’ll also listen to the machine one but it requires more focus.

Also, some machine narrators might be better than the voice you are using? Maybe that Obama-like one?

Where can I find/filter the human narrations only?