While I agree there are similarities in the form of argument between degrowth and AI pause, I don't think those similarities are evidence that the two issues should have the same conclusion. There's simply nothing at all inconsistent about believing all of these at the same time:

• AI pause is desirable
• AI pause is achievable
• Degrowth is undesirable
• Degrowth is not feasible

Almost the entire question, for resolving either of these issues, is working out whether these premises are really true or not. And that's where the similarities end, IMO: there's not much analogy between the relevant considerations for feasibility of AI pause and feasibility of degrowth, or desirability of either outcome, that would lead us to think it's surprising for them to have different answers.

Especially if you disagree, explain why or upvote a comment that roughly reflects your view rather than downvoting. Downvoting controversial views only hides them rather than confronting them.

As a meta-comment, please don't assume that anyone who downvotes does so because they disagree, or only because they disagree. A post being controversial doesn't mean it must be useful to read, any more than it means it must not be useful to read. I vote on posts like this based on whether they said something that I think deserves more attention or helped me understand something better, regardless of whether I think it's right or wrong.

In my mind there are 2 main differences:

1. Economic degrowth is undesirable, vs pausing AI is at least arguably desirable – climate change is very unlikely to lead to a literal existential catastrophe, "business as usual" tech improvements and policy changes (i.e., without overthrowing capitalism) will likely lead to a clean energy transition as is, economic degrowth would probably kill many more people than it would save, etc. Meanwhile, AI presents large existential risk in my mind, and I think a pause would probably lower this risk by a non-negligible amount.
2. Economic degrowth is much less politically feasible than an AI pause – first, because people are loss averse, so degrowth would be taking something away from them vs a pause would just be asking them to forgo future progress; second, because the fear of actual existential risk (from AI) may motivate more extreme policies.

I will say, if I thought p(doom | climate) > 10%, with climate timelines of 12 years, then I would be in favor of degrowth policies that seemed likely to reduce this risk. I just think that in reality, the situation is very different than this.

Thanks for sharing your take :)

EA have disregarded the possibility to degrowth the economy in rich countries without engaging the arguments

Do you have some references for this? Is the claim more that EA hasn't seen the degrowth arguments at all, or that it has and has dismissed them unjustifiably (in your opinion)?

The EA community has not addressed these reasons, just argued that economic growth is good and that degrowth in rich countries is anyway impossible.

Again, has the EA community made these arguments as opposed to a few individuals? I'm not sure I can think of a canonical source here.

The best example I can think of here is Growth and the case against randomista development - but the argument here is not that growth is good as an end in itself, but that it is the best route to increasing human welfare, and indeed that post explicitly says that "economic growth is not all that matters. GDP misses many crucial determinants of human welfare"

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Nevertheless, I do you think your intuition is right that the 'degrowth' movement and the 'EA' movement are not friends, and in fact often in opposition. But I think that's because both movements have a set of auxiliary ideological claims which are often in conflict. For example, Jason Hickel is one of the world's most prominent degrowthers, and he often argues that the charts showing that global poverty are biased and incorrect (I think he's wrong), which are often core parts of EAs argument for problems of global health being tractable. But often this argument actually rests on an even more foundational argument of "is the world getting better or not" and so on, so what actually seems like an argument about 'is the current rate of GDP growth sustainable' actually turn out to be deep arguments about 'how should humanity live morally'

Today in Nature Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42782-y

"On the other hand, a global negative growth scenario will significantly reduce future cumulative carbon emissions (45%) but also dramatically undermines the pursuit of global development goals, like the elimination of poverty. Even with global policies that significantly increase cash transfers to the poor and retired, dramatically improve income inequality, and eliminate military spending, the Global Negative Growth Big Push scenario leads to an increase of 15 percentage points in global extreme poverty by 2100."