BLUF:
* To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’.
* Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our...
Public service announcement
1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what’s different this round here and apply...
TL;DR
* The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team.
* The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital...
Distribution of Impact Across General Population
Has there been much research on the estimated impact that the general population has, and what sort of distribution curve would be created?
The vast majority of people would tend to lead relatively inconsequential lives. But is there a normal distribution around an impact of zero? But that assumes equal numbers of people with both successively greater or net negative impacts. So instead would we expect a very long tail of high positive impact people?
Probably depends a lot on how you "split the gains" of the positive impact.
If I sell you ice cream (which is healthy! don't worry), who made the happiness? Me? The Ice cream maker? The person who invented capitalism?