Cullen's Quick takes

Did any of the boosters of real-money prediction markets correctly predict that prediction market platforms would be quickly dominated by thinly disguised sports gambling?

(I mean this question literally and earnestly, not as a snide takedown of prediction markets or their proponents)

I am not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI.

It is important to me that people know this, so that they can trust any future policy analysis or opinions I offer.

I have no further comments at this time.

Both Sam and Dario saying that they now believe they know how to build AGI seems like an underrated development to me. To my knowledge, they only started saying this recently. I suspect they are overconfident, but still seems like a more significant indicator than many people seem to be tracking.

Longtermist shower thought: what if we had a campaign to install Far-UVC in poultry farms? Seems like it could:

1. Reduce a bunch of diseases in the birds, which is good for: a. the birds’ welfare; b. the workers’ welfare; c. Therefore maybe the farmers’ bottom line?; d. Preventing/suppressing human pandemics (eg avian flu)
2. Would hopefully drive down the cost curve of Far-UVC
3. May also generate safety data in chickens, which could be helpful for derisking it for humans

Insofar as one of the main obstacles is humans' concerns for health effects, this would at least only raise these for a small group of workers.

Pretty wild discussion in this podcast about how aggressively the USSR cut corners on safety in their space program in order to stay ahead of the US. In the author's telling of the history, this was in large part because Khrushchev wanted to rack up as many "firsts" (e.g., first satellite, first woman in space) as possible. This seems like it was most proximately for prestige and propaganda rather than any immediate strategic or technological benefit (though of course the space program did eventually produce such bigger benefits).

Evidence of the following claim for AI: people may not need a reason to cut corners on safety because the material benefits are so high. They may do so just because of the prestige and glory of being first.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/chatter--the-harrowing-history-of-the-soviet-space-program-with-john-strausbaugh

People sometimes worry that the decrease in companies going public (arguably due to greater securities regulations) will drive down the expected return for public investors as compared to private ones. But it seems like public investors can still get decent exposure to private markets through publicly traded private equity and BDCs.

Maybe an actionable takeaway is to overweight those companies in one's portfolio, to account for the private returns you don't have access to.

Quote from VC Josh Wolfe:

Biology. We will see an AWS moment where instead of you having to be a biotech firm that opens your own wet lab or moves into Alexandria Real Estate, which is you know, specializes in hosting biotech companies, in in all these different regions approximate to academic research centers. You will be able to just take your experiment and upload it to the cloud where there are cloud-based robotic labs. We funded some of these. There's one company called Stratios.

There's a ton that are gonna come on wave, and this is exciting because you can be a scientist on the beach in the Bahamas, pull up your iPad, run an experiment. The robots are performing 90% of the activity of Pouring something from a beaker into another, running a centrifuge, and then the data that comes off of that.

And this is the really cool part. Then the robot and the machines will actually say to you, “Hey, do you want to run this experiment but change these 4 parameters or these variables?” And you just click a button “yes” as though it's reverse prompting you, and then you run another experiment. So the implication here is that the boost in productivity for science, for generation of truth, of new information, of new knowledge, That to me is the most exciting thing. And the companies that capture that, forget about the societal dividend, I think are gonna make a lot of money.

https://overcast.fm/+5AWO95pnw/46:15

I'm beginning to think that we should generally taboo "free speech" when discussing all speech regulation decisions by non-governmental actors. In my experience, people mean very different things by this, ranging from "intellectual openness should weigh heavily in private speech regulation" to "private speech regulators should mirror First Amendment principles." These have very different implications and possible justifications.

Should EAs prepare to start stockpiling N95s when the pandemic is over? There will presumably be a lot of excess capacity, so later this year it may be easier than usual to buy up a ton on N95s and store them for the next few years.

Random, time-sensitive charity idea: start a pledge drive for people who have received their COVID vaccine to contribute the cost of at least one vaccine to the COVAX facility. Unfortunately, Americans can’t directly donate to COVAX, but people from the UK can.

Although I've seen some people say they feel like EA is in a bit of an intellectual slump right now, I think the number of new, promising EA startups may be higher than ever. I'm thinking of some of the recent Charity Entrepreneurship incubated programs and some new animal welfare orgs like the Fish Welfare Initiative.

According to the book Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History, some early Christians sold themselves into slavery so they could donate the proceeds to the poor. Super interesting example of extreme and early ETG.

(I'm listening on audiobook so I don't have the precise page for this claim.)

(To avoid bad-faith misinterpretation: I obviously think that nobody should do the same.)

The venerable Judge Easterbrook appears to understand harms from unaligned AI. In this excerpt, he invokes a favorite fictional example among the AI risk community:

The situation is this: Customer incurs a debt and does not pay. Creditor hires Bill Collector to dun Customer for the money. Bill Collector puts a machine on the job and repeatedly calls Cell Number, at which Customer had agreed to receive phone calls by giving his number to Creditor. The machine, called a predictive dialer, works autonomously until a human voice comes on the line. If that happens, an employee in Bill Collector's call center will join the call. But Customer no longer subscribes to Cell Number, which has been reassigned to Bystander. A human being who called Cell Number would realize that Customer was no longer the subscriber. But predictive dialers lack human intelligence and, like the buckets enchanted by the Sorcerer's Apprentice, continue until stopped by their true master.

Soppet v. Enhanced Recovery Co., LLC, 679 F.3d 637, 638–39 (7th Cir. 2012).

Interesting excerpt from a book I’m reading:

Somewhat incongruously, at the same time that private standardization was both promoting economic globalization and becoming more global, social activists concerned with the impact of globalization on the environment, on workers, and on human rights began to look to ISO's experience with management system standards as a model of how to prevent a globalization-led race to the bottom. For the activists, ISO 9000 provided a governance model for organizations concerned with social and environmental sustainability, one that actually promised their continuous improvement across the global economy. The relevant feature of the model had also helped make ISO 9000 certification such a successful business: as part of the "continuous improve-ment" that the standards demanded, ISO 9000-certified companies were expected increasingly to buy their supplies from companies that also had quality management systems in place. Adherence to this principle helped the standard spread.37 British historian Deborah Cadbury points to a precedent for this hoped-for contagious spread of higher standards in the unusual success of nineteenth-century British and American Quaker manufacturers. They followed the highest social standards of the day in their own firms, demanded similar standards of their distributors and global suppliers, and were held accountable by an active popular press eager to point out any hypocrisy on the part of these "austere men of God" who influenced "the course of the Industrial Revolution and the [pre-Thatcher-era] commercial world."

JoAnne Yates & Craig N. Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (2019) (citing Deborah Cadbury, Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers at xii (2010)).