Comments
More from the author
Curated and popular this week
...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Summary: The actions taken this decade may be exceptionally important for the future of civilization, but we should be unusually hesitant to proclaim that any course of action is “best.” Still, we should try to think carefully about how we'll influence the future.
This post was written as part of an introduction to a new reading group I’m starting called “Doing Good in the Age of AGI.” If you want to follow along, the full curriculum can be found ...
Recent opportunities to take action
Cool angle and thought experiment, makes this all a bit more concete. My timelines for transformative AI already were close to what you're handwaving at, but I'm really happy to see more thought in this direction and hope that this inspires more people to take soon-ish tansformative AI even more seriously.
From my inside view it feels pretty unsettling to think about the changes I expect to happen in the coming decade or two. I wonder if you think the EA community is too slow to update their strategies here. It feels like what is coming is easily among the most difficult things humanity ever has to get right and we could be doing much more if we all took current TAI forecasts more into account.
You guessed it -- I believe that most of EA's best and brightest will end up having approximately zero impact (compared to what they could have had) because they are planning for business-as-usual. The twenties are going to take a lot of people by surprise, I think. Hopefully EAs working their way up the academic hierarchy will at least be able to redirect prestige/status towards those who have been building up expertise in AI safety and AI governance, when the time comes.