TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
In the recent interview with Katja Grace referenced on ACX, she mentioned that many people may be opposed to slowing down AI progress because (I'm paraphrasing) they perceive AGI as a genie that will solve longevity and other problems and bring about the Cool Transhumanist Future, which they won't see otherwise - due to their age and/or longer timelines. I have been hanging out in longevity/anti-aging spaces for a while and this perspective is exceedingly common there. People are very hyped about AI coming and curing aging, and dismiss any concerns about AI safety.
From this point of view, solving aging, or even just making a tangible progress towards LEV , will make those people less resistant to the notion of slowing/stopping AI progress. This is complementary to the often mentioned idea that longer life expectancy will cause people to care more about AGI (and other existential risks). This of course doesn't imply that anti-aging is more important than direct work on AI alignment, but 1) it is likely more tractable and 2) not everyone can or want to work on AI alignment directly.