I just have info from AI:

I haven’t dug into the surveys that Knight cites but I’m super skeptical. I know vegans who don’t have vegan pets, and I know how hard it is to make people go vegan. There are big barriers to getting humans to transition to alternative proteins at scale, and that’s only more true for companion animals.

 

I'm skeptical as well, but in some ways, the barriers for pets going vegan are lower:

1. Taste is less of an issue for pets.
2. Time cost is much lower for pets because you can just pick out one food and buy it every time.
3. For people concerned about social interactions involving veganism, you don't have to tell anyone that your pet is vegan.
4. It may be easier to mitigate the health issues of being vegan for pets: For methane single cell protein (SCP) fed to salmon, just a little compared to fully vegan (soy) diet showed a big improvement in gut health. I'd be most confident that this would port to other obligate carnivores like cats, but I could see it being beneficial for dogs as well. Methane SCP is not yet approved for human food, but they are targeting pet food.

In the last few decades, dog food has become more plant based because plants are cheaper (and they figured out how to make it appealing to dogs and not offensive to people). If methane SCP can become cheaper than animal byproducts, you could have a healthy cheaper product with lower environmental impact that probably wouldn't taste as good, but I think many non-vegans would go for.

I personally do think the probability of eventual disempowerment is high. However, you are implying that it is 100%. If it is 99%, or indeed even 99.9999999%, and one thinks the value of the future is significantly higher with humanity (not necessarily biological humans) in control vs AI, then there are still astronomical stakes of humanity remaining in control. 

Let  be the number of parameters in the model,  be the number of data tokens it is trained on,  be the number of times the model is deployed (e.g. the number of questions it is asked) and  be the number of inference steps each time it is deployed (e.g. the number of tokens per answer). Then this approximately works out to:^[9]

Note that scaling up the number of parameters, , increases both pre-training compute and inference compute, because you need to use those parameters each time you run a forward pass in your model.

Several variables are not showing up in the text.

If AI systems replace humanity, that outcome would undoubtedly be an absolute disaster for the eight billion human beings currently alive on Earth. However, it would be a localized, short-term disaster rather than an astronomical one. Bostrom's argument, strictly interpreted, no longer applies to this situation. The reason is that the risk is confined to the present generation of humans: the question at stake is simply whether the eight billion people alive today will be killed or allowed to continue living. Even if you accept that killing eight billion people would be an extraordinarily terrible outcome, it does not automatically follow that this harm carries the same moral weight as a catastrophe that permanently eliminates the possibility of 10^23 future lives.

This only holds if the future value in the universe of AIs that took over is almost exactly the same as the future value if humans remained in control (meaning varying less than one part in a billion (and I think less than one part in a billion billion billion billion billion billion)). Some people argue that the value of the universe would be higher if AIs took over, and the vast majority of people argue that it would be lower. But it is extremely unlikely to have exactly the same value. Therefore, in all likelihood, whether AI takes over or not does have long-term and enormous implications.

Could you please explain your reasoning on 40 hours?

I think your formulation is elegant, but I think the real possibilities are lumpier and span many more orders of magnitude (OOMs). Here's a modification from a comment on a similar idea: 

I think there would be some probability mass that we have technological stagnation and population reductions, though the cumulative number of lives would be much larger than alive today. Then there would be some mass on maintaining something like 10 billion people for a billion years (no AI, staying on earth either due to choice or technical reasons). Then there would be AI doing a Dyson swarm, but either because of technical reasons or high discount rate, not going to other stars. Then there would be AI settles the galaxy, but again either because of technical reasons or discount rate, not going to other galaxies. Then there would be settling many galaxies. Then 30 OOMs to the right, there could be another high slope region corresponding to aestivation. And there could be more intermediate states corresponding to various scales of space settlement of biological humans. Even if you ignore the technical barriers, there are still many different levels scale we could choose to end up at. Even if you think the probability should be smoothed because of uncertainties, still there are something like 60 OOMs between survival of biological humans on Earth and digital aestivation. Or are you collapsing all that and just looking at welfare regardless of the scale? Even welfare could span many OOMs.

I didn't realize it was that much money. This has relevance to the debates about whether AI will value humans. Though EA has not focused as much on making mainstream money more effective, there have been some efforts.
But my major response is why the focus on cultivated meat? It seems like efforts on plant-based meat or fermentation or leaf protein concentrate have much greater likelihood of achieving parity in the near term. 

It could even be that mitigating existential risk is the most cost-effective way of saving species, though I realize that is probably too far afield for this pot of money.

Thanks for doing this and for pointing it out to me. Yeah, participation bias could be huge, but it's still good to get some idea.

=Confusion in What mildest scenario do you consider doom?=

My probability distribution looks like what you call the MIRI Torch, and what I call the MIRI Logo: Scenarios 3 to 9 aren't well described in the literature because they are not in a stable equilibrium. In the real world, once you are powerless, worthless and an obstacle to those in power, you just end up dead. 

This question was not about probability, but instead what one considers doom. But let's talk probability. I think Yudkowsky and Soares believe that one or more of 3-5 has decent likelihood, though I'm not finding it now, because of acausal trade. As someone else said, "Killing all humans is defecting. Preserving humans is a relatively cheap signal to any other ASI that you will cooperate." Christiano believes a stronger version, that most humans will survive (unfrozen) a takeover because AGI has pico-pseudo kindness. Though humans did cause the extinction of close competitors, they are exhibiting pico-pseudo kindness to many other species, despite them being a (small) obstacle.

=Confusion in Minimum P(doom) that is unacceptable to develop AGI?=
For non-extreme values, the concrete estimate and the most of the considerations you mention are irrelevant. The question is morally isomorphic to "What percentage of the worlds population am I willing to kill in expectation?". Answers such as "10^6 humans" and "10^9 humans" are both monstrous, even though your poll would rate them very differently.

Since your doom equates to extinction, a probability of doom of 0.01% gives ~10^6 expected deaths, which you call monstrous. Solving factory farming does not sway you, but what about saving the billions of human lives who would die without AGI in the next century decades (even without creating immortality, just solving poverty)? Or what about AGI preventing other existential risks like an engineered pandemic? Do you think that non-AI X risk is <0.01% in the next century? Ever? Or maybe you are just objecting to the unilateral part - so then is it ok if the UN votes to create AGI even if it has a 33% chance of doom, as one paper said could be justified by economic growth?