A major problem in predicting CAIS safety is to understand the order in which various services are likely to arise, in particular whether risk-reducing services are likely to come before risk-increasing services. This seems to require a lot of work in delineating various kinds of services and how they depend on each other as well as on algorithmic advancements, conceptual insights, computing power, etc. (instead of treating them as largely interchangeable or thinking that safety-relevant services will be there when we need them). Since this analysis seems very hard to do much ahead of time, I think we’ll have to put very wide error bars on any predictions of whether CAIS would be safe or unsafe, until very late in the game.
Wei_Dai writes: