I mostly want to point out that many disempowerment/dystopia failure scenarios don’t require a step-change from AI, just an acceleration of current trends.
Do you think that the world is getting worse each year?
My rough take is that humans, especially rich humans, are generally more and more successful.
I’m sure there are ways for current trends to lead to catastrophe—line some trends dramatically increasing and others decreasing, but that seems like it would require a lengthy and precise argument.
Do you think that the world is getting worse each year?
Good clarification question! My answer probably isn’t satisfying, though. “It’s complicated” (meaning: multidimensional and not ordinally comparable).
On a lot of metrics, it’s better by far, for most of the distribution. On harder-to-operationally-define dimensions (sense of hope and agency for the 25th through 75th percentile of culturally normal people), it’s quite a bit worse.
> On harder-to-operationally-define dimensions (sense of hope and agency for the 25th through 75th percentile of culturally normal people), it’s quite a bit worse.
I think it’s likely that many people are panicking and losing hope each year. There’s a lot of grim media around.
I’m far less sold that something like “civilizational agency” is declining. From what I can tell, companies have gotten dramatically better at achieving their intended ends in the last 30 years, and most governments have generally been improving in effectiveness.
One challenge I’d have for you / others who feel similar to you, is to try to get more concrete on measures like this, and then to show that they have been declining.
My personal guess is that a bunch of people are incredibly anxious over the state of the world, largely for reasons of media attention, and then this spills over into them assuming major global ramifications without many concrete details or empirical forecasts.
One challenge I’d have for you / others who feel similar to you, is to try to get more concrete on measures like this, and then to show that they have been declining.
I’ve given some thought to this over the last few decades, and have yet to find ANY satisfying measures, let alone a good set. I reject the trap of “if it’s not objective and quantitative, it’s not important”—that’s one of the underlying attitudes causing the decline.
I definitely acknowledge that my memory of the last quarter of the previous century is fuzzy and selective, and beyond that is secondhand and not-well-supported. But I also don’t deny my own experience that the (tiny subset of humanity) people I am aware of as individuals have gotten much less hopeful and agentic over time. This may well be for reasons of media attention, but that doesn’t make it not real.
Do you think that the world is getting worse each year?
My rough take is that humans, especially rich humans, are generally more and more successful.
I’m sure there are ways for current trends to lead to catastrophe—line some trends dramatically increasing and others decreasing, but that seems like it would require a lengthy and precise argument.
Good clarification question! My answer probably isn’t satisfying, though. “It’s complicated” (meaning: multidimensional and not ordinally comparable).
On a lot of metrics, it’s better by far, for most of the distribution. On harder-to-operationally-define dimensions (sense of hope and agency for the 25th through 75th percentile of culturally normal people), it’s quite a bit worse.
Thanks for the specificity!
> On harder-to-operationally-define dimensions (sense of hope and agency for the 25th through 75th percentile of culturally normal people), it’s quite a bit worse.
I think it’s likely that many people are panicking and losing hope each year. There’s a lot of grim media around.
I’m far less sold that something like “civilizational agency” is declining. From what I can tell, companies have gotten dramatically better at achieving their intended ends in the last 30 years, and most governments have generally been improving in effectiveness.
One challenge I’d have for you / others who feel similar to you, is to try to get more concrete on measures like this, and then to show that they have been declining.
My personal guess is that a bunch of people are incredibly anxious over the state of the world, largely for reasons of media attention, and then this spills over into them assuming major global ramifications without many concrete details or empirical forecasts.
I’ve given some thought to this over the last few decades, and have yet to find ANY satisfying measures, let alone a good set. I reject the trap of “if it’s not objective and quantitative, it’s not important”—that’s one of the underlying attitudes causing the decline.
I definitely acknowledge that my memory of the last quarter of the previous century is fuzzy and selective, and beyond that is secondhand and not-well-supported. But I also don’t deny my own experience that the (tiny subset of humanity) people I am aware of as individuals have gotten much less hopeful and agentic over time. This may well be for reasons of media attention, but that doesn’t make it not real.