I’m having trouble understanding your ToC in a future influenced by AI. What’s the point of investigating this if it takes 20 years to become significant?
Kman and I probably differ somewhat here. I think it’s >90% likely that if we continue along the current trajectory we’ll get AGI before the superbabies grow up.
This technology only starts to become really important if there’s some kind of big AI disaster or a war that takes down most of the world’s chip fabs. I think that’s more likely than people are giving it credit for and if it happens this will become the most important technology in the world.
Gene editing research is much less centralized than chip manufacturing. Basically all of the research can be done in normal labs of the type seen all over the world. And the supply chain for reagents and other inputs is much less centralized than the supply chain for chip fabrication.
You don’t have a hundred billion dollar datacenter than can be bombed by hypersonic projectiles. The research can happen almost anywhere. So this stuff is just naturally a lot more robust than AI in the event of a big conflict.
I mostly think we need smarter people to have a shot at aligning ASI, and I’m not overwhelmingly confident ASI is coming within 20 years, so I think it makes sense for someone to have the ball on this.
In that case, per my other comment, I think it’s much more likely that superbabies concern only a small fraction of the population and exacerbates inequality without bringing the massive benefits that a generally more capable population would.
Do you think superbabies would be put to work on alignment in a way that makes a difference due to geniuses driving the field? I’m having trouble understanding how concretely you think superbabies can lead to significantly improved chance of helping alignment.
My guess is that peak intelligence is a lot more important than sheer numbers of geniuses for solving alignment. At the end of the day someone actually has to understand how to steer the outcome of ASI, which seems really hard and no one knows how to verify solutions. I think that really hard (and hard to verify) problem solving scales poorly with having more people thinking about it.
Sheer numbers of geniuses would be one effect of raising the average, but I’m guessing the “massive benefits” you’re referring to are things like coordination ability and quality of governance? I think those mainly help with alignment via buying time, but if we’re already conditioning on enhanced people having time to grow up I’m less worried about time, and also think that sufficiently widespread adoption to reap those benefits would take substantially longer (decades?).
It’s possible I’m misunderstanding your comment, so please correct me if I am, but there’s no reason you couldn’t do superbabies at scale even if you care about alignment. In fact, the more capable people we have the better.
I’m having trouble understanding how concretely you think superbabies can lead to significantly improved chance of helping alignment.
Kman may have his own views, but my take is pretty simple; there are a lot of very technically challenging problems in the field of alignment and it seems likely smarter humans would have a much higher chance of solving them.
I’m having trouble understanding your ToC in a future influenced by AI. What’s the point of investigating this if it takes 20 years to become significant?
Kman and I probably differ somewhat here. I think it’s >90% likely that if we continue along the current trajectory we’ll get AGI before the superbabies grow up.
This technology only starts to become really important if there’s some kind of big AI disaster or a war that takes down most of the world’s chip fabs. I think that’s more likely than people are giving it credit for and if it happens this will become the most important technology in the world.
Gene editing research is much less centralized than chip manufacturing. Basically all of the research can be done in normal labs of the type seen all over the world. And the supply chain for reagents and other inputs is much less centralized than the supply chain for chip fabrication.
You don’t have a hundred billion dollar datacenter than can be bombed by hypersonic projectiles. The research can happen almost anywhere. So this stuff is just naturally a lot more robust than AI in the event of a big conflict.
I mostly think we need smarter people to have a shot at aligning ASI, and I’m not overwhelmingly confident ASI is coming within 20 years, so I think it makes sense for someone to have the ball on this.
In that case, per my other comment, I think it’s much more likely that superbabies concern only a small fraction of the population and exacerbates inequality without bringing the massive benefits that a generally more capable population would.
Do you think superbabies would be put to work on alignment in a way that makes a difference due to geniuses driving the field? I’m having trouble understanding how concretely you think superbabies can lead to significantly improved chance of helping alignment.
My guess is that peak intelligence is a lot more important than sheer numbers of geniuses for solving alignment. At the end of the day someone actually has to understand how to steer the outcome of ASI, which seems really hard and no one knows how to verify solutions. I think that really hard (and hard to verify) problem solving scales poorly with having more people thinking about it.
Sheer numbers of geniuses would be one effect of raising the average, but I’m guessing the “massive benefits” you’re referring to are things like coordination ability and quality of governance? I think those mainly help with alignment via buying time, but if we’re already conditioning on enhanced people having time to grow up I’m less worried about time, and also think that sufficiently widespread adoption to reap those benefits would take substantially longer (decades?).
It’s possible I’m misunderstanding your comment, so please correct me if I am, but there’s no reason you couldn’t do superbabies at scale even if you care about alignment. In fact, the more capable people we have the better.
Kman may have his own views, but my take is pretty simple; there are a lot of very technically challenging problems in the field of alignment and it seems likely smarter humans would have a much higher chance of solving them.