It seemed to me that all four participants (and the moderator!) were making timelines and LLM-related arguments, in ways that were both annoyingly vague, and unrelated to the statement under debate.
(If astronomers found a giant meteor projected to hit the earth in the year 2123, nobody would question the use of the term “existential threat”, right??)
The giant meteor likely wouldn’t be questioned in that way if multiple independent groups (i.e. NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, CNSA, etc...) announced it with a decent probability, (maybe at least a 5% to 10% chance?) and publicized their calculations.
It’s a lot more difficult for LLM timeline arguments because there are no existing guaranteed-to-be-independent-from-each-other groups with a comparable level of reputation and credibility to stake.
Even if something precluded astronomers from making principled calculations of the impact probability up until five years before the date of the hit, and before that the maximum that they could say would be “we cannot confidently rule out the possibility of an impact”, this would still be treated like an existential threat.
Thanks for the interesting writeup.
The giant meteor likely wouldn’t be questioned in that way if multiple independent groups (i.e. NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, CNSA, etc...) announced it with a decent probability, (maybe at least a 5% to 10% chance?) and publicized their calculations.
It’s a lot more difficult for LLM timeline arguments because there are no existing guaranteed-to-be-independent-from-each-other groups with a comparable level of reputation and credibility to stake.
Even if something precluded astronomers from making principled calculations of the impact probability up until five years before the date of the hit, and before that the maximum that they could say would be “we cannot confidently rule out the possibility of an impact”, this would still be treated like an existential threat.
It doesn’t seem like anything could preclude all of the world’s astronomers from making calculations regarding impact events.
Can you explain how the presence or absence of such an unlikely restriction relates to your latter point?