It seems like if capabilities are escalating like that, it’s important to know how long ago it started. I don’t think the order-of-magnitude-every-4-years would last (compute bottleneck maybe?), but I see what you’re getting at, with the loss of hope for agency and stable groups happening on a function that potentially went bad a while ago.
Having forecasts about state-backed internet influence during the Arab Spring and other post-2008 conflicts seems like it would be important for estimating how long ago the government interest started, since that was close to the Deep Learning revolution. Does anyone have good numbers for these?
I agree with all of this, except 4 years is a lot of time lately and the empirical record from here to 2015 (in 2015 I don’t think there was much capabilities at all aside from bots drowning out voices and things like clown attacks, Yann Lecun wrote a great post on how these systems are hard to engineer in practice) suggests that the rate will continue without big increases in investment, especially since compute production alone can generates a large portion of that OOM every 4 years, and a fixed proportion of compute will be going into psych research, and there’s also stuff like edge computing/5G.
I don’t have good models on the Arab Spring other than that authoritarian states face pretty strong incentives to blame all kinds of domestic problems on foreign influence ops from the West. It’s a pretty bad equilibria since influence ops actually do come out of the West.
It seems like if capabilities are escalating like that, it’s important to know how long ago it started. I don’t think the order-of-magnitude-every-4-years would last (compute bottleneck maybe?), but I see what you’re getting at, with the loss of hope for agency and stable groups happening on a function that potentially went bad a while ago.
Having forecasts about state-backed internet influence during the Arab Spring and other post-2008 conflicts seems like it would be important for estimating how long ago the government interest started, since that was close to the Deep Learning revolution. Does anyone have good numbers for these?
I agree with all of this, except 4 years is a lot of time lately and the empirical record from here to 2015 (in 2015 I don’t think there was much capabilities at all aside from bots drowning out voices and things like clown attacks, Yann Lecun wrote a great post on how these systems are hard to engineer in practice) suggests that the rate will continue without big increases in investment, especially since compute production alone can generates a large portion of that OOM every 4 years, and a fixed proportion of compute will be going into psych research, and there’s also stuff like edge computing/5G.
I don’t have good models on the Arab Spring other than that authoritarian states face pretty strong incentives to blame all kinds of domestic problems on foreign influence ops from the West. It’s a pretty bad equilibria since influence ops actually do come out of the West.