Thanks for this series! I found it very useful and clear, and am very likely to recommend it to various people.
Minor comment: I think “latter” and “former” are the wrong way around in the following passage?
By contrast, I think the AI takeover scenarios that this report focuses on have received much more scrutiny—but still, as discussed previously, have big question marks surrounding some of the key premises. However, it’s important to distinguish the question of how likely it is that the second species argument is correct, from the question of how seriously we should take it. Often people with very different perspectives on the latter actually don’t disagree very much on the former.
(I.e., I think you probably mean that, of people who’ve thought seriously about the question, probability estimates vary wildly but (a) tend to be above (say) 1 percentage point of x-risk from a second species risk scenario and (b) thus tend to suffice to make the people think humanity should put a lot more resources into understanding and mitigating the risk than we currently do. Rather than that people tend to wildly disagree on how much effort to put into this risk yet agree on how likely the risk is. Though I’m unsure, since I’m just guessing from context that “how seriously we should take it” means “how much resources should be spent on this issue”, but in other contexts it’d mean “how likely is this to be correct” or “how big a deal is this”, which people obviously disagree on a lot.)
Thanks for this series! I found it very useful and clear, and am very likely to recommend it to various people.
Minor comment: I think “latter” and “former” are the wrong way around in the following passage?
(I.e., I think you probably mean that, of people who’ve thought seriously about the question, probability estimates vary wildly but (a) tend to be above (say) 1 percentage point of x-risk from a second species risk scenario and (b) thus tend to suffice to make the people think humanity should put a lot more resources into understanding and mitigating the risk than we currently do. Rather than that people tend to wildly disagree on how much effort to put into this risk yet agree on how likely the risk is. Though I’m unsure, since I’m just guessing from context that “how seriously we should take it” means “how much resources should be spent on this issue”, but in other contexts it’d mean “how likely is this to be correct” or “how big a deal is this”, which people obviously disagree on a lot.)
Also came here to say that ‘latter’ and ‘former’ are mixed up.