I consider naming particular years to be a cognitively harmful sort of activity; I have refrained from trying to translate my brain’s native intuitions about this into probabilities, for fear that my verbalized probabilities will be stupider than my intuitions if I try to put weight on them. What feelings I do have, I worry may be unwise to voice; AGI timelines, in my own experience, are not great for one’s mental health, and I worry that other people seem to have weaker immune systems than even my own.
The following metaphor helped me to understand the Eliezer’s point:
Imagine you’re forced to play the game of Russian roulette with the following rules:
every year on the day of Thanksgiving, you must put a revolver muzzle against your head and pull the trigger
the number of rounds in the revolver is a convoluted probabilistic function of various technological and societal factors (like the total knowledge in the field of AI, the number of TPUs owned by Google, etc).
How should you allocate your resources between the following two options?
Option A: try to calculate the year of your death, by estimating the values for the technological and societal factors
Option B: try to escape the game.
It is clear that in this game, the option A is almost useless.
(but not entirely useless, as your escape plans might depend on the timeline).
The following metaphor helped me to understand the Eliezer’s point:
Imagine you’re forced to play the game of Russian roulette with the following rules:
every year on the day of Thanksgiving, you must put a revolver muzzle against your head and pull the trigger
the number of rounds in the revolver is a convoluted probabilistic function of various technological and societal factors (like the total knowledge in the field of AI, the number of TPUs owned by Google, etc).
How should you allocate your resources between the following two options?
Option A: try to calculate the year of your death, by estimating the values for the technological and societal factors
Option B: try to escape the game.
It is clear that in this game, the option A is almost useless.
(but not entirely useless, as your escape plans might depend on the timeline).