The two posts I linked above explain my view on what EAs should care about for timelines; it’s pretty similar to yours. I call it AI-PONR, but basically it just means “a chunk of time where the value of interventions drops precipitously, to a level significantly below its present value, such that when we make our plans for how to use our money, our social capital, our research time, etc. we should basically plan to have accomplished what we want to have accomplished by then.” Things that could cause AI-PONR: An AI takes over the world. Persuasion tools destroy collective epistemology. AI R&D tools make it so easy to build WMD’s that we get a vulnerable world. Etc. Note that I disagree that the time when AI fundamentally transforms the world is what we care about, because I think AI-PONR will come before that point. (By fundamentally transforms the world, do you mean something notably different from “accelerates GDP?”) I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this framework, since it seems you’ve been thinking along similar lines and might have more expertise than me with the background concepts from economics.
So it sounds like we do disagree on something substantive, and it’s how early in takeoff AI-PONR happens. And/or what timelines look like. I think there’s, like, a 25% chance that nanobots will be disassembling large parts of Earth by 2030, but I think that the 2030′s will look exactly as you predict up until it’s too late.
The two posts I linked above explain my view on what EAs should care about for timelines; it’s pretty similar to yours. I call it AI-PONR, but basically it just means “a chunk of time where the value of interventions drops precipitously, to a level significantly below its present value, such that when we make our plans for how to use our money, our social capital, our research time, etc. we should basically plan to have accomplished what we want to have accomplished by then.” Things that could cause AI-PONR: An AI takes over the world. Persuasion tools destroy collective epistemology. AI R&D tools make it so easy to build WMD’s that we get a vulnerable world. Etc. Note that I disagree that the time when AI fundamentally transforms the world is what we care about, because I think AI-PONR will come before that point. (By fundamentally transforms the world, do you mean something notably different from “accelerates GDP?”) I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this framework, since it seems you’ve been thinking along similar lines and might have more expertise than me with the background concepts from economics.
So it sounds like we do disagree on something substantive, and it’s how early in takeoff AI-PONR happens. And/or what timelines look like. I think there’s, like, a 25% chance that nanobots will be disassembling large parts of Earth by 2030, but I think that the 2030′s will look exactly as you predict up until it’s too late.