I always get downvoted when I suggest that (1) if you have short timelines and (2) you decide to work at a Lab then (3) people might hate you soon and your employment prospects could be damaged.
What is something obvious I’m missing here?
One thing I won’t find convincing is someone pointing at the Finance industry post GFC as a comparison.
I believe the scale of unemployment could be much higher. E.g. 5% ->15% unemployment in 3 years.
If you work in a generative AI lab a significant number of people already hate the work you’re doing and would likely hate you specifically if your existence became salient to you, for reasons that are at best tangentially related to your contribution to existential risk. This is true regardless of what your timelines look like.
But I don’t understand the mechanism by which working in a frontier AI lab is supposed to damage your employment prospects. The set of people who hate you for causing technological unemployment is probably not going to intersect much with the set of people who are making hiring decisions. People who have a history of doing antisocial-but-profitable-for-their-employer stuff get hired all the time, and proudly advertise those profitable antisocial activities on their resumes.
In the extreme, you could argue that working in a frontier AI lab could lead to total human obsolescence, which would harm your job prospects on account of there are no jobs anywhere for anyone. But that’s like saying “crashing into an iceberg could cause a noticeable decrease in the number of satisfied diners in the dining saloon of the Titanic”.
I always get downvoted when I suggest that (1) if you have short timelines and (2) you decide to work at a Lab then (3) people might hate you soon and your employment prospects could be damaged.
What is something obvious I’m missing here?
One thing I won’t find convincing is someone pointing at the Finance industry post GFC as a comparison.
I believe the scale of unemployment could be much higher. E.g. 5% ->15% unemployment in 3 years.
If you work in a generative AI lab a significant number of people already hate the work you’re doing and would likely hate you specifically if your existence became salient to you, for reasons that are at best tangentially related to your contribution to existential risk. This is true regardless of what your timelines look like.
But I don’t understand the mechanism by which working in a frontier AI lab is supposed to damage your employment prospects. The set of people who hate you for causing technological unemployment is probably not going to intersect much with the set of people who are making hiring decisions. People who have a history of doing antisocial-but-profitable-for-their-employer stuff get hired all the time, and proudly advertise those profitable antisocial activities on their resumes.
In the extreme, you could argue that working in a frontier AI lab could lead to total human obsolescence, which would harm your job prospects on account of there are no jobs anywhere for anyone. But that’s like saying “crashing into an iceberg could cause a noticeable decrease in the number of satisfied diners in the dining saloon of the Titanic”.
My instinct as to why people don’t find it a compelling argument;
They don’t have short timelines like me, and therefore chuck it out completely
Are struggling to imagine a hostile public response to 15% unemployment rates
Copium