The other risk that could motivate not making this bet is the risk that the market – for some unspecified reason – never has a chance to correct, because (1) transformative AI ends up unaligned and (2) humanity’s conversion into paperclips occurs overnight. This would prevent the market from ever “waking up”.
You don’t even need to expect it to occur overnight. It’s enough for the market update to predictably occur so late that having lots of money available at that point is no longer useful. If AGI ends the world next week, there’s not that much a hundred billion dollar influx can actually gain you. Any operation that actually stops the apocalypse from happening probably needs longer than that to set up, regardless of any additional funds available. And everything else you can do with a hundred billion dollars in that week is just not that fun or useful.
And if you do get longer than that, if we have an entire month somehow, a large fraction of market participants believing the apocalypse is coming would be the relevant part anyway. That many people taking the problem actually seriously might maybe be enough to put the brakes on things through political channels. For a little bit at least. Monetary concerns seem secondary to me in comparison.
I guess a short position by EA aligned people just in case that this edge scenario happens and a competent institutional actor with a hundred billion dollars is needed now now now could maybe make some sense?
You don’t even need to expect it to occur overnight. It’s enough for the market update to predictably occur so late that having lots of money available at that point is no longer useful. If AGI ends the world next week, there’s not that much a hundred billion dollar influx can actually gain you. Any operation that actually stops the apocalypse from happening probably needs longer than that to set up, regardless of any additional funds available. And everything else you can do with a hundred billion dollars in that week is just not that fun or useful.
And if you do get longer than that, if we have an entire month somehow, a large fraction of market participants believing the apocalypse is coming would be the relevant part anyway. That many people taking the problem actually seriously might maybe be enough to put the brakes on things through political channels. For a little bit at least. Monetary concerns seem secondary to me in comparison.
I guess a short position by EA aligned people just in case that this edge scenario happens and a competent institutional actor with a hundred billion dollars is needed now now now could maybe make some sense?