I agree with your characterization of the problem, and would feel far more confident about our ability to solve AI alignment if I expected we would have thousands of smart people working hard on this for decades. Instead, I think we have maybe 5-10 years, and I don’t know how to scale up the number of scientists working on this in time, or how to slow down the countdown.
I think we have significantly longer. Still, if success requires several tens of thousands of people researching this for decades, we will likely fail.
(1) Reasoned estimates for the date as of which we will develop AGI start in less than two decades.
(2) To my knowledge, there aren’t thousands studying alignment now (let alone tens of thousands) and there does not seem to be a significant likelihood of that changing in the next few years.
(3) Even if, by the early 2030s, there are 10s of thousands of researchers working on alignment, there is a significant chance they may not have time to work on it for decades before AGI is developed.
I agree with your characterization of the problem, and would feel far more confident about our ability to solve AI alignment if I expected we would have thousands of smart people working hard on this for decades. Instead, I think we have maybe 5-10 years, and I don’t know how to scale up the number of scientists working on this in time, or how to slow down the countdown.
I think we have significantly longer. Still, if success requires several tens of thousands of people researching this for decades, we will likely fail.
(1) Reasoned estimates for the date as of which we will develop AGI start in less than two decades.
(2) To my knowledge, there aren’t thousands studying alignment now (let alone tens of thousands) and there does not seem to be a significant likelihood of that changing in the next few years.
(3) Even if, by the early 2030s, there are 10s of thousands of researchers working on alignment, there is a significant chance they may not have time to work on it for decades before AGI is developed.