For past x-risks, we survived, and the world is a vast intricate strongly-interacting non-linear system, so any perturbation of the past (even one that sure looks like it would have made the Cuban Missile Crisis a less close-run thing, say) will have snowballing side-effects propagating in all directions that we simply can’t predict, and is thus a bad idea. Or possibly even some side-effect we can: maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis being close-run was a necessary shock to the system to make people on both sides of the Cold War more careful about brinkmanship and keener on detente? So far, we’ve survived, so (if you had a time machine) don’t reroll the dice.
I know, this doesn’t help with your goal. My point is, we don’t know yet.
I think it could at the very least be useful to go back just 5-20 years to share alignment progress and the story of how the future played out with LLMs.
For future x-risks, we don’t know yet.
For past x-risks, we survived, and the world is a vast intricate strongly-interacting non-linear system, so any perturbation of the past (even one that sure looks like it would have made the Cuban Missile Crisis a less close-run thing, say) will have snowballing side-effects propagating in all directions that we simply can’t predict, and is thus a bad idea. Or possibly even some side-effect we can: maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis being close-run was a necessary shock to the system to make people on both sides of the Cold War more careful about brinkmanship and keener on detente? So far, we’ve survived, so (if you had a time machine) don’t reroll the dice.
I know, this doesn’t help with your goal. My point is, we don’t know yet.
I think it could at the very least be useful to go back just 5-20 years to share alignment progress and the story of how the future played out with LLMs.