I tend to agree that burning up the timeline is highly costly, but more because Effective Altruism is an Idea Machine that has only recently started to really crank up. There’s a lot of effort being directed towards recruiting top students from uni groups, but these projects require time to pay off.
I’m giving this example not to say “everyone should go do agent-foundations-y work exclusively now!”. I think it’s a neglected set of research directions that deserves far more effort, but I’m far too pessimistic about it to want humanity to put all its eggs in that basket.
If it is the case that more people should go into Agent Foundations research then perhaps MIRI should do more to enable it?
I tend to agree that burning up the timeline is highly costly, but more because Effective Altruism is an Idea Machine that has only recently started to really crank up. There’s a lot of effort being directed towards recruiting top students from uni groups, but these projects require time to pay off.
If it is the case that more people should go into Agent Foundations research then perhaps MIRI should do more to enable it?