Here’s my naive summary; please critique if I’m misunderstanding. EDIT: I think I’m framing things differently from the post. Here’s a separate comment with my confusions about the post’s framing.
Say there are 3 parts/chunks/segments of solving alignment that have to happen sequentially (each one can only start once the previous part is complete), and each part requires at least 5 years no matter how many people we throw at it. In this world,you need at least 15 years to solve alignment.
Why does each part take at least 5 years? Because of diminishing returns. There are constraints on how much you can parallelize the work, so eventually new people can’t do anything but work on projects that other people are already working on (in a way that doesn’t speed up progress on these projects).
I’m not sure how rapidly returns will diminish. Researcher retreats, operations work, personal assistants, AI tools, etc could continue to shorten the time to complete each chunk even after technical researchers saturate the field. Regardless, there is some minimum length of time required across all realistic worlds.
If your research project helps with parallelizing the current chunk so that we can do it in e.g. 7 years instead of 8 years, that seems great—except what if it also decreases timelines from 16 years to 14 years? Then it’s a death sentence.
Shortening timelines burns/reduces our serial time—the time we have left to complete all 3 chunks (basically a reframing of “timelines”?). Trading serial time for more labor (parallelized to solve the current chunk) is extremely dangerous, even though it helps us complete the current chunk faster.
How might progress be serial? Maybe we need to deeply understand minds/optimization/agency before we can start coming up with alignment proposals that actually work. Within each of these steps there are more serial substeps. Also, progressing from one major step to the next might require large “paradigm shifts,” and these shifts might not happen without some fresh eyes entering the field (due to shortcomings of human psychology?), which might take several years at a minimum.
Here’s my naive summary; please critique if I’m misunderstanding. EDIT: I think I’m framing things differently from the post. Here’s a separate comment with my confusions about the post’s framing.
Say there are 3 parts/chunks/segments of solving alignment that have to happen sequentially (each one can only start once the previous part is complete), and each part requires at least 5 years no matter how many people we throw at it. In this world, you need at least 15 years to solve alignment.
Why does each part take at least 5 years? Because of diminishing returns. There are constraints on how much you can parallelize the work, so eventually new people can’t do anything but work on projects that other people are already working on (in a way that doesn’t speed up progress on these projects).
I’m not sure how rapidly returns will diminish. Researcher retreats, operations work, personal assistants, AI tools, etc could continue to shorten the time to complete each chunk even after technical researchers saturate the field. Regardless, there is some minimum length of time required across all realistic worlds.
If your research project helps with parallelizing the current chunk so that we can do it in e.g. 7 years instead of 8 years, that seems great—except what if it also decreases timelines from 16 years to 14 years? Then it’s a death sentence.
Shortening timelines burns/reduces our serial time—the time we have left to complete all 3 chunks (basically a reframing of “timelines”?). Trading serial time for more labor (parallelized to solve the current chunk) is extremely dangerous, even though it helps us complete the current chunk faster.
How might progress be serial? Maybe we need to deeply understand minds/optimization/agency before we can start coming up with alignment proposals that actually work. Within each of these steps there are more serial substeps. Also, progressing from one major step to the next might require large “paradigm shifts,” and these shifts might not happen without some fresh eyes entering the field (due to shortcomings of human psychology?), which might take several years at a minimum.