To clarify, the above argument isn’t a slam dunk in favor of “something bad will happen because of AGI in the next 7 years”. I could make that argument, but I haven’t, and so I wouldn’t necessarily hope that you would believe it.
But what about the 10 years after that, if we still have no global coordination? What’s the mechanism by which nobody ever does anything dumb, without most people being aware of safety considerations and no restriction whatsoever on who gets to do what.
That seems like a hard bet to win. I suggest instead offering to bet on “you will end up less worried” vs “I will end up more worried”, though that may not work.
I meant it’s a hard bet to win because how exactly would I collect. That said, I’m genuinely not sure if it’s a good field for betting. Roughly speaking, there’s two sorts of bets: “put your money where your mouth is” bets and “hedging” bets. The former are “for fun” and signaling/commitment purposes; the latter are where the actual benefit comes in. But with both bets, it’s difficult to figure out a bet structure that works if the market gets destroyed in the near future! We could bet on confidence, but I’m genuinely not sure if there’ll be one or two “big papers” before the end shifting probabilities. So the model of the world might be one where we see nothing for years and then all die. Hard for markets to model.
Doing a “money now/money later” bet structure works, I guess, like the other commenter said, but I don’t know of any prediction markets that are set up for that.
Wanna bet some money that nothing bad will come of any of this on the timescales you are worried about?
There’s a new post today specifying such bets.
To clarify, the above argument isn’t a slam dunk in favor of “something bad will happen because of AGI in the next 7 years”. I could make that argument, but I haven’t, and so I wouldn’t necessarily hope that you would believe it.
But what about the 10 years after that, if we still have no global coordination? What’s the mechanism by which nobody ever does anything dumb, without most people being aware of safety considerations and no restriction whatsoever on who gets to do what.
That seems like a hard bet to win. I suggest instead offering to bet on “you will end up less worried” vs “I will end up more worried”, though that may not work.
I don’t think it’s that hard e.g see here https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/01/my_end-of-the-w.html
TLDR person who doesn’t think end of the world will happen gives other person money now and it gets paid back double if the world doesn’t end.
If you think it’s a hard bet to win, you are saying you agree that nothing bad will happen. So why worry?
I meant it’s a hard bet to win because how exactly would I collect. That said, I’m genuinely not sure if it’s a good field for betting. Roughly speaking, there’s two sorts of bets: “put your money where your mouth is” bets and “hedging” bets. The former are “for fun” and signaling/commitment purposes; the latter are where the actual benefit comes in. But with both bets, it’s difficult to figure out a bet structure that works if the market gets destroyed in the near future! We could bet on confidence, but I’m genuinely not sure if there’ll be one or two “big papers” before the end shifting probabilities. So the model of the world might be one where we see nothing for years and then all die. Hard for markets to model.
Doing a “money now/money later” bet structure works, I guess, like the other commenter said, but I don’t know of any prediction markets that are set up for that.