Thanks for this comment; I found it helpful and agree with a lot of it. I expect the “university groups are disproportionately useful in long timelines worlds” point to be useful to a lot of people.
On this bit:
EA is more adaptive over time… This is much more likely to be relevant in long timelines worlds
This isn’t obvious to me. I would expect that short timeline worlds are just weirder and changing more rapidly in general, so being adaptive is more valuable.
Caricature example: in a short timeline world we have one year from the first sentient LLM to when we achieve value lock in, and in a long timeline world we have 100 years. In the former case EA seems more useful, because we can marshal a bunch of people to drop what they are doing and focus on digital sentience. In the latter case digital sentience probably just becomes an established field, without any need for EA.
There are counterbalancing factors (e.g. more of our resources should probably go towards AI safety, in short timelines worlds) but it seems pretty plausible to me that this nets out in favor of EA being more useful in shorter timelines.[1]
Thanks for this comment; I found it helpful and agree with a lot of it. I expect the “university groups are disproportionately useful in long timelines worlds” point to be useful to a lot of people.
On this bit:
This isn’t obvious to me. I would expect that short timeline worlds are just weirder and changing more rapidly in general, so being adaptive is more valuable.
Caricature example: in a short timeline world we have one year from the first sentient LLM to when we achieve value lock in, and in a long timeline world we have 100 years. In the former case EA seems more useful, because we can marshal a bunch of people to drop what they are doing and focus on digital sentience. In the latter case digital sentience probably just becomes an established field, without any need for EA.
There are counterbalancing factors (e.g. more of our resources should probably go towards AI safety, in short timelines worlds) but it seems pretty plausible to me that this nets out in favor of EA being more useful in shorter timelines.[1]
JP has made a related point to me, and deserves credit for a lot of this idea