It seems like it would have been worth discussing AI more explicitly, but maybe that’s a discussion for a separate article?
How plausible is it that we can actually meaningfully advance or speed up progress through work we do now, other than through AI or deregulating AI, which is extremely risky (and could “bring forward the end of humanity” or worse)? When sufficiently advanced AI comes, the time to achieve any given milestone could be dramatically reduced, making our efforts ahead of the arrival of that AI, except to advance or take advantage of advanced AI, basically pointless.
I suppose we don’t need this extra argument, if your model and arguments are correct.
This is a great point and would indeed have been good to include.
There is a plausible case that advancing AI roughly advances everything (as well as having other effects on existential risk …) making advancements easier if they are targetting AI capabilities in particular and making advancements targetting everything else harder. That said, I still think it is easier to reduce risk by 0.0001% than to advance AI by 1 year — especially doing the latter while not increasing risk by a more-than-compensating amount.
It seems like it would have been worth discussing AI more explicitly, but maybe that’s a discussion for a separate article?
How plausible is it that we can actually meaningfully advance or speed up progress through work we do now, other than through AI or deregulating AI, which is extremely risky (and could “bring forward the end of humanity” or worse)? When sufficiently advanced AI comes, the time to achieve any given milestone could be dramatically reduced, making our efforts ahead of the arrival of that AI, except to advance or take advantage of advanced AI, basically pointless.
I suppose we don’t need this extra argument, if your model and arguments are correct.
This is a great point and would indeed have been good to include.
There is a plausible case that advancing AI roughly advances everything (as well as having other effects on existential risk …) making advancements easier if they are targetting AI capabilities in particular and making advancements targetting everything else harder. That said, I still think it is easier to reduce risk by 0.0001% than to advance AI by 1 year — especially doing the latter while not increasing risk by a more-than-compensating amount.