I agree with most of your comment, but I am very surprised by some points:
Think of all the technological challenges that we’d face over the coming 500 years, on a business-as-usual 1-5% per year growth rate.
Now imagine that that occurs over the course of 5 years rather than 500.
Does this mean that you consider plausible an improvement in productivity of ~100,000 x in a 5 year period in the next 20 years? As in, one hour of work would become more productive than 40 years of full time work 5 years earlier? That seems significantly more transformative than most people would find plausible.
The point of time at which we expand beyond our solar system might be within our lifetimes. This could be one of the most influential moments in human history: the speed of light sets an upper bound on how fast you can go, so who leaves first at max-speed gets there first. And, plausibly, solar systems are defense-dominant so whoever gets there first controls the resources they reach indefinitely.
I’m really surprised to read this. Wouldn’t interstellar travel close to the speed of light require a huge amount of energy, and a level of technological transformation that again seems much higher than most people expect? At that point it seems unlikely that concepts like “defense-dominant” or “controlling resources” (I assume the matter of the systems?) would still be meaningful, or at least in a way predictable enough to make regulation written before-transformation useful.
If AI goes well, then it could greatly extend currently-existing lives, and greatly increase their quality of life, too.
If AI goes badly, you could make the exact same argument in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t those two effects cancel out, given that we’re so uncertain about AI effects on humans?
key decision-makers (e.g. politicians, people at AI labs)
I don’t understand the theory of change for people at AI labs impacting the global factory farming market (including CEOs, but especially the technical staff). After some quick googling, the global factory farmed market size is around 2 trillionsof dollars. Being able to influence that significantly would imply a valuation of AI labs that’s very significantly larger than the one implied by the current market.
Wouldn’t interstellar travel close to the speed of light require a huge amount of energy, and a level of technological transformation that again seems much higher than most people expect?
Not really—about six hours of the energy produced by the sun. If molecular manufacturing could double every day (many bacteria double much faster), we would get there very fast.
So nice to see you back on the forum!
I agree with most of your comment, but I am very surprised by some points:
Does this mean that you consider plausible an improvement in productivity of ~100,000 x in a 5 year period in the next 20 years? As in, one hour of work would become more productive than 40 years of full time work 5 years earlier? That seems significantly more transformative than most people would find plausible.
I’m really surprised to read this. Wouldn’t interstellar travel close to the speed of light require a huge amount of energy, and a level of technological transformation that again seems much higher than most people expect? At that point it seems unlikely that concepts like “defense-dominant” or “controlling resources” (I assume the matter of the systems?) would still be meaningful, or at least in a way predictable enough to make regulation written before-transformation useful.
If AI goes badly, you could make the exact same argument in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t those two effects cancel out, given that we’re so uncertain about AI effects on humans?
I don’t understand the theory of change for people at AI labs impacting the global factory farming market (including CEOs, but especially the technical staff). After some quick googling, the global factory farmed market size is around 2 trillions of dollars. Being able to influence that significantly would imply a valuation of AI labs that’s very significantly larger than the one implied by the current market.
Not really—about six hours of the energy produced by the sun. If molecular manufacturing could double every day (many bacteria double much faster), we would get there very fast.