I guess at a very high level, I think: either there are accessible arrangements for society at some level of technological advancement which drive risk very low, or there aren’t. If there aren’t, it’s very unlikely that the future will be very large. If there are, then there’s a question of whether the world can reach such a state before an existential catastrophe.
This reasoning seems off. Why would it have to drive thing to very low risk, rather than to a low but significant level of risk, like we have today with nuclear weapons? Why would it be impossible to find arrangements that keep the level of state risk at like 1%?
AI risk thinking seems to have a lot of “all or nothing” reasoning that seems completely unjustified to me.
I’m worried we’re talking past each other here. We totally might find arrangements that keep the state risk at like 1% -- and in that case then (as Thorstad points out) we expect not to have a very large future (though it could still be decently large compared to the world today).
But if your axiology is (in part) totalist, you’ll care a lot whether we actually get to very large futures. I’m saying (agreeing with Thorstad) that these are dependent on finding some arrangement which drives risk very low. Then I’m saying (disagreeing with Thorstad?) that the decision-relevant question is more like “have we got any chance of getting to such a state?” rather than “are we likely to reach such a state?”
I think the talk of transition risks and sail metaphors aren’t actually that relevant to your argument here? Wouldn’t a gradual and continuous decrease to state risk, like Kuznets curve shown in Thorstadt’s paper here, have the same effect?
Yeah it totally has the same effect. It can just be less natural to analyse, if you think the risk will (or might) decrease a lot following some transition (which is also when the risk will mostly be incurred), but you’re less confident about when the transition will occur.
This reasoning seems off. Why would it have to drive thing to very low risk, rather than to a low but significant level of risk, like we have today with nuclear weapons? Why would it be impossible to find arrangements that keep the level of state risk at like 1%?
AI risk thinking seems to have a lot of “all or nothing” reasoning that seems completely unjustified to me.
I’m worried we’re talking past each other here. We totally might find arrangements that keep the state risk at like 1% -- and in that case then (as Thorstad points out) we expect not to have a very large future (though it could still be decently large compared to the world today).
But if your axiology is (in part) totalist, you’ll care a lot whether we actually get to very large futures. I’m saying (agreeing with Thorstad) that these are dependent on finding some arrangement which drives risk very low. Then I’m saying (disagreeing with Thorstad?) that the decision-relevant question is more like “have we got any chance of getting to such a state?” rather than “are we likely to reach such a state?”
Okay, that makes a lot more sense, thank you.
I think the talk of transition risks and sail metaphors aren’t actually that relevant to your argument here? Wouldn’t a gradual and continuous decrease to state risk, like Kuznets curve shown in Thorstadt’s paper here, have the same effect?
Yeah it totally has the same effect. It can just be less natural to analyse, if you think the risk will (or might) decrease a lot following some transition (which is also when the risk will mostly be incurred), but you’re less confident about when the transition will occur.