This work hinges on the assumption that we’re not in a time of perils situation. In other work Thorstad argues that the common arguments for thinking we’re in a time of perils are uncompelling. I’m not sure I agree (i.e. on balance my inside view supports a time of perils, but I’m not sure that the case for this has ever been spelled out in a watertight way), but fair enough—it’s very healthy and good to poke at foundational assumptions. But he doesn’t provide any strong arguments that we aren’t in a time of perils. And the arguments presented here rely in important ways on certainty (rather than just likelihood) in the assumption that we’re not in a time of perils—the far-distant future should be discounted at its lowest possible rate, and that applies just as much to discounting for hazard rate (chance that we will go extinct) as to any other kind of discounting.
From my perspective, therefore, the value of this work is that it justifies that it would be importantly decision-relevant to find strong arguments that we’re not in a time of perils situation. That’s not hugely surprising, but it’s good to get the increased confidence and to have a handle on precisely how it would be decision-relevant.
Thorstadt has previously written a paper specifically addressing the time of perils hypothesis, summarised in seven parts here.
One of the points is that just being in a time of perils is not enough to debunk his arguments, it has to be a short time of perils, and the time of perils ending has to drop the risk by many orders of magnitude. These assumptions seem highly uncertain to me.
The main point of my comment above is that “highly uncertain” is enough to support action premised on the possibility of a time of perils.
For what it’s worth I think that the ontology of “dropping risk by many orders of magnitude” is putting somewhat too much emphasis on “risk per century” as a natural unit. I think a lot of anthropogenic risk is best understood not as a state risk (think “risk I randomly fall off the side of the boat”), but as a transition risk (think “risk I fall in as I try to put the sail up”). Some of the high risk imagined this century is from the possibility that we rush putting the sail up. We may not rush it! So my ex ante risk doesn’t diminish super steeply over centuries as I don’t know in which one the sail attempt will be made. But (in this metaphor) we only need to put the sail up once, and it would seem confused to argue that risk will stay high ~forever just because we don’t know when we’ll make the attempt.
I think this sail metaphor is more obfucatory than revealing. If you think that the risk will drop orders of magnitude and stay there, then it’s fine to say so, and you should make your object-level arguments for that. Calling it a transition doesn’t really add anything: society has been “transitioning” between different states for it’s entire lifetime, why is this one different?
Let me be clear about the type signature of the sail metaphor: it’s not giving an object-level argument that the risk will drop a long way. I think it’s a completely legit question why this one is different. (I’m not confident that it is, but the kind of reason I think it may well be are outlined in this post.)
Instead it’s saying that it may be more natural to have the object-level conversations about transitions rather than about risk-per-century. Here’s a stylized example:
Suppose you’re confident that putting up the sail will incur a 50% risk, and otherwise risk is essentially zero
Suppose further that you don’t know at all when the sail attempt will be made
(yeah, I’m mixing my metaphors here by keeping us on the boat for many centuries)
You decide to use Laplace’s law of succession on centuries, starting 1 century ago
So ex ante there was a 1⁄2 chance of it happening in the last century; but that now hasn’t happened, so there’s a 1⁄3 chance of it happening in the next century. If we wait N more centuries without it happening, then the probability of it happening over the following century (i.e. conditional on it not having happened yet) is 1/(3+N)
Then your risk of falling in is 16% over the next century, and decreasing smoothly with time, but still 0.01% absolute risk (i.e. that’s not even conditional on surviving that long) 100 centuries out
In this example you’re certainthere’s a time-of-perils dynamic going on, and that you have a 50% chance of an indefinitely long future without falling in. But it’s hard to argue for any particular century by which risk is very low … even the estimates in my spreadsheet don’t provide bounds on risk, because you weren’t at all confident in the per-century estimates of when the sail attempt would be made.
My claim is that in cases roughly like this it can be more illuminating to think and argue about the risk-per-transition than the risk-per-century. (Of course, if you think that most risk is state risk rather than transition risk that’s also worth discussion.)
Instead it’s saying that it may be more natural to have the object-level conversations about transitions rather than about risk-per-century.
Hmm, I definitely think there’s an object level disagreement about the structure of risk here.
Take the invention of nuclear weapons for example. This was certainly a “transition” in society relevant to existential risk. But it doesn’t make sense to me to analogise it to a risk in putting up a sail. Instead, nuclear weapons are just now a permanent risk to humanity, which goes up or down depending on geopolitical strategy.
I don’t see why future developments wouldn’t work the same way. It seems that since early humanity the state risk has only been increasing further and further as technology develops. I know there are arguments for why it could suddenly drop, but I agree with the linked Thorstadt analysis that this seems unlikely.
Ok, I agree with you that state risk is also an important part of the picture. I basically agree that nuclear risk is better understood as a state risk. I think the majority of AI risk is better understood as a transition risk, which was why I was emphasising that.
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. If risk now is lower than risk we’re likely to incur on the path to such an arrangement, it can be thought of as a transition risk (whether we manage to bear the increased exposure on the way)
… by analogy, maybe there’s a part of putting up the sail where you’re exposed to being washed overboard by a freak wave, which can be thought of as a state risk which forms part of a transition risk.
If there are accessible arrangements, even if we can’t identify them now, I expect some significant effort to go into searching and steering for them, so a nontrivial chance of reaching one. An argument that we won’t reach such a state seems like it’s either going to need to argue that there are no such states (seems unlikely to me; I think my intuition is informed in part by the existence of error correcting codes), or that it’s vanishingly unlikely that we could reach one that does exist (doesn’t seem impossible to me but I find it hard to see how we could hope to get confidence on this point).
(With apologies, I think this comment is kind of dense. Some better version of it would give the arguments more cleanly.)
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.
But it doesn’t make sense to me to analogise it to a risk in putting up a sail.
I think this depends on the timeframe. Over a longer one, looking into the estimated destroyable area by nuclear weapons, nuclear risk looks like a transition risk (see graph below). In addition, I think the nuclear extinction risk has decreased even more than the destroyable area, since I believe greater wealth has made society more resilient to the effects of nuclear war and nuclear winter. For reference, I estimated the current annual nuclear extinction risk is 5.93*10^-12.
You can conservatively multiply through by the probability that the time of perils is short enough and for the risk dropping enough orders of magnitude.
This work hinges on the assumption that we’re not in a time of perils situation. In other work Thorstad argues that the common arguments for thinking we’re in a time of perils are uncompelling. I’m not sure I agree (i.e. on balance my inside view supports a time of perils, but I’m not sure that the case for this has ever been spelled out in a watertight way), but fair enough—it’s very healthy and good to poke at foundational assumptions. But he doesn’t provide any strong arguments that we aren’t in a time of perils. And the arguments presented here rely in important ways on certainty (rather than just likelihood) in the assumption that we’re not in a time of perils—the far-distant future should be discounted at its lowest possible rate, and that applies just as much to discounting for hazard rate (chance that we will go extinct) as to any other kind of discounting.
From my perspective, therefore, the value of this work is that it justifies that it would be importantly decision-relevant to find strong arguments that we’re not in a time of perils situation. That’s not hugely surprising, but it’s good to get the increased confidence and to have a handle on precisely how it would be decision-relevant.
Thorstadt has previously written a paper specifically addressing the time of perils hypothesis, summarised in seven parts here.
One of the points is that just being in a time of perils is not enough to debunk his arguments, it has to be a short time of perils, and the time of perils ending has to drop the risk by many orders of magnitude. These assumptions seem highly uncertain to me.
The main point of my comment above is that “highly uncertain” is enough to support action premised on the possibility of a time of perils.
For what it’s worth I think that the ontology of “dropping risk by many orders of magnitude” is putting somewhat too much emphasis on “risk per century” as a natural unit. I think a lot of anthropogenic risk is best understood not as a state risk (think “risk I randomly fall off the side of the boat”), but as a transition risk (think “risk I fall in as I try to put the sail up”). Some of the high risk imagined this century is from the possibility that we rush putting the sail up. We may not rush it! So my ex ante risk doesn’t diminish super steeply over centuries as I don’t know in which one the sail attempt will be made. But (in this metaphor) we only need to put the sail up once, and it would seem confused to argue that risk will stay high ~forever just because we don’t know when we’ll make the attempt.
I think this sail metaphor is more obfucatory than revealing. If you think that the risk will drop orders of magnitude and stay there, then it’s fine to say so, and you should make your object-level arguments for that. Calling it a transition doesn’t really add anything: society has been “transitioning” between different states for it’s entire lifetime, why is this one different?
Let me be clear about the type signature of the sail metaphor: it’s not giving an object-level argument that the risk will drop a long way. I think it’s a completely legit question why this one is different. (I’m not confident that it is, but the kind of reason I think it may well be are outlined in this post.)
Instead it’s saying that it may be more natural to have the object-level conversations about transitions rather than about risk-per-century. Here’s a stylized example:
Suppose you’re confident that putting up the sail will incur a 50% risk, and otherwise risk is essentially zero
Suppose further that you don’t know at all when the sail attempt will be made
(yeah, I’m mixing my metaphors here by keeping us on the boat for many centuries)
You decide to use Laplace’s law of succession on centuries, starting 1 century ago
So ex ante there was a 1⁄2 chance of it happening in the last century; but that now hasn’t happened, so there’s a 1⁄3 chance of it happening in the next century. If we wait N more centuries without it happening, then the probability of it happening over the following century (i.e. conditional on it not having happened yet) is 1/(3+N)
Then your risk of falling in is 16% over the next century, and decreasing smoothly with time, but still 0.01% absolute risk (i.e. that’s not even conditional on surviving that long) 100 centuries out
Here’s a quick spreadsheet with my sail math, if you want to play with it
In this example you’re certain there’s a time-of-perils dynamic going on, and that you have a 50% chance of an indefinitely long future without falling in. But it’s hard to argue for any particular century by which risk is very low … even the estimates in my spreadsheet don’t provide bounds on risk, because you weren’t at all confident in the per-century estimates of when the sail attempt would be made.
My claim is that in cases roughly like this it can be more illuminating to think and argue about the risk-per-transition than the risk-per-century. (Of course, if you think that most risk is state risk rather than transition risk that’s also worth discussion.)
Hmm, I definitely think there’s an object level disagreement about the structure of risk here.
Take the invention of nuclear weapons for example. This was certainly a “transition” in society relevant to existential risk. But it doesn’t make sense to me to analogise it to a risk in putting up a sail. Instead, nuclear weapons are just now a permanent risk to humanity, which goes up or down depending on geopolitical strategy.
I don’t see why future developments wouldn’t work the same way. It seems that since early humanity the state risk has only been increasing further and further as technology develops. I know there are arguments for why it could suddenly drop, but I agree with the linked Thorstadt analysis that this seems unlikely.
Ok, I agree with you that state risk is also an important part of the picture. I basically agree that nuclear risk is better understood as a state risk. I think the majority of AI risk is better understood as a transition risk, which was why I was emphasising that.
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. If risk now is lower than risk we’re likely to incur on the path to such an arrangement, it can be thought of as a transition risk (whether we manage to bear the increased exposure on the way) … by analogy, maybe there’s a part of putting up the sail where you’re exposed to being washed overboard by a freak wave, which can be thought of as a state risk which forms part of a transition risk.
If there are accessible arrangements, even if we can’t identify them now, I expect some significant effort to go into searching and steering for them, so a nontrivial chance of reaching one. An argument that we won’t reach such a state seems like it’s either going to need to argue that there are no such states (seems unlikely to me; I think my intuition is informed in part by the existence of error correcting codes), or that it’s vanishingly unlikely that we could reach one that does exist (doesn’t seem impossible to me but I find it hard to see how we could hope to get confidence on this point).
(With apologies, I think this comment is kind of dense. Some better version of it would give the arguments more cleanly.)
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.
Nice discussion, Owen and titotal!
I think this depends on the timeframe. Over a longer one, looking into the estimated destroyable area by nuclear weapons, nuclear risk looks like a transition risk (see graph below). In addition, I think the nuclear extinction risk has decreased even more than the destroyable area, since I believe greater wealth has made society more resilient to the effects of nuclear war and nuclear winter. For reference, I estimated the current annual nuclear extinction risk is 5.93*10^-12.
You can conservatively multiply through by the probability that the time of perils is short enough and for the risk dropping enough orders of magnitude.