It definitely does strike me as there needing to be a lot of continued longtermist research and field-building to allow us to be in a good position to deploy a large amount of capital at a critical time. It’s not easy to deploy capital overnight.
Sorry if this is a strawman of the “invest to give later” argument or something already addressed, but I think it’s important to put out there if it hasn’t been already.
I emphatically agree that we could be in a much better position to productively deploy capital, and that there may be significant room for improvement here.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to “give now vs. later”. At first glance, it seems like a key question might be what timeframe we’re thinking about when considering “giving later”.
If it’s on the order of a few decades, then I agree it would be somewhat farcical to say we should just wait. E.g., if we thought there’d be some pivotal AI-related moment in 2050, then “let’s invest all capital and not do anything until 2040” would strike me as an obviously bad strategy.
If, on the other hand, the idea is to use the capital in hundreds of years, then I’m less sure (but then it also becomes harder to see if we can successfully invest over such long time horizons).
It definitely does strike me as there needing to be a lot of continued longtermist research and field-building to allow us to be in a good position to deploy a large amount of capital at a critical time. It’s not easy to deploy capital overnight.
Sorry if this is a strawman of the “invest to give later” argument or something already addressed, but I think it’s important to put out there if it hasn’t been already.
I emphatically agree that we could be in a much better position to productively deploy capital, and that there may be significant room for improvement here.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to “give now vs. later”. At first glance, it seems like a key question might be what timeframe we’re thinking about when considering “giving later”.
If it’s on the order of a few decades, then I agree it would be somewhat farcical to say we should just wait. E.g., if we thought there’d be some pivotal AI-related moment in 2050, then “let’s invest all capital and not do anything until 2040” would strike me as an obviously bad strategy.
If, on the other hand, the idea is to use the capital in hundreds of years, then I’m less sure (but then it also becomes harder to see if we can successfully invest over such long time horizons).