Arguments for the Time of Perils Hypothesis which do not appeal to AI are not strong enough to ground the relevant kind of Time of Perils Hypothesis
What you’ve shown is that some very specific alternate arguments aren’t enough to ground the relevant kind of Time of Perils hypothesis. But the implicature of your statement here is that one needs to appeal to AI to ground the relevant hypothesis, which I think (1) you haven’t shown, and (2) is most likely false (though I think it’s easier to ground with AI).
I guess with a broad enough conception of “AI” I think the statement would be true. I think to get stability against political risks one needs systems that are extremely robust / internally error-correcting. It’s my view that one could likely build such systems out of humans organized in novel ways with certain types of information flow in the system, but I think that’s far out of reach at the moment that the social technology to enable it could conceivably be called “AI”.
I haven’t laid out a particular argument because I think the AI argument is by some way the strongest, and I haven’t done the work to flesh out the alternatives.
I guess I thought you were making a claim like “the only possible arguments that will work need to rest on AI”. If instead you’re making a claim like “among the arguments people have cleanly articulated to date, the only ones that appear to work are those which rest on AI” that’s a much weaker claim (and I think it’s important to disambiguate that that’s the version you’re making, as my guess is that there are other arguments which give you a Time of Perils with much lower probability than AI but still significant probability; but that AFAIK nobody’s worked out the boundaries of what’s implied by the arguments).
You say:
What you’ve shown is that some very specific alternate arguments aren’t enough to ground the relevant kind of Time of Perils hypothesis. But the implicature of your statement here is that one needs to appeal to AI to ground the relevant hypothesis, which I think (1) you haven’t shown, and (2) is most likely false (though I think it’s easier to ground with AI).
I guess with a broad enough conception of “AI” I think the statement would be true. I think to get stability against political risks one needs systems that are extremely robust / internally error-correcting. It’s my view that one could likely build such systems out of humans organized in novel ways with certain types of information flow in the system, but I think that’s far out of reach at the moment that the social technology to enable it could conceivably be called “AI”.
Thanks Owen! It’s good to hear from you.
I’d definitely like to make sure that I consider the best arguments for the Time of Perils Hypothesis. Did you have some other arguments in mind?
I haven’t laid out a particular argument because I think the AI argument is by some way the strongest, and I haven’t done the work to flesh out the alternatives.
I guess I thought you were making a claim like “the only possible arguments that will work need to rest on AI”. If instead you’re making a claim like “among the arguments people have cleanly articulated to date, the only ones that appear to work are those which rest on AI” that’s a much weaker claim (and I think it’s important to disambiguate that that’s the version you’re making, as my guess is that there are other arguments which give you a Time of Perils with much lower probability than AI but still significant probability; but that AFAIK nobody’s worked out the boundaries of what’s implied by the arguments).