The funds we’re donating to are aware of AI’s impact on the world and seem likely to take steps to use AI to improve their outcomes
There is definitely some correlation between current competence and ability to adapt to a changing world, though I suspect that there’s also a huge amount of stickiness that undermines this.
All that said, if you think there should be a higher discount, you can apply it, but that doesn’t substantially change the results regarding what goes to AW. Indeed, if you increase the discount to 90%, you don’t get much more to AI (and less overall to GCRs as a whole, likely because the discount also applies to biorisk and nuclear weapons)
Fascinating. Is biorisk depreciating because some of those projects have a long payoff time?
My intuition is that biorisk talent will be more easily redeployable in a world undergoing an AI transition than a lot of the animal talent (more sticky).
This is definitely an approximation, not based on a rigorous underlying model. I informally personally asked several people in the cause prio and AI spaces, including some at labs, to answer the question about what type of discount seemed appropriate and, along with my best judgment, settled on 40%.
I would very much like to improve this input in the future, perhaps through formal surveys or, perhaps, a Delphi panel-type process. Though I think my weakly held intuition here is a bigger possible change isn’t the precise value (which in the current model doesn’t change the result dramatically), but distinguishing between reduced effectiveness overall and probability of an effect going decreasing, with consideration of different time periods when those effects happen in each cause area.
Fascinating. Is biorisk depreciating because some of those projects have a long payoff time?
My intuition is that biorisk talent will be more easily redeployable in a world undergoing an AI transition than a lot of the animal talent (more sticky).
We included biorisk in the AI discount not just because of payoff times but because of the same type of uncertainty you raised about AW. That is, it seems possible the actions people are taking today could be mooted by changes in AI development.
It does seem possible that biorisk talent could potentially be more easily redeployable than AW. I would also add a couple more related additional considerations in what discount to use for biorisk: (i) some pathways to very negative outcomes for AI run through biorisk and (ii) it seems plausible to me that some civilizational hardening measures (i.e. more widely available PPE) seem perhaps more robust to AI uncertainty than some interventions in other cause areas because they act on AI risk itself given (i).
This is why in future versions of this model, I could imagine both nukes and biorisk having a different AI discount since there are clear interactions here between AI and these other GCRs.
How was the 40% figure calculated?
There is definitely some correlation between current competence and ability to adapt to a changing world, though I suspect that there’s also a huge amount of stickiness that undermines this.
Fascinating. Is biorisk depreciating because some of those projects have a long payoff time?
My intuition is that biorisk talent will be more easily redeployable in a world undergoing an AI transition than a lot of the animal talent (more sticky).
This is definitely an approximation, not based on a rigorous underlying model. I informally personally asked several people in the cause prio and AI spaces, including some at labs, to answer the question about what type of discount seemed appropriate and, along with my best judgment, settled on 40%.
I would very much like to improve this input in the future, perhaps through formal surveys or, perhaps, a Delphi panel-type process. Though I think my weakly held intuition here is a bigger possible change isn’t the precise value (which in the current model doesn’t change the result dramatically), but distinguishing between reduced effectiveness overall and probability of an effect going decreasing, with consideration of different time periods when those effects happen in each cause area.
We included biorisk in the AI discount not just because of payoff times but because of the same type of uncertainty you raised about AW. That is, it seems possible the actions people are taking today could be mooted by changes in AI development.
It does seem possible that biorisk talent could potentially be more easily redeployable than AW. I would also add a couple more related additional considerations in what discount to use for biorisk: (i) some pathways to very negative outcomes for AI run through biorisk and (ii) it seems plausible to me that some civilizational hardening measures (i.e. more widely available PPE) seem perhaps more robust to AI uncertainty than some interventions in other cause areas because they act on AI risk itself given (i).
This is why in future versions of this model, I could imagine both nukes and biorisk having a different AI discount since there are clear interactions here between AI and these other GCRs.