Alternatively, one could look at the opinions of smart people in the effective altruism community (“EA experts”), who tend to assign a non-negligible probability to short timelines. But this (vaguely defined) set of people is subject to a self-selection bias – if you think AGI is likely to happen soon, you’re much more likely to spend years thinking and talking about that – and has little external validation of their “expert” status.
One way of countering this bias is only looking at the opinion of EAs who have thought about this a lot and got into EA from some cause area other than AI safety. My impression is that that group has roughly similar timelines to EAs who were initially focused on AI safety.
Seems like there’s still self-selection going on, depending on how much you think ‘a lot’ is, and how good you are at finding everyone who have thought about it that much. You might be missing out on people who thought about it for, say, 20 hours, decided it wasn’t important, and moved on to other cause areas without writing up their thoughts.
On the other hand, it seems like people are worried about and interested in talking about AGI happening in 20 or 30 or 50 years time, so it doesn’t seem likely that everyone who thinks 10-year timelines are <10% stops talking about it.
One way of countering this bias is only looking at the opinion of EAs who have thought about this a lot and got into EA from some cause area other than AI safety. My impression is that that group has roughly similar timelines to EAs who were initially focused on AI safety.
Seems like there’s still self-selection going on, depending on how much you think ‘a lot’ is, and how good you are at finding everyone who have thought about it that much. You might be missing out on people who thought about it for, say, 20 hours, decided it wasn’t important, and moved on to other cause areas without writing up their thoughts.
On the other hand, it seems like people are worried about and interested in talking about AGI happening in 20 or 30 or 50 years time, so it doesn’t seem likely that everyone who thinks 10-year timelines are <10% stops talking about it.