It seems to me that your concern “that the older model trivialized the question by assuming we could not spend our money on anything but AI safety research” could be addressed by dividing existing longtermist or EA capital up into one portion to be spent on AI safety and one portion to be spent on other causes. Each capital stock can then be spent at independent rates according to the value of availabkr giving opportunities in their respective cause areas.
Your model already makes the assumption:
Prior to the emergence of AGI, we don’t want to spend money on anything other than AI safety research.
And then:
The new model allows for spending money on other things [but only after AGI]
It just seems like a weird constraint to say that with one stock of capital you only want to spend it on one cause (AI safety) before some event but will spend it on any cause after the event.
I’m not sure that I can articulate a specific reason this doesn’t make sense right now, but intuitively I think your older model is more reasonable.
The reason I made the model only have one thing to spend on pre-AGI is not because it’s realistic (which it isn’t), but because it makes the model more tractable. I was primarily interested in answering a simple question: do AI timelines affect giving now vs. later?
Thanks, I only read through Appendix A.
It seems to me that your concern “that the older model trivialized the question by assuming we could not spend our money on anything but AI safety research” could be addressed by dividing existing longtermist or EA capital up into one portion to be spent on AI safety and one portion to be spent on other causes. Each capital stock can then be spent at independent rates according to the value of availabkr giving opportunities in their respective cause areas.
Your model already makes the assumption:
And then:
It just seems like a weird constraint to say that with one stock of capital you only want to spend it on one cause (AI safety) before some event but will spend it on any cause after the event.
I’m not sure that I can articulate a specific reason this doesn’t make sense right now, but intuitively I think your older model is more reasonable.
The reason I made the model only have one thing to spend on pre-AGI is not because it’s realistic (which it isn’t), but because it makes the model more tractable. I was primarily interested in answering a simple question: do AI timelines affect giving now vs. later?