Thanks for the response, that all makes sense. I missed some of the parts where you disambiguated those two concepts; apologies for that. I suspect I still see the disparity between “extraordinarily important century” and “most important century” as greater than you do, though, perhaps because I consider value lock-in this century less likely than you do—I haven’t seen particularly persuasive arguments for it in general (as opposed to in specific scenarios, like AGIs with explicit utility functions or the scenario in your digital people post). And relatedly, I’m pretty uncertain about how far away technological completion is—I can imagine transitions to post-human futures in this century which still leave a huge amount of room for progress in subsequent centuries.
I agree that ’extraordinarily important century” and “transformative century” don’t have the same emotional impact as “most important century”. I wonder if you could help address this by clarifying that you’re talking about “more change this century than since X” (for x = a millennium ago, or since agriculture, or since cavemen, or since we diverged from chimpanzees). “Change” also seems like a slightly more intuitive unit than “importance”, especially for non-EAs for whom “importance” is less strongly associated with “our ability to exert influence”.
Agreed that we probably disagree about lock-in. I don’t want my whole case to ride on it, but I don’t want it to be left out as an important possibility either.
With that in mind, I think the page I linked is conveying the details of what I mean pretty well (although I also find the “more change than X” framing interesting), and I think “most important century” is still the best headline version I’ve thought of.
Thanks for the response, that all makes sense. I missed some of the parts where you disambiguated those two concepts; apologies for that. I suspect I still see the disparity between “extraordinarily important century” and “most important century” as greater than you do, though, perhaps because I consider value lock-in this century less likely than you do—I haven’t seen particularly persuasive arguments for it in general (as opposed to in specific scenarios, like AGIs with explicit utility functions or the scenario in your digital people post). And relatedly, I’m pretty uncertain about how far away technological completion is—I can imagine transitions to post-human futures in this century which still leave a huge amount of room for progress in subsequent centuries.
I agree that ’extraordinarily important century” and “transformative century” don’t have the same emotional impact as “most important century”. I wonder if you could help address this by clarifying that you’re talking about “more change this century than since X” (for x = a millennium ago, or since agriculture, or since cavemen, or since we diverged from chimpanzees). “Change” also seems like a slightly more intuitive unit than “importance”, especially for non-EAs for whom “importance” is less strongly associated with “our ability to exert influence”.
Agreed that we probably disagree about lock-in. I don’t want my whole case to ride on it, but I don’t want it to be left out as an important possibility either.
With that in mind, I think the page I linked is conveying the details of what I mean pretty well (although I also find the “more change than X” framing interesting), and I think “most important century” is still the best headline version I’ve thought of.