I agree with the broad critique that ” Even if you buy the empirical claims of short-ish AI timelines and a major upcoming transition, even if we solve technical alignment, there is a way more diverse set of important work to be done than just technical safety and AI governance”
But I’m concerned that reasoning like this can easily implicitly lead to people justifying incremental adaptions to what they were already doing and answering the question of, is what I’m doing useless in the light of AI, rather than the question that actually matters of, given my values, could I be doing things that I have substantially more impact? It would just be pretty surprising to me if the list of the most important cause areas conditional on short-ish timelines was very similar to the list conditioning on the reverse, and I expect there’s bunch of areas being dropped here.
By calling out one kind of mistake, we don’t want to incline people toward making the opposite mistake. We are calling for more careful evaluations of projects, both within AI and outside of AI. But we acknowledge the risk of focusing on just one kind of mistake (and focusing on an extreme version of it, to boot). We didn’t pursue comprehensive analyses of which cause areas will remain important conditional on short timelines (and the analysis we did give was pretty speculative), but that would be a good future project. Very near future, of course, if short-ish timelines are correct!
I agree with the broad critique that ” Even if you buy the empirical claims of short-ish AI timelines and a major upcoming transition, even if we solve technical alignment, there is a way more diverse set of important work to be done than just technical safety and AI governance”
But I’m concerned that reasoning like this can easily implicitly lead to people justifying incremental adaptions to what they were already doing and answering the question of, is what I’m doing useless in the light of AI, rather than the question that actually matters of, given my values, could I be doing things that I have substantially more impact? It would just be pretty surprising to me if the list of the most important cause areas conditional on short-ish timelines was very similar to the list conditioning on the reverse, and I expect there’s bunch of areas being dropped here.
By calling out one kind of mistake, we don’t want to incline people toward making the opposite mistake. We are calling for more careful evaluations of projects, both within AI and outside of AI. But we acknowledge the risk of focusing on just one kind of mistake (and focusing on an extreme version of it, to boot). We didn’t pursue comprehensive analyses of which cause areas will remain important conditional on short timelines (and the analysis we did give was pretty speculative), but that would be a good future project. Very near future, of course, if short-ish timelines are correct!