Thanks for your comment, and that’s a fair point/critique—I agree about impact through academia being slow. However, at this stage it’s pretty difficult to plan for what jobs you should be training for if AI replaces your current role, so it still makes sense to do something that broadly expands your career capital as you state, whether this is a PhD or something else. I would have thought the likelihood of an X-risk happening within the time you do your PhD is probably quite small, but I’ll leave the quantification to the experts! AI is probably least likely to impact some more practical and non-academic roles so this could be an argument for gaining career capital outside of the knowledge sector (e.g. see this Times article: bit.ly/3M8Utpr). I didn’t know the Bing AI had been rolled out yet—I’ll have to give that a try and I’m curious how it will develop over time, and how quickly—and whether it will make my new job quicker and/or ultimately replace me or some of the workforce.
My argument doesn’t hang on whether an X-risk occurs during my PhD. If AGI is 10 years away, it’s questionable whether investing half of that remaining time into completing a PhD is optimal.
Thanks for your comment, and that’s a fair point/critique—I agree about impact through academia being slow. However, at this stage it’s pretty difficult to plan for what jobs you should be training for if AI replaces your current role, so it still makes sense to do something that broadly expands your career capital as you state, whether this is a PhD or something else. I would have thought the likelihood of an X-risk happening within the time you do your PhD is probably quite small, but I’ll leave the quantification to the experts! AI is probably least likely to impact some more practical and non-academic roles so this could be an argument for gaining career capital outside of the knowledge sector (e.g. see this Times article: bit.ly/3M8Utpr). I didn’t know the Bing AI had been rolled out yet—I’ll have to give that a try and I’m curious how it will develop over time, and how quickly—and whether it will make my new job quicker and/or ultimately replace me or some of the workforce.
My argument doesn’t hang on whether an X-risk occurs during my PhD. If AGI is 10 years away, it’s questionable whether investing half of that remaining time into completing a PhD is optimal.