Thanks, that’s a good observation—you’re right that this is a permissive operationalisation. I actually deliberately did that to be more “charitable” to Eden—to say, “AI winter seems pretty unlikely even on these pretty conservative assumptions”, but I should probably have flagged that more clearly. I agree that there are some scenarios where a 50% drawdown happens but there’s no real winter worthy of the name.
Another way of putting this is, I thought I’d get pushback along the lines of “this is way too bullish on AI progress” (and I did get some of that, but not a lot), and instead got lots of pushback in the form of “this is way too bullish on AI winter”. (Not talking about the EA forum here, but other places.)
I think a more likely outcome is a kind of “AI autumn”: Investment keeps coming at a steady rate, and lots and lots of people are using AI for the things it’s good at, but the number of advancements slows significantly, and certain problems prove intractable, and the hype dies down. I think we’ve already seen this process happen for Autonomous Vehicles. I think this scenario is very likely.
Agree that this is a live possibility. (But I also don’t think there’s been a 50% drawdown in autonomous driving investment, so I don’t think my operationalisation fails there.)
Thanks, that’s a good observation—you’re right that this is a permissive operationalisation. I actually deliberately did that to be more “charitable” to Eden—to say, “AI winter seems pretty unlikely even on these pretty conservative assumptions”, but I should probably have flagged that more clearly. I agree that there are some scenarios where a 50% drawdown happens but there’s no real winter worthy of the name.
Another way of putting this is, I thought I’d get pushback along the lines of “this is way too bullish on AI progress” (and I did get some of that, but not a lot), and instead got lots of pushback in the form of “this is way too bullish on AI winter”. (Not talking about the EA forum here, but other places.)
Agree that this is a live possibility. (But I also don’t think there’s been a 50% drawdown in autonomous driving investment, so I don’t think my operationalisation fails there.)