Interesting view. It seems to me like it makes sense, but I also feel like itād be valuable for it to be fleshed out and critiqued further to see how solid it is. (Perhaps this has already been done somewhereāI do feel like Iāve heard vaguely similar arguments here and there.)
Also, arriving at this thread 5 months late, I notice Toby Ord makes a similar argument in The Precipice. He writes about:
a subtle form of correlationānot between two risks, but between risks and the value of the future. There might be risks that are much more likely to occur in worlds with high potential. For example, if it is possible to create artificial intelligence that far surpasses humanity in every domain, this would increase the risk from misaligned AGI, but would also increase the value we could achieve using AGI that was aligned with human values. By ignoring this correlation, the total risk approach underweights the value of work on this risk.
This can be usefully understood in terms of there being a common cause for the risk and the benefit, producing the correlation. A high ceiling on technological capability might be another common cause between a variety of risks and extremely positive futures. I will set this possibility aside in the rest of the book, but it is an important issue for future work to explore.
Interesting view. It seems to me like it makes sense, but I also feel like itād be valuable for it to be fleshed out and critiqued further to see how solid it is. (Perhaps this has already been done somewhereāI do feel like Iāve heard vaguely similar arguments here and there.)
Thanks! Iām not sure if I made it up or not. I will try to find some time to write more about it.
I think itās worth noting that, for predictions concerning the next few decades, accelerating growth or āthe god of straight linesā with 2% growth are not the only possibilities. There is for instance this piece by Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood on the slowing down of scientific progress, which I find very good. Also, in Chapter 18 of Gordonās book on āthe rise and fall of American growthā, he predicts (under assumptions that I find reasonable) that the median disposable income per person in the US will grow by about 0.3% per year on average over the period 2015-2040. (This does not affect your argument though, as far as I understand it.)
Interesting view. It seems to me like it makes sense, but I also feel like itād be valuable for it to be fleshed out and critiqued further to see how solid it is. (Perhaps this has already been done somewhereāI do feel like Iāve heard vaguely similar arguments here and there.)
Also, arriving at this thread 5 months late, I notice Toby Ord makes a similar argument in The Precipice. He writes about:
Thanks! Iām not sure if I made it up or not. I will try to find some time to write more about it.
I think itās worth noting that, for predictions concerning the next few decades, accelerating growth or āthe god of straight linesā with 2% growth are not the only possibilities. There is for instance this piece by Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood on the slowing down of scientific progress, which I find very good. Also, in Chapter 18 of Gordonās book on āthe rise and fall of American growthā, he predicts (under assumptions that I find reasonable) that the median disposable income per person in the US will grow by about 0.3% per year on average over the period 2015-2040. (This does not affect your argument though, as far as I understand it.)