I think I’m more bullish on digital storage than you.
Most alignment work today exists as digital bits: arXiv papers, lab notes, GitHub repos, model checkpoints. Digital storage is surprisingly fragile without continuous power and maintenance.
SSDs store bits as charges in floating-gate cells; when unpowered, charge leaks, and consumer SSDs may start losing data after a few years. Hard drives retain magnetic data longer, but their mechanical parts degrade; after decades of disuse they often need clean-room work to spin up safely. Data centres depend on air-conditioning, fire suppression, and regular maintenance.
In a global collapse where grids are down for years, almost all unmaintained digital archives eventually succumb to bit-rot, corrosion, fire, or physical decay.
This is true but the fundamental value proposition of digital storage is extremely cheap, and easy (~free on both fronts for a few GB of PDFs) replication. So it’s true that a single physical device by default won’t last very long, but the data itself simply (“simply”—I mean the crux is how hard/common this will be) needs to hop from device to device (possibly and ideally existing on many devices at any one time) indefinitely.
By analogy you might think that human aging/death poses a major problem for the continued existence of the information necessary to recreate a human (i.e. DNA + a few other sources of info) but in fact the ability for people to replicate makes destruction of that knowledge much, much harder.
Of course a key consideration is how bad the setback is. At the limit you’re right because our ability to create the tools for info replication won’t exist, but at least naively it might take quite a bit to destroy all of society’s ability to manufacture flash drives and computers for long enough for all info to die out via the mechanisms you describe.
I think I’m more bullish on digital storage than you.
This is true but the fundamental value proposition of digital storage is extremely cheap, and easy (~free on both fronts for a few GB of PDFs) replication. So it’s true that a single physical device by default won’t last very long, but the data itself simply (“simply”—I mean the crux is how hard/common this will be) needs to hop from device to device (possibly and ideally existing on many devices at any one time) indefinitely.
By analogy you might think that human aging/death poses a major problem for the continued existence of the information necessary to recreate a human (i.e. DNA + a few other sources of info) but in fact the ability for people to replicate makes destruction of that knowledge much, much harder.
Of course a key consideration is how bad the setback is. At the limit you’re right because our ability to create the tools for info replication won’t exist, but at least naively it might take quite a bit to destroy all of society’s ability to manufacture flash drives and computers for long enough for all info to die out via the mechanisms you describe.