This is a good point, but I’d flag that there are many departments of the government with different levels of autonomy. It seems easy for me to imagine some special cluster in the military or intelligence departments to be spending a lot of time around AGI events, but I so far don’t have evidence of anything like that.
Fair point. First let me add another piece of info about the congress: “The dominant professions of Members are public service/politics, business, and law.”
Now on to your point.
How old are the leaders of the military? How many of them know what python is? What was their major in college? Now ask yourself the same thing about the CIA/NSA./Etc. This isn’t a rhetorical question. I assume each department will differ. Though there may be a bit of smugness implicit.
Conditional on such a cluster existing: How likely do you think it is that it would be declassified? I don’t find it that unlikely that the NSA or CIA could be running a program and not speaking on it, and it seems possible to figure this out simply by accounting for where every CS/AI graduate in the US works. I feel less strongly that the military would hide such a project. FWIW my epistemic confidence is very low for this entire claim, I am not someone who has obsessed over governmental classification and things like that.
How many CS PHDs are there in the US government in total? How many masters? how many bachelors?
I think there is also more to say about the variety of reasons people feel more comfortable giving their input on economic, social, and foreign policy issues (even if they have no business doing so), which I think could leak into leaders just naturally trending towards dealing with those issues, but I think this is a much more delicate argument that I don’t feel comfortable fleshing out right now.
I think aogaras point above is reasonable and mostly true, but I don’t think it goes to the level of explaining the discrepancy. This is incredibly skewed because of who I associate with(not all of my friends are eas though), but anecdotally I think AGI is starting to gain some recognition as a very important issue among people my age (early 20s), specifically those in STEM fields. Not a lot, but certainly more than it is talked about in the mainstream. Let’s be real though, none of my friends will ever be in the military or run for office, nor do I believe they will work for the intelligence agencies. My point is, In addition to age, we have a serious problem with under-representation of stem in high up positions and over-representation of lawyers. It would be interesting to test the leaders of various Gov departments on their level of computer science competency/comprehension.
“The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 117th Congress was 58.4 years; of Senators, 64.3 years.”
This is a good point, but I’d flag that there are many departments of the government with different levels of autonomy. It seems easy for me to imagine some special cluster in the military or intelligence departments to be spending a lot of time around AGI events, but I so far don’t have evidence of anything like that.
Fair point. First let me add another piece of info about the congress: “The dominant professions of Members are public service/politics, business, and law.”
Now on to your point.
How old are the leaders of the military? How many of them know what python is? What was their major in college? Now ask yourself the same thing about the CIA/NSA./Etc. This isn’t a rhetorical question. I assume each department will differ. Though there may be a bit of smugness implicit.
Conditional on such a cluster existing: How likely do you think it is that it would be declassified? I don’t find it that unlikely that the NSA or CIA could be running a program and not speaking on it, and it seems possible to figure this out simply by accounting for where every CS/AI graduate in the US works. I feel less strongly that the military would hide such a project. FWIW my epistemic confidence is very low for this entire claim, I am not someone who has obsessed over governmental classification and things like that.
How many CS PHDs are there in the US government in total? How many masters? how many bachelors?
I think there is also more to say about the variety of reasons people feel more comfortable giving their input on economic, social, and foreign policy issues (even if they have no business doing so), which I think could leak into leaders just naturally trending towards dealing with those issues, but I think this is a much more delicate argument that I don’t feel comfortable fleshing out right now.
I think aogaras point above is reasonable and mostly true, but I don’t think it goes to the level of explaining the discrepancy. This is incredibly skewed because of who I associate with(not all of my friends are eas though), but anecdotally I think AGI is starting to gain some recognition as a very important issue among people my age (early 20s), specifically those in STEM fields. Not a lot, but certainly more than it is talked about in the mainstream. Let’s be real though, none of my friends will ever be in the military or run for office, nor do I believe they will work for the intelligence agencies. My point is, In addition to age, we have a serious problem with under-representation of stem in high up positions and over-representation of lawyers. It would be interesting to test the leaders of various Gov departments on their level of computer science competency/comprehension.