This seems like a massive overcorrection to me and seems to be using the FTX crisis as an opportunity to push a preconceived anti-crypto bias.
Many people think crypto could be revolutionary, like the Internet in the 90s and 2000s. The Internet had many fraudulent and scammy companies arise and many people lost lots of money but I think looking back on it, we’d be absurd to say that EA should stay away from the internet since there is a lot of nefarious behaviors. Suggesting that EAs should stay away from this could be sacrificing some of the most important interventions on global poverty and/or coordination problems with relevance to AI safety. Furthermore, we could miss our opportunity to have an impact on a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Many people don’t like crypto. That’s fine. They may be correct that it won’t have much technological importance. But it very well might. It seems bad for EA to steer clear of it.
The original poster’s bottom-line conclusion seems rather modest to me: <I mean “avoid being significantly associated with the field”. Don’t invest assets in crypto or crypto companies, don’t put them on your board, don’t boast about your ties to crypto insiders. >
That doesn’t even seem to be saying that everyone should stay away from crypto in their personal capacities. I read it as more about trying to minimize entanglement in an EA capacity.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people trying out cool blockchain ideas in a personal capacity, as long as you avoid getting sucked into the speculator orbit. And I wouldn’t object to someone donating lottery winnings, so I similarly can’t object to people who just gambled on memecoins and donating the winnings or whatever. (I can advise against crypto investment on the grounds that there’s a good chance you’ll lose your money, however).
Where I draw the line is in encouraging other people to jump into the speculator bubble, which FTX undoubtedly did with it’s atrocious superbowl ad. This goes quintuple for charity orgs, where reputation is everything.
I really dislike comparisons to the internet here. When the web burst onto the scene, it became useful almost immediately, and not just to people trying to make money off of it. When the dot com crash happened, a third of the developed world was already using the internet, and the growth in internet usage was not affected at all.
The dot com crash was a speculative bubble, yes, but it occurred because everyone knew that the internet was taking over and about bring in an obscene amount of paying customers. If crypto becomes as revolutionary as the internet, we’ll know, because it’ll be obvious to everyone, not just a handful of insiders.
This seems like a massive overcorrection to me and seems to be using the FTX crisis as an opportunity to push a preconceived anti-crypto bias.
Many people think crypto could be revolutionary, like the Internet in the 90s and 2000s. The Internet had many fraudulent and scammy companies arise and many people lost lots of money but I think looking back on it, we’d be absurd to say that EA should stay away from the internet since there is a lot of nefarious behaviors. Suggesting that EAs should stay away from this could be sacrificing some of the most important interventions on global poverty and/or coordination problems with relevance to AI safety. Furthermore, we could miss our opportunity to have an impact on a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Many people don’t like crypto. That’s fine. They may be correct that it won’t have much technological importance. But it very well might. It seems bad for EA to steer clear of it.
The original poster’s bottom-line conclusion seems rather modest to me: <I mean “avoid being significantly associated with the field”. Don’t invest assets in crypto or crypto companies, don’t put them on your board, don’t boast about your ties to crypto insiders. >
That doesn’t even seem to be saying that everyone should stay away from crypto in their personal capacities. I read it as more about trying to minimize entanglement in an EA capacity.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people trying out cool blockchain ideas in a personal capacity, as long as you avoid getting sucked into the speculator orbit. And I wouldn’t object to someone donating lottery winnings, so I similarly can’t object to people who just gambled on memecoins and donating the winnings or whatever. (I can advise against crypto investment on the grounds that there’s a good chance you’ll lose your money, however).
Where I draw the line is in encouraging other people to jump into the speculator bubble, which FTX undoubtedly did with it’s atrocious superbowl ad. This goes quintuple for charity orgs, where reputation is everything.
I really dislike comparisons to the internet here. When the web burst onto the scene, it became useful almost immediately, and not just to people trying to make money off of it. When the dot com crash happened, a third of the developed world was already using the internet, and the growth in internet usage was not affected at all.
The dot com crash was a speculative bubble, yes, but it occurred because everyone knew that the internet was taking over and about bring in an obscene amount of paying customers. If crypto becomes as revolutionary as the internet, we’ll know, because it’ll be obvious to everyone, not just a handful of insiders.