Thank you for the welcome, and the encouragement!
I was already thinking about re-posting some interviews here, but was a bit worried about too much self-promotion, so glad you suggested it :)
felix.h
Karma: 48
Interview Thomas Moynihan: “The discovery of extinction is a philosophical centrepiece of the modern age”
Interview with Tom Chivers: “AI is a plausible existential risk, but it feels as if I’m in Pascal’s mugging”
Good point! I can’t say I have an immediate response, but I’m gonna think a bit more about this.
Thank you! Great post, with a lot of what I was looking for in there.
Do power laws drive politics?
Hi everyone! I have been interested in EA, and adjacent fields, for little over a year now. So I thought it was time to register here.
I work in journalism, although not always on EA-related topics. As a side-project I also run a little newsletter about, among other issues, x-risk.
So hope being here can help advance my thinking, and maybe even support me in doing more good.
Great post!
I was thinking recently about nanotechnology as an x-risk, so it’s awesome you took the time to research this. Nanotechnology features heavily in early writings on x-risk and trans-humanism, sometimes even being mentioned more prominently than AI-risk. Which as I understand it coincided with a strong push of public and private investments in all things nanotech from around 2000 (although not always APM). From 2010 on investment seems to have gone down and a lot of people in the space, like Eric Drexler and Nick Bostrom, redirected their attention to AI, leaving me wondering what happened to it, and how real of a threat it remains.
Do you think the retreat of investment into nanotechnology reduced attention towards it as an EA cause area, compared to research into more well-funded (and hyped) technologies like AI?