I have been on a mission to do as much good as possible since I was quite young, and I decided to prioritize X-risk and improving the long-term future at around age 13. Toward this end, growing up I studied philosophy, psychology, social entrepreneurship, business, economics, the history of information technology, and futurism.
A few years ago I wrote a book draft I was calling “Ways to Save The World” or “Paths to Utopia” which imagined broad innovative strategies for preventing existential risk and improving the long-term future.
Upon discovering Effective Altruism in January 2022, while preparing to start a Master’s of Social Entrepreneurship degree at the University of Southern California, I did a deep dive into EA and rationality and decided to take a closer look at the possibility of AI caused X-risk and lock-in, and moved to Berkeley to do longtermist research and community building work.
I am now researching “Deep Reflection,” processes for determining how to get to our best achievable future, including interventions such as “The Long Reflection,” “Coherent Extrapolated Volition,” and “Good Reflective Governance.”
I think it’s essentially a matter of ITN, AI timelines, and post-AGI dynamics. And perhaps a little sociological.
Compared to long-term trajectory change, AI safety is now much less neglected, I would say by a couple orders of magnitude, which is not enough to compensate for the lower tractability of trajectory change.
AI timelines seem quite short and AGI & ASI seem like they may be quite likely to be structurally power concentrating (even if we avoid the most extreme scenarios, although of course those are one of the main concerns) and likely to make most humans largely irrelevant;
Hence the time we have left to influence the trajectory of the long-term future may be quite limited. Even if nothing is locked in immediately, the ability of most humans to meaningfully influence the long-term trajectory of the future may be strongly curtailed as AI (and who controls AI, and the overall shape of civilization at the time the AI transition occurs) becomes the dominant force deciding what happens in the future.
As noted in the MacAskill essay you mentioned, AGI/ASI may also accelerate other factors like grabbing solar space resources & potentially defense dominant deep space settlement, rapidly moving toward technological maturity, and various other forces increasing the likelihood of local and global lock-in, enabled by advanced AI.
So overall I think the concern is that AI may cause a dramatic relatively near-term acceleration of path dependence and lock-in dynamics, and that this is very severely neglected compared to AI related extinction risk, which seem like the biggest extinction risk.
I think trajectory change is in fact so neglected that it’s hard to even say how tractable it is because barely anyone has looked at it, and it seems worth having at least a few people looking at it.
I think there’s also a sociological factor that MacAskill and Forethought, which have something not too far off from the the above view, have been really trying to raise the profile of these ideas since at least “What We Owe The Future” (although to be clear I know there are several longtermists who helped innovate these views and quite a lot of longtermists who are sympathetic to this kind of stuff, I just think MacAskill/Forethought have been most effective.)
This is a bit more speculative, but I also think that perhaps when the whole shift from “longtermist” framing to “x-risk” framing occured, a lot of the people who cared most about/were most comparatively advantaged at work on extinction just stopped calling themselves longtermists, or at least stop emphasizing this, as they saw this as a liability, whereas people who cared about/were comparatively advantaged at work on the trajectory of the future were much more likely to continue calling themselves longtermists; so part of it might be that, not only did longtermists start focusing more on this stuff, but that people who care about extinction stopped calling themselves longtermists, making it seem like a higher proportion of longtermists now care more about non-extinction issues.
While I don’t know if this was counterfactual, I requested the “Existential Choices Debate” on this topic and spent most of last year researching and writing a yet-to-be-published essay containing a lot of my own views essentially comparing extinction vs. trajectory change as cause areas, which you may find relevant.