Tom_Davidson

How can the mid­dle pow­ers avoid get­ting trounced dur­ing the in­tel­li­gence ex­plo­sion? A plan.

• Tom_Davidson 15 May 2026 13:12 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Bet­ter Fu­tures Dis­cus­sion Thread: With Fin Moorhouse

  Sorry for the slow reply!

  Thanks, this is a helpful perspective.

  I’ve normally thought from a frame of “we’ve got limited chips to spend on pausing, when is it best to spend them”. I think this frame is reasonable if you’re worried about irresponsible developers catching up or tradeoffs with the current gen’s desire to survive.

  But it is true that a pause today might make a pause in the future more likely.

  Otoh, it could also make it less likely if ppl perceive that nothing concretely useful comes out of it, which is my worry with pausing today. Like, i think ~nothing useful would have come from pausing shortly after GPT-4 was released.

  If we end the first pause only after we’ve solved the problem of building aligned AIs that are philosophically and strategically competent

  Do you think this is possible with today’s AI capabilities? I’d have thought you can’t match human philosophy and strategy yet, but we are def getting closer.

  Also, how do you think about whether to slow down vs pause, holding fixed the total delay relative to ‘full speed ahead’? I’d have thought slow down is better re iterating on alignment as problems arise and re building philosophically competent AIs.

  So if we don’t pause now (and use the time to fix this issue) then by the time we do pause, we’ll likely have AIs that can accelerate other fields (such as math/​coding/​science/​tech and manipulating humans) much more than the fields that are crucial for Better Futures.

  Interesting. I normally expect AI to accelerate philosophy and strategy less than the math/​coding but more than science/​tech. Science/​tech rely on experimental bottlenecks, whereas for philosophy the only input is cognitive labour. But you’re right, if AI can’t do philosophy/​strategy properly, it won’t speed it up at all! So far, AI systems have been pretty good at these skills though?

• Tom_Davidson 30 Apr 2026 16:30 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Bet­ter Fu­tures Dis­cus­sion Thread: With Fin Moorhouse

  Thanks for this.

  In each the examples you give, i’m thinking that the pause would be significantly more beneficial (plausibly by 10x) if we pause when AI is already capable enough that it can significantly help us solve the issue. In general, they seem like the kinds of issues where AI could massively accelerate progress.

  So if i’m choosing between international pause now vs international pause in 2 years, I choose the latter. (I assume we’re talking about international pauses here rather than just the U.S. but lmk if you also support a unilateral pause now!)

  I do find Holly’s point that it might be damaging to quibble about exactly when we pause if that reduces the chance of a pause happening at all. And today we are very far from a pause actually happening, and one may well be needed in two years’ time, so I def support efforts to get us closer to a pause!

  I’m hesitant about saying “pause now” because I actually think a different policy might be much more effective. But I think a world where we were about to do an international pause would be better than the actual world.

  (I want to think more about this topic and all of this is v tentative.)

AI for de­ci­sion advice

• Tom_Davidson 31 Mar 2026 19:35 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: AI should be a good cit­i­zen, not just a good assistant

  Thanks! This is a great comment.

  I should I was using is from the perspective society. We as a society should set a norm and expectation for systems to have these drives.

  I completely agree that there’s a tricky question for how you make that incentive compatible when there are multiple companies. And I agree that it could be a bad idea for company to do this unilaterally.

AI should be a good cit­i­zen, not just a good assistant

• Tom_Davidson 26 Mar 2026 8:54 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Michael Townsend🔸’s comment on: AI char­ac­ter is a big deal

  This is a real trade-off when thinking about what AI character should look like. I think that more work to think about that trade-off and where we should be along it, and ways to get the best of both—the biggest benefits of being ethical and of being obedient—is hugely valuable.

• Tom_Davidson 25 Mar 2026 8:46 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 2

  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: AI char­ac­ter is a big deal

  This comment discusses a similar objection.

  In brief, I think that the transitional period before ASI will shape the world that ASI is built into. That is, it will indirectly shape the values of ASI and the institutions that it’s embedded in and who controls it. I think the impact flows through to ASI. An analogy is how the behaviour of humans over the last two decades has flowed through to the character and impacts of today’s AI systems.

  You might be right that the same alignment methods don’t work for superintelligence, but I don’t think that undermines the value of this work. If we can agree on what a good character would be for superintelligence, then you can use the new alignment methods to aim for that same character. Of course, if alignment is completely hopeless, then we shouldn’t work on AI character, but I think there is a good chance that alignment is solvable.

AI char­ac­ter is a big deal

• Tom_Davidson 25 Feb 2026 18:37 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: OscarD🔸’s comment on: Mo­ral pub­lic goods are a big deal for whether we get a good future

  Who are the people that you’re worried will not use their resources for good purposes by default?

  If you’re worried about ppl with dmr in consensium etc, this could still shift them (see our sensitivity analysis)

Mo­ral pub­lic goods are a big deal for whether we get a good future

• Tom_Davidson 12 Jan 2026 16:57 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: 3 Stages of Com­pe­ti­tion for the Long-Term Future

  Is the threat model for stages one and two the same as the one in my post on whether one country can outgrow the rest of the world?

  That post just looks at the basic economic forces driving super-exponential growth and argues that they would lead an actor that starts with more than half of resources, and doesn’t trade, to gain a larger and larger fraction of world output.

  I can’t tell from this post whether there are dynamics that are specific to settling the solar system in Stage II that feed into the first-mover advantage or whether it’s just simple super-exponential growth.

  My current guess is that there are so many orders of magnitude for growth on Earth that super-exp growth would lead to a decisive strategic advantage without even going to space. If that’s right (which it might not be), then it’s unclear that stage two adds that much.

• Tom_Davidson 8 Jan 2026 16:23 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Mo­ral ~realism

  Perhaps many minds end up at a shared notion of what they’re aiming for, via acausal trade (getting to some grand bargain), or evidential cooperation in large worlds

  This isn’t convergence. It’s where ppl DIDN”T converge but make a win-win compromise deal. If ppl all converge, there’s no role for acausal trade/​ECL

• Tom_Davidson 8 Jan 2026 16:20 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Mo­ral ~realism

  It seems like we can predictably make moral progress by reflecting; i.e. coming to answers + arguments that would be persuasive to our former selves
  I think I’m more likely to update towards the positions of smart people who’ve thought long and hard about a topic than the converse (and this is more true the smarter they are, the more they’re already aware of all the considerations I know, and the more they’ve thought about it)
  If I imagine handing people the keys to the universe, I mostly want to know “will they put serious effort into working out what the right thing is and then doing it” rather than their current moral views

  I guess i feel this shows that there’s some shared object-level moral assumptions and some shared methodology for making progress among humans.

  But doesn’t show that the overlap is strong enough for convergence.

  And you could explain the overlap by conformism, in which case i wouldn’t agree with societies i haven’t interacted with

ML re­search di­rec­tions for pre­vent­ing catas­trophic data poisoning

• Tom_Davidson 16 Dec 2025 16:34 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Rerun­ning the Time of Perils

  I think my biggest uncertainty about this is:

  If there were a catastrophic setback of this kind, and civilisation tried hard to save and maintain the weights of superintelligent AI (which they presumably would), how likely are they to succeed?

  My hunch is that they very likely could succeed. E.g. in the first cpl of decades they’d have continued access to superintelligent AI advice (and maybe robotics) from pre-existing hardware. They could use that to bootstrap to longer periods of time. E.g. saving the weights on hard drives rather than SSDs, and then later transferring them to a more secure, long lasting format. Then figure out the minimal-effort-version of compute maintenance and/​or production needed to keep running some superintelligences indefinitely

• Tom_Davidson 16 Dec 2025 16:28 UTC

  13 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Rerun­ning the Time of Perils

  Really like this post!

  I’m wondering whether human-level AI and robotics will significantly decrease civilisation’s susceptibility to catastrophic setbacks?

  AI systems and robots can’t be destroyed by pandemics. They don’t depend on agriculture—just mining and some form of energy production. And a very small number of systems could hold tacit expertise for ~all domains.

  Seems like this this might reduce the risk by a lot, such that the 10% numbers you’re quoting are too high. E.g. you’re assigning 10% to a bio-driven set-back. But i’d have thought that would have to happen before we get human-level robotics?

• Tom_Davidson 16 Oct 2025 17:45 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: A per­sonal take on why you should work at Forethought (maybe)

  I also work at Forethought!

  I agree with a lot of this, but wanted to flag that I would be very excited for ppl doing blue skies research to apply and want Forethought to be a place that’s good for that. We want to work on high impact research and understand that sometimes mean doing things where it’s unclear up front if it will bear fruit.

Could one coun­try out­grow the rest of the world?

• Tom_Davidson 11 Aug 2025 16:44 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: OscarD🔸’s comment on: How quick and big would a soft­ware in­tel­li­gence ex­plo­sion be?

  Thanks, good Q.

  I’m saying that if there is such a new paradigm then we could have >10 years worth of AI progress at rates of 2020-5, and >10 OOMs of effective compute growth according to the old paradigm. But that, perhaps, within the new paradigm these gains are achieved while the efficiency of AI algs only increases slightly. E.g. a new paradigm where each doubling of compute increases capabilities as much as 1000X does today. Then, measured within the new paradigm, the algorithmic progress might seem like just a couple of OOMs so ‘effective compute’ isn’t rising fast, but relative to the old paradigm progress (and effective compute growth) is massive.

  Fwiw, this X thread discusses the units I’m using for “year of Ai progress”, and Eli Lifland gives a reasonable alternative. Either work as a way to understand the framework.