From Lewis' The Big Short:
My [first] book was mainly about the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts. This, too, I assumed was unsustainable. I thought that I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America, when a great nation lost its financial mind. I expected readers of the future would be appalled that, back in 1986, the CEO of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million as he ran the business into the ground. I expected them to gape in wonder at the story of Howie Rubin, the Salomon mortgage bond trader, who had moved to Merrill Lynch and promptly lost $250 million. I expected them to be shocked that, once upon a time on Wall Street, the CEOs had only the vaguest idea of the complicated risks their bond traders were running.
And that's pretty much how I imagined it; what I never imagined is that the future reader might look back on any of this, or on my own peculiar experience, and say, "How quaint." How innocent. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last for two full decades longer, or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary economic life would swell to a difference in kind. That a single bond trader might be paid $47 million a year and feel cheated. That the mortgage bond market invented on the Salomon Brothers trading floor, which seemed like such a good idea at the time, would lead to the most purely financial economic disaster in history. That exactly twenty years after Howie Rubin became a scandalous household name for losing $250 million, another mortgage bond trader named Howie, inside Morgan Stanley, would lose $9 billion on a single mortgage trade, and remain essentially unknown, without anyone beyond a small circle inside Morgan Stanley ever hearing about what he'd done, or why.
...In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces?
At some point, I gave up waiting. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, sufficiently great to sink the system.
More (#4) from The Big Short:
...[Mike Barry] wasn't wasting a lot of time worrying about why these supposedly shrewd investment bankers were willing to sell him insurance so cheaply. He was worried that others would catch on and the opportunity would vanish. "I would play dumb quite a bit," he said, "making it seem to them like I don't really know what I'm doing. 'How do you do this again?' 'Oh, where can I find that information?' Or, 'Really?'--when they tell me something really obvious." It was one of the fringe benefits of living for
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know: