From Harford's The Undercover Economist Strikes Back:
"Are you sure there isn't a much simpler solution to [economic growth] that you're missing?" The world is full of people who will tell you that there is. Tie your currency to gold! Always balance your budget! Protect manufacturing! Eliminate red tape! That kind of thing. You can safely ignore these people. Anyone who insists that running a modern economy is a matter of plain common sense frankly doesn’t understand much about running a modern economy.
And:
Bhutan. The Himalayan mountain kingdom provides the clearest example I can think of that there’s a difference between collecting statistics about happiness and making people happy. Bhutan is venerated by the more naïve among happiness wonks... who seem unaware of its rather dubious human rights record. According to Human Rights Watch, many members of Bhutan’s Nepali minority have been stripped of their citizenship and harassed out of the country. Although, of course, if the Nepalis were miserable to start with, ethnic cleansing, driving them out of the country, might indeed raise average happiness levels—in Bhutan itself, if not in refugee camps across the border in Nepal.
Funnily enough, the “gross national happiness” thing appears to have emerged as a defensive reflex—the then king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, announced that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product” when pressed on the question of Bhutan’s lack of economic progress in an interview with the Financial Times in 1986. His majesty isn’t the last person to turn to alternative measures of progress for consolation. When Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France he commissioned three renowned economists, Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel laureate), Amartya Sen (another Nobel laureate) and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, to contemplate alternatives to GDP. One possible reason for President Sarkozy’s enthusiasm was surely that the French spend most of their time not working, and this lowers France’s GDP. The country is likely to look better on most alternative indices. It’s not unreasonable to look at those alternatives, but let’s not kid ourselves: politicians are always on the lookout for statistical measures that reflect well on them.
More (#2) from The Undercover Economist Strikes Back:
......forecasting is not the economist’s main job. Unfortunately, economists have managed to stereotype themselves as bad forecasters because investment firms have realized that they can get some publicity by sending someone called a “chief economist” to the studios of Bloomberg Television, where said chief economist will opine about whether shares will go up or down. Most academic economists don’t even try to forecast, because they know that forecasts of complex systems are extremely difficult — if anyth
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: