I'm not convinced that slowing economic growth would result in FAI developing faster than UFAI and I think your main point of leverage for getting an advantage lies elsewhere (explained). The key is obviously the proportion between the two, not just slowing down the one or speeding up the other, so I suggest a brainstorm to consider all of the possible ways that slow economic growth could also slow FAI. For one thought: do non-profit organizations do disproportionately poorly during recessions?
The major point of leverage, I think, is people, not the economy. How that would work:
Selfish people have a goal that divides them. If your goal is to be an AI trillionaire, you have to start your own AI company. If your goal is to save the world from AI, your goal benefits if you co-operate with like-minded people as much as possible. The aspiring trillionaire's goals will not be furthered by co-operating with competitors, and the world-saver's goals will not be furthered by competing with potential allies. This means that even if UFAI workers outnumber FAI workers 10 to 1, it's possible for the FAI effort to unite that 10% and conquer the 90% with sheer numbers, assuming that the 90% is divided into fragments smaller than 10% each.
An organization made up of altruistic people might be stronger and more efficient than an organization made up of selfish people. If FAI workers are more honest or less greedy, this could yield practical benefits like a reduction in efficiency-draining office politics games, a lower risk of being stolen from or betrayed by those within the organization, and being able to put more money toward research because paychecks may not need to be as large. Also, people who are passionate about their goal derive meaning from their work. They might work harder or have more moments of creative inspiration than people who are working simply to get more money.
The FAI movement is likely to attract people who are forward-thinking and/or more sensible, realistic or rational. These people may be more likely to succeed at what they do than those attracted to UFAI projects.
People look down on those who hurt others for profit. Right now, the average person probably does not know about the UFAI risk and how important it is that people should not work on such projects. UFAI is a problem that would affect everyone, so it's likely that the average person will eventually take interest in it and shun those who work on UFAI. If they're accurately informed about which projects should be considered UFAI, I think it would seriously deter AI workers from choosing UFAI jobs.
It has been said by people knowledgeable about geniuses that they typically don't prioritize money as highly as others. Unfortunately, there isn't enough solid research on the gifted population (let alone geniuses) but if it's true that money is not the most important thing to a genius, you may find that a disproportionate number of geniuses would prioritize working on FAI over taking the biggest possible paycheck.
Unlike the economy, all of these are things that MIRI can take action on. If the FAI movement can take advantage of any of these to get more workers, more good minds, or more good people than the UFAI projects, I want to see it happen.
Uhm, it is not that simple. Perhaps selfish people cooperate less, but among altruistic people often the price for cooperation is worshiping the same applause lights. Selfish people optimize for money or power, altruistic people often optimize for status in altruistic community. Selfish people may be more agenty, simply because they know that if they don't work for their selfish benefits, no one else will. Altruistic people often talk about what others should do, what the government should do, etc. Altruistic people collect around different causes, they co...
I was raised as a good and proper child of the Enlightenment who grew up reading The Incredible Bread Machine and A Step Farther Out, taking for granted that economic growth was a huge in-practice component of human utility (plausibly the majority component if you asked yourself what was the major difference between the 21st century and the Middle Ages) and that the "Small is Beautiful" / "Sustainable Growth" crowds were living in impossible dreamworlds that rejected quantitative thinking in favor of protesting against nuclear power plants.
And so far as I know, such a view would still be an excellent first-order approximation if we were going to carry on into the future by steady technological progress: Economic growth = good.
But suppose my main-line projection is correct and the "probability of an OK outcome" / "astronomical benefit" scenario essentially comes down to a race between Friendly AI and unFriendly AI. So far as I can tell, the most likely reason we wouldn't get Friendly AI is the total serial research depth required to develop and implement a strong-enough theory of stable self-improvement with a possible side order of failing to solve the goal transfer problem. Relative to UFAI, FAI work seems like it would be mathier and more insight-based, where UFAI can more easily cobble together lots of pieces. This means that UFAI parallelizes better than FAI. UFAI also probably benefits from brute-force computing power more than FAI. Both of these imply, so far as I can tell, that slower economic growth is good news for FAI; it lengthens the deadline to UFAI and gives us more time to get the job done. I have sometimes thought half-jokingly and half-anthropically that I ought to try to find investment scenarios based on a continued Great Stagnation and an indefinite Great Recession where the whole developed world slowly goes the way of Spain, because these scenarios would account for a majority of surviving Everett branches.
Roughly, it seems to me like higher economic growth speeds up time and this is not a good thing. I wish I had more time, not less, in which to work on FAI; I would prefer worlds in which this research can proceed at a relatively less frenzied pace and still succeed, worlds in which the default timelines to UFAI terminate in 2055 instead of 2035.
I have various cute ideas for things which could improve a country's economic growth. The chance of these things eventuating seems small, the chance that they eventuate because I write about them seems tiny, and they would be good mainly for entertainment, links from econblogs, and possibly marginally impressing some people. I was thinking about collecting them into a post called "The Nice Things We Can't Have" based on my prediction that various forces will block, e.g., the all-robotic all-electric car grid which could be relatively trivial to build using present-day technology - that we are too far into the Great Stagnation and the bureaucratic maturity of developed countries to get nice things anymore. However I have a certain inhibition against trying things that would make everyone worse off if they actually succeeded, even if the probability of success is tiny. And it's not completely impossible that we'll see some actual experiments with small nation-states in the next few decades, that some of the people doing those experiments will have read Less Wrong, or that successful experiments will spread (if the US ever legalizes robotic cars or tries a city with an all-robotic fleet, it'll be because China or Dubai or New Zealand tried it first). Other EAs (effective altruists) care much more strongly about economic growth directly and are trying to increase it directly. (An extremely understandable position which would typically be taken by good and virtuous people).
Throwing out remote, contrived scenarios where something accomplishes the opposite of its intended effect is cheap and meaningless (vide "But what if MIRI accomplishes the opposite of its purpose due to blah") but in this case I feel impelled to ask because my mainline visualization has the Great Stagnation being good news. I certainly wish that economic growth would align with FAI because then my virtues would align and my optimal policies have fewer downsides, but I am also aware that wishing does not make something more likely (or less likely) in reality.
To head off some obvious types of bad reasoning in advance: Yes, higher economic growth frees up resources for effective altruism and thereby increases resources going to FAI, but it also increases resources going to the AI field generally which is mostly pushing UFAI, and the problem arguendo is that UFAI parallelizes more easily.
Similarly, a planet with generally higher economic growth might develop intelligence amplification (IA) technology earlier. But this general advancement of science will also accelerate UFAI, so you might just be decreasing the amount of FAI research that gets done before IA and decreasing the amount of time available after IA before UFAI. Similarly to the more mundane idea that increased economic growth will produce more geniuses some of whom can work on FAI; there'd also be more geniuses working on UFAI, and UFAI probably parallelizes better and requires less serial depth of research. If you concentrate on some single good effect on blah and neglect the corresponding speeding-up of UFAI timelines, you will obviously be able to generate spurious arguments for economic growth having a positive effect on the balance.
So I pose the question: "Is slower economic growth good news?" or "Do you think Everett branches with 4% or 1% RGDP growth have a better chance of getting FAI before UFAI"? So far as I can tell, my current mainline guesses imply, "Everett branches with slower economic growth contain more serial depth of cognitive causality and have more effective time left on the clock before they end due to UFAI, which favors FAI research over UFAI research".
This seems like a good parameter to have a grasp on for any number of reasons, and I can't recall it previously being debated in the x-risk / EA community.
EDIT: To be clear, the idea is not that trying to deliberately slow world economic growth would be a maximally effective use of EA resources and better than current top targets; this seems likely to have very small marginal effects, and many such courses are risky. The question is whether a good and virtuous person ought to avoid, or alternatively seize, any opportunities which come their way to help out on world economic growth.
EDIT 2: Carl Shulman's opinion can be found on the Facebook discussion here.