Eh. It's not unusual for the government to get experts together and ask in a general sense for worst-case scenario possible disaster situations, with the intent of then working to reduce those risks.

Open-ended brainstorming about some potential AI risk scenarios that could happen in the near future might be useful, if the overall goal of MIRI is to reduce AI risk.

Hmm. It's hard to say. I think the SNCC sit-ins were a vitally important part of the civil rights moment, though, they played a big role in drawing attention to and eventually ending segregation in a lot of places, and high school students did or helped in a significant percentage of them. High school students played a significant role in the SNCC organization in general.

I mean, it's hard to say what the overall effect is; that's like saying "would the civil rights movement has been as effective if there had been a third less protests". It seems likely that it would not have been, but it's hard to say with any certainty or to quantify it.

High school students played a significant role in some SNCC civil rights protests, such as sit-ins at lunch counters. In many cities the sit-ins were actually ran and done entirely by high school students. One well known example is that a number of students from Dudly high school participated in the famous Greensboro sit-in.

Edit: They're only just mentioned in this source, but they were there.

http://www.sitinmovement.org/history/greensboro-chronology.asp

I'm not claiming that high school students played as big a role as college students, but their impact wasn't zero, either.

I personally put weight on this type of scenario, namely, that progress might stall and then resume once some complementary supply-side and demand-side innovations have been made and other economic progress has happened to support more investment in the area.

Yeah, so do I.

I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference in terms of long run predictions, though. Let's say that for the next 10 years, we cut the amount of research we are doing into computers in half in percentage terms (so instead of putting X% of our global GDP into computer research every year, we put X/2%.) Let's say we take that and instead invest it in other forms of growth (other technologies, biotech, transhuman technologies, science, infrastructure, or even bringing the third world out of poverty and into education, ect) and maintain the current rate of global growth. Let's further say that the combination of global GDP growth and science and technology growth is roughly 7% a year, so that the global economy is doubled every 10 years in how much it can devote to research. And then at the end of that period, computer research goes back up to X%.

In that case, that 10 year long research slowdown would put us getting to where we "should" have been in computer science in 2044 now happening in 2045 instead; if that's the point we need to be at to get a singularity started, then that 10 years long research slowdown would only delay the singularity by about 1.75 years. (edit: math error corrected)

And not only that, after a 10 year slowdown into computer science research, I would expect computers to become the new "low hanging fruit", and we might end up devoting even more resources to it at that point, perhaps eliminating the time loss all together.

Basically, so long as exponential growth continues at all, in technological and economic terms in general, I don't think the kind of slowdown we're talking about would have a huge long-term effect on the general trajectory of progress.

I don't think that's true. Youth activists have often been very influential in changing the political direction of the country, several times in our history. High school and college aged activists have played a big role in changing policy on issues like civil rights, the Vietnam war, gay rights, and so on. They've also played a significant role in recent elections.

To an extent, high school-aged and college aged activists can often do more and have a bigger impact then older people, simply because they have more free time, have less responsibilities, and tend to be less risk-averse about risks like "being arrested". They also tend to be less tied to the status quo and more able to imagine a world that is significantly better then the current one, which can be important.

Something to puzzle over is the fact we have seen computational grunt grow exponentially for decade upon decade yet economic growth has been stable over the same period.

Economic growth itself is an exponential function. "The economy grows 3% every year" is exponential growth, not linear growth. I would say that it's only happened because of exponential technological progress; we never had that level of exponential growth until the industrial revolution. And I would say that most of the economic growth the first world has had over the past 20 years has come from recent technological advancement, mostly being the twin communication and computer revolutions we've had (PC's, cell phones, internet, smart phones, and some smaller examples of both).

Fair enough. In that case, though, I think you then have to consider the possibilities that other forms of technological development might themselves lead to a singularity of a different type (biotech, for example, seems quite possible), or might at least lower the barrier and make it easier for someone to improve computer technology with fewer resources, making it profitable for people to continue to improve computers even with a lower payoff in forms of consumer demand.

That is; if there's only X level of consumer demand for "better computers" by whatever definition you want to use, that might not be enough to fund enough research to accomplish that right now, but in an exponentially growing economy with exponentially growing technology and resources, it should cost far less to make that advance in a few years.

So long as the whole economy and the whole mass of human science and technology continues to grow exponentially, I would expect computers to continue to improve exponentially; they may become a "lagging indicator" of progress instead of the cutting edge if other areas get a larger fraction of the research capital investment, but even that should be enough to maintain some kind of exponential curve.