Seems like a pretty similar thesis to this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty

I expect that within a year or two, there will be an enormous surge of people who start paying a lot of attention to AI.

This could mean that the distribution of who has influence will change a lot. (And this might be right when influence matters the most?)

I claim: your effect on AI discourse post-surge will be primarily shaped by how well you or your organization absorbs this boom.

The areas I've thought the most about this phenomena are:

1. AI safety university groups
2. Non agi lab research organizations
3. AI bloggers / X influencers

(But this applies to anyone who's impact primarily comes from spreading their ideas, which is a lot of people.)

I think that you or your organization should have an explicit plan to absorb this surge.

Unresolved questions:

• How much will explicitly planning for this actually help absorb the surge? (Regardless, it seems worth a google doc and a pomodoro session to at least see if there's anything you can do to prepare)
• How important is it to make every-day people informed about AI risks? Or is influence so long-tailed that it only really makes sense to build reputation with highly influential people? (Though- note that this surge isn't just for every day people — I expect that the entire memetic landscape will be totally reformed after AI becomes clearly a big deal, and that applies to big shot government officials along with your average joe)

I'd be curious to see how this looked with Covid: Did all the covid pandemic experts get an even 10x multiplier in following? Or were a handful of Covid experts highly elevated, while the rest didn't really see much of an increase in followers? If the latter, what did those experts do to get everyone to pay attention to them?

Securing AI labs against powerful adversaries seems like something that almost everyone can get on board with. Also, posing it as a national security threat seems to be a good framing.

Some more links from the philosophical side that I've found myself returning to a lot:

• The fun theory sequence
• Three worlds collide

(Lately, it's seemed to me that focusing my time on nearer-term / early but post-AGI futures seems better than spending my time discussing ideas like these on the margin, but this may be more of a fact about myself than it is about other people, I'm not sure.)

Ah, sorry- I meant it's genuinely unclear how to classify this.

Once again, props to OAI for putting this in the system card. Also, once again, it's difficult to sort out "we told it to do a bad thing and it obeyed" from "we told it to do a good thing and it did a bad thing instead," but these experiments do seem like important information.

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

- Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

The fatebook embedding is so cool! I especially appreciate that it hides other people's predictions before you make your own. From what I can tell this isn't done on Lesswrong right now and I think that would be really cool to see!

(I may be mistaken on how this works, but from what I can tell they look like this on LW right now)

Great post, seems like a handy thing to remember.