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I think that I predict the opposite (conditional on what exactly is being predicted).
What exactly would count as a GPT-3 moment for fusion? How about an experiment demonstrating reactor-like conditions? This is roughly equivalent to what I referred to as 'getting fusion' in my book review.
My prediction is that, after Commonwealth Fusion Systems gets Q > 5 on SPARC, they will continue to supply or plan to supply HTS tape to at least 3 other fusion startups.
I agree that this is plausibly a real important difference, but I do not think that it is obvious.
The most recent augmentative technological change was the industrial revolution. It has reshaped virtually every every activity. It allowed for the majority of the population to not work in agriculture for the first time since the agricultural revolution.
The industrial revolution centered on energy. Having much cheaper, much more abundant energy allowed humans to use that energy for all sorts of things.
If fusion ends up being similar in cost to existing electricity production, it will be a substitutional technology. This is the thing that we are working on now (well, also making it work at all). People who work in fusion focus on this because it is the reasonable near/medium term projection. If fusion ends up being substantially cheaper, it will be an augmentative technology. It is not at all clear that this will happen, because we can't know how the costs will change between the first and thousandth fusion power plant.
Notably, we don't know if foom is going to be a thing either.
The narrative around the technology is at least as important as what has happened in the technology itself. The fusion community could frequently talk about how incredible the industrial revolution was, and how it powered Britain to global dominance for two centuries. A new source of energy might do the same thing ! But this is more hype than we feel we ought to offer, and the community's goal is not to create a dominant superpower.
Even if foom is going to happen, things would look very different if the leaders credibly committed to helping others foom if they are first. I don't know if this would be better or worse from a existential risk perspective, but it would change the nature of the race a lot.
A few more thoughts on Ord's paper:
Despite the similarities, I think that there is some difference between Ord's notion of hyperbolation and what I'm describing here. In most of his examples, the extra dimension is given. In the examples I'm thinking of, what the extra dimension ought to be is not known beforehand.
There is a situation in which hyperbolation is rigorously defined: analytic continuation. This takes smooth functions defined on the real axis and extends them into the complex plane. The first two examples Ord gives in his paper are examples of analytic continuation, so his intuition that these are the simplest hyperbolations is correct.
More generally, solving a PDE from boundary conditions could be considered to be a kind of hyperbolation, although the result can be quite different depending on which PDE you're solving. This feels like substantially less of a new ability than e.g. inventing language.
Climate change is not the only field to have defined words for specific probability ranges. The intelligence community has looked into this as well. They're called words of estimative probability.
A lot of the emphasis is on climate change, which has become partisan than other environmental issues. But other environmental issues have become partisan as well. Here's some data from a paper from 2013 by D.L. Guber, "A cooling climate for change? Party polarization and the politics of global warming."
The poll you linked indicates that Republicans in the Mountain West are more concerned with the environmental than Republicans in the rest of the country. There is a 27 p.p. partisan gap on the energy vs environment question (p. 17) - much less than the 55 p.p. partisan gap for the country as a whole. The partisan gap for whether "a public official's position on conservation issues will be an important factor in determining their support" is 22 p.p. (p. 13), with clear majorities in both parties. Climate change is somewhat less of a concern than other issues, which I would guess is because it is more partisan, but not by that much (p. 21).
In the Mountain West, it looks like there is some partisanship for environmental issues, but only the amount we would expect for a generic issue in the US, or for environmentalism in another country. This is consistent with environmentalism being extremely partisan on average over the entire country. The Mountain West is less than a tenth of the country's population and has an unusually impressive natural environment.
Environmentalism started to became partisan around 1990. Nixon & Reagan both spoke of the environment in these terms.
I think that this is a coincidence. Japan has low partisanship for environmentalism and has less nuclear power than most developed countries (along with low overall partisanship). The association would be between three things: (1) low partisanship for environmentalism, (2) high overall partisanship, and (3) lots of nuclear power plants. There aren't enough countries to do this kind of correlation.
From the introduction to the last post in this sequence:
Environmentalists were not the only people making significant decisions here. Fossil fuel companies and conservative think tanks also had agency in the debate – and their choices were more blameworthy than the choices of environmentalists. Politicians choose who they do and do not want to ally with. My focus is on the environmental movement itself, because that is similar to what other activist groups are able to control.
The motivation for this report was to learn what the AI safety movement should do to keep from becoming partisan. 'Meta doesn't lobby the government' isn't an action the AI safety movement can take.
I would also make the same prediction for Q > 10. Or when CFS first sells electricity to the grid. These will be farther into the future, but I do not think that this culture will have changed by then.