LESSWRONG
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All of university_student's Comments + Replies

Open Thread: June 2010
university_student10

Do you mean that he actively seeks to encourage young people to try and slow Moore's Law, or that this is an unintentional consequence of his writings on AI risk topics?

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2JoshuaZ
I'm pretty sure that Roko means the second. If this idea got mentioned to Eliezer I'm pretty sure he'd point out the minimal impact that any single human can have on this, even before one gets to whether or not it is a good idea.
Open Thread: June 2010
university_student40

(Wherein I seek advice on what may be a fairly important decision.)

Within the next week, I'll most likely be offered a summer job where the primary project will be porting a space weather modeling group's simulation code to the GPU platform. (This would enable them to start doing predictive modeling of solar storms, which are increasingly having a big economic impact via disruptions to power grids and communications systems.) If I don't take the job, the group's efforts to take advantage of GPU computing will likely be delayed by another year or two. Th... (read more)

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7orthonormal
The amount you could slow down Moore's Law by any strategy is minuscule compared to the amount you can contribute to FAI progress if you choose. It's like feeling guilty over not recycling a paper cup, when you're planning to become a lobbyist for an environmentalist group later.
-8rwallace
4Roko
Personally trying to slow Moore's Law down is the kind of foolishness that Eliezer seems to inspire in young people...
5Kaj_Sotala
I would say that there seem to be a lot of companies that are in one way or another trying to advance Moore's law. For as long as it doesn't seem like the one you're working on has a truly revolutionary advantage as compared to the other companies, just taking the money but donating a large portion of it to existential risk reduction is probably an okay move. (Full disclosure: I'm an SIAI Visiting Fellow so they're paying my upkeep right now.)
7NaN
Uninformed opinion: space weather modelling doesn't seem like a huge market, especially when you compare it to the truly massive gaming market. I doubt the increase in demand would be significant, and if what you're worried about is rate of growth, it seems like delaying it a couple of years would be wholly insignificant.
The Last Days of the Singularity Challenge
university_student310

Although I don't have much cash to spare, I've cut back in some personal budget areas for the next few months and donated $500 to the 'Hard Takeoff Paper' project. I have two hopes: that the donation (and matching funds) will make a non-negligible difference in the number of AI researchers taking the possibility of hard takeoff seriously, and that publicly posting this will nudge at least a few people into re-evaluating their willingness to donate to SIAI.

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5John_Maxwell
That's awesome. I'm also a college student, but I can't think of any personal budget areas cut back on. I think a donation to SIAI would probably result in a commiserate increase in my eventual student loans. Can someone from SIAI tell me if they'd be borrowing money at student-loan interest rates if they had the opportunity? If not, I'll probably wait until I'm out of college and I have my loans paid off to donate.