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It’s early in the morning, and sadly 1:29pm. After spending some time looking at things and picking them up and walking up the stairs and down the stairs and considering questions like “what should I…”, which my brain apparently considered objects of art more than of imperative, I inched into...
Why is the advent of AI a big deal, and more worrying than previous advents? I think there are actually two interesting things going on, that make AI importantly different to previous technologies. I. Industrializing the cognitive labor supply I.a. Scale: the incoming ocean of new cognitive labor Until lately,...
We recently (finally!) got the results of the 2024 survey out. The paper is here, but it’s pretty long, so I’ll tell you the most interesting bits (according to me). But first, quick background: this was the fourth run of the same survey since 2016. We wrote to everyone we...
Advanced AI is basically the embodiment of immigration as envisioned in the conservative nightmare: 1. We are letting a bunch of new agents into our society 2. They don’t clearly share our values and we suspect a society full of them would be awful by our lights 3. But we...
People constantly talk as if ‘AI’ is a single future you can accept or fight. But the whole point of AI is that it’s an intelligence that you build. And there are myriad possible artificial intelligences one might conceivably build. A mind is a complex thing. Perhaps the biggest question...
AI is not very regulated. For instance, Max Tegmark notes that AI is less regulated than a sandwich shop in the US. This seems kind of wild for an industry where most relevant scientists think there is a serious chance of it destroying humanity. Even for something that occasionally encourages...
Advanced AI is generally expected to have some very high variance outcomes—it might herald everything good, it might destroy humanity. For instance, here are 800 random AI researchers’ expectations about how good the future is, lined up: From my 2023 survey As you can see, most AI researchers put a...