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My suggested alternative is prioritizing problems appropriately. This "Open Philantropy Project" is a guy taking money that used to be for curing malaria (and I
by rspeer 10y ago
My suggested alternative is prioritizing problems appropriately. This "Open Philantropy Project" is a guy taking money that used to be for curing malaria (and I respect what he used to do on that front!) and giving it to his roommate.
You can do better solving a terrible problem that does exist than solving a sci-fi problem that doesn't exist.
I know it's usually uncouth to compare different charities like this, but that's exactly what Effective Altruism was supposed to be about, and this cause directly competes with curing malaria.
If more than zero AGI technology starts existing, we can re-prioritize. It makes no sense for a field to go from not existing to superhuman performance without anyone noticing.
- nbouscal 10y agoNobody thinks we won't notice when it's more imminent; the concern is that capability research has always been faster than safety research. If we wait until it's imminent, we risk having no chance of catching up in time. Why not devote a tiny fraction of our funding to starting the research now, so we can be ready on time? Worst case we're early... which in this context is a lot better than being late.
- Avshalom 10y agoWorst case the safety research ends up causing the AGI to be actively antagonistic. Slightly less worst case it never leads anywhere and AGI ends up turning us into mouthless slugs anyway. Third-ish worst it makes AGI suborn-able and whoever gets to it first becomes our god-king. many many worse situations later we get to: It never leads anywhere but AGI never happens anyway and it just ends up being welfare-for-future-phobes instead of curing debilitating disease or buying every homeless person in a city a new pair of shoes or whatever. "we're early" is in fact the best possible scenario, actually it's basically the only positive scenario.