@Jabaluck
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Took me under 5 minutes to turn a normal, smart 13-year-old against the minimum wage.View quoted post on X
Contrary to almost everyone, the textbook argument IS intuitive.
It's just emotionally unappealing.
Two things I’ve been thinking about regarding AI:View quoted post on X
• People often highlight the risks involved in AI, which are surely very real. I’m struck, however, by how hard it is to understand the contours of the positive scenario. There are easy-to-perceive and frequently invoked elements of a positive vision — more diseases cured, more material abundance, etc. — which sound great, but these are by themselves just ingredients. I’m curious what the larger equilibrium is supposed to look like. Do people work? If so, why? What is their marginal contribution? If not, how are resources allocated? What is scarce? What is the ratio between humans and AIs? Are humans in control, whatever that means? One sometimes hears the Culture novels invoked as one scenario, but I’m not sure they depict a desirable outcome. (AI runs everything and humans compete in games? Iain Banks himself said that the humans in the Culture are “somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”) There is Richard Brautigan’s famous poem, but do we want to be “returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”? (Isn’t that rewinding Genesis?) We could say that it was hard to imagine the world of 1900 from the vantage point of 1700, and that’s assuredly true. But nobody in 1700 was trying to recast humanity itself within a couple of years — things necessarily unfolded slowly and by increments, and therefore with the possibility for error correction. Given how rapid the rate of progress in AI may be, it feels strange for the upside case to be so opaque.
• There is increasing discussion of whether AIs are conscious or how we would know whether they are, with conclusions there often assumed to be relevant to matters of moral worth. At first blush, this seems a rather arcane, benign, or even absurd issue. (Remember the response to Blake Lemoine’s fears.) Setting aside the terms of the debate itself, or the relevant demarcation criteria, it seems to me a quite high-stakes question, for an affirmative answer — that is, granting moral worth to AIs — would presumably mean that the aggregate worth of AIs would soon outweigh that of humans in any utilitarian calculus. The AIs will be exceptionally wise and intelligent, and vastly more numerous (especially once one considers the imminent future and the AIs not yet born). As such, even epsilon of moral worth will multiply to a lot once one considers the quadrillions that could soon exist. (This is effectively a distributed version of the Nozick’s utility monster.) If this conclusion is unpalatable, I think one of three propositions needs to be rejected: the premise AIs can have moral worth; utilitarianism itself; or the belief that there is even a possibility that they will be far more numerous than humans.
With both of these matters (contours of future society; AI moral worth), there is the possibility of dramatic change. Today, people argue about datacenters. I’m curious how popular support for AI will evolve as more people come to understand these medium-term questions and the relevant stakes. What is the vision for AI that most people would be excited about?
I've gone back and forth on how transformative AI will be.View quoted post on X
But the more I look at the underlying economic data, the more I'm convinced we're not getting either utopia or doom any time soon.
Consider:
-GDP growth is normal, and projected to remain normal.
-The stock market looks pretty normal. It's done well in recent years, but there's no indication that we're getting massive increases in societal wealth due to rapid productivity gains.
-Economic theory says transformative AI should massively increase interest rates. If massive growth is coming soon, people will want to borrow against future wealth. If we're all going to die, no one will lend. In both cases, interest rates go up. Yet interest rates look... completely historically normal.
-There is nothing in the jobs data to indicate widespread displacement of workers, not even a major shift in the workforce, much less "the end of work."
Practically all data is pointing in the same direction. AI looks like a normal technology.
I think that those who said that the bottleneck to changing the world wasn't book-type intelligence are looking like they were correct. We keep hearing that AI bulls have gotten so much right, but although they've been correct on the pace of technological development, we're yet to see the real-world impacts they promised.
It's time to start thinking carefully about why that is. richardhanania.com/p/ai-is-lookin…
AI progress per dollar of investment shows diminishing returns (as we've all known, right?) This is using METR's estimate of acceleration at Anthropic. That acceleration isn't enough to overcome the diminishing returns. by @sebkrierView quoted post on X
If Dario had just said that he vibes more with Stop TB because saving adults feels better knowing he’s helping people who are already in rich, complex lives, no one would’ve objected. It was the putting numbers to arbitrary moral weights that rankled people. But what EA points out, which to people with a mathematical way of viewing the world may seem like it doesn’t need saying, is that if you donate to a charity in the US that saves 1 life for every $1 million, that means you vibe with saving an American life 250x as much as saving a life from Malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Or if you donate to the opera, that means that improving opera quality by 5% gives you about the same good vibes as saving 180 lives from malaria. Which must be true for some people—at least in economics, we have the idea of revealed preference that says this must be true for opera donors. But most people’s vibes or moral weights look absolutely galling when phrased that way, far far more galling than Dario’s comparison between the neediest adults and the neediest children sounds. Hence, I think resisting mathematizing things in this way allows people to dodge the guilt from seeing their moral weights reflected back to them.View quoted post on X
x.com/TaylorLorenz/s…
