This post is a response to Tyler Cowen’s A household expenditure approach to measuring AI progress, discussing how AI will affect productivity over the next 5 years (i.e. until the summer of 2030) via the effects on typical household expenses.
I mostly predict that the effects will be larger than Tyler expects, but the 5 year time period that he chose is short enough that the effects won’t be obvious until near then end of that period.
Continue ReadingI’ve been shifting my investments to more AI-focused bets.
Here’s an overview of my larger positions, in descending order of how eager I am to recommend further purchases now:
Short positions:
[This is not at all a complete list, as I have smaller positions in something like 150 other companies.]
AI stocks are likely to form a bubble someday, but I’m guessing the peak of that bubble is more than a year away.
I still have some concerns about tariff-related damage causing some declines sometime this year. I’m optimistic that the courts will strike down the per-country tariffs this fall. It shouldn’t take long for the country to recover from the tariff damage once the tariffs have been removed.
Beware that even in a strong bull market, there will be periodic scares, such as January’s DeepSeek-trigger panic, that cause sharp drops in leading stocks. AI-related stocks had a big rally in June, and are likely to consolidate for a while before the next such rally.
My recent post Are Intelligent Agents More Ethical? criticized some brief remarks by Scott Sumner.
Sumner made a more sophisticated version of those claims in the second half of this Doom Debate.
His position sounds a lot like the moral realism that has caused many people to be complacent about AI taking over the world. But he’s actually using an analysis that follows Richard Rorty’s rejection of standard moral realism. Which seems to mean there’s a weak sense in which morality can be true, but in a socially and historically contingent fashion. If I understand that correctly, I approve.
Continue ReadingIn key centers of power, there’s an important shift happening now of the Overton Window for AI dangers.
The first sign is a surprising reaction to the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
Continue ReadingThis post is a response to a claim by Scott Sumner in his conversation at LessOnline with Nate Soares, about how ethical we should expect AI’s to be.
Sumner sees a pattern of increasing intelligence causing agents to be increasingly ethical, and sounds cautiously optimistic that such a trend will continue when AIs become smarter than humans. I’m guessing that he’s mainly extrapolating from human trends, but extrapolating from trends in the animal kingdom should produce similar results (e.g. the cooperation between single-celled organisms that gave the world multicellular organisms).
I doubt that my response is very novel, but I haven’t seen clear enough articulation of the ideas in this post.
Continue ReadingAI 2027 portrays two well thought out scenarios for how AI is likely to impact the world toward the end of this decade.
I expect those scenarios will prove to be moderately wrong, but close enough to be scary. I also expect that few people will manage to make forecasts that are significantly more accurate.
Here are some scattered thoughts that came to mind while I read AI 2027.
The authors are fairly pessimistic. I see four key areas where their assumptions seem to lead them to see more danger than do more mainstream experts. They see:
I expect that the authors are being appropriately concerned on about two of these assumptions, and a bit too pessimistic on the others. I’m hesitant to bet on which assumptions belong in which category.
They don’t focus much on justifying those assumptions. That’s likely wise, since prior debates on those topics have not been very productive. Instead, they’ve focused more on when various changes will happen.
This post will focus on aspects of the first two assumptions for which I expect further analysis to be relatively valuable.
Continue ReadingI have an idea for a fairly cheap strategy for slightly reducing the risk of catastrophic harm from AI.
This post was inspired by a recent LessWrong post How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years.
That post describes a scenario in which most humans die, mainly because an AI that is first to become powerful enough to attempt world conquest sees risks that other AIs, imperfectly aligned with it, will cause danger soon. This creates a perceived need to engage in a few violent pivotal processes, rather than using a combination of persuasion and negotiation.
The specific scenario in that post seems fairly unrealistic. I see less than a 5% chance that a leading AI within the next 10 years will want to attempt that kind of world conquest. But it’s close enough to being realistic that I want to analyze a class of scenarios that are similar to it.
I want to nudge AIs in the direction of being more willing to cooperate with each other, in order to reduce the risk of such a conquest. Specifically, I want them to negotiate a peaceful outcome instead of using pre-emptive destruction.
Continue ReadingI’ve been creating prediction markets on Manifold in order to better predict AI strategies. Please trade them.
If I get a bit more trading in these markets, I will create more AI-related markets. Stay tuned here, or follow me on Manifold.
In 2015, I posted some investing advice for people who only spend a few hours per year on investing.
I intended to review it after five years, but a pandemic distracted me. It looks like this whole decade will end up being too busy for me to write everything that I want to write. But I’ve become able to write faster recently, maybe due to the feeling of urgency about AI transforming the world soon. So I’m getting a few old ideas for blog posts off of my to-do list, in order to be able to devote most of my attention to AI when the world becomes wild.
My advice worked poorly enough that I’m too discouraged to quantify the results.
Continue ReadingAI may produce a windfall surge in government revenues in 5 to 10 years. I want governments to spending a small fraction of that windfall on retroactively rewarding entities in proportion to how they have contributed to medical advances, measured by lives saved and suffering avoided.
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