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one very striking thing about people in the mid 20th century is a lot of them were convinced that overpopulation was the biggest problem. clearly in retrospect this was extremely incorrect. what lessons can we learn from this so that we don't make similar mistakes?
The fact that a problem was to a degree addressed does not mean it wasn't real. When "The Population Bomb" came out in 1968, world population was 3.5 billion. Now it's 8.3. If 1968 growth rates had persisted, it would be 12 billion. China would have 3.8 billion, instead of 1.4. India would have 450,000,000 more people than they do now. Global warming would be worse. There would be more wars, and more desperate migrants. I wouldn't say the alarm was misplaced.
There was plenty of evidence by the 1950s since birth rates fell below the replacement level in many European countries during the Interbellum, and the process clearly started before the Great Depression. But they recovered in the late 1930s for reasons still arguably unclear, and then skyrocketed during the Baby Boom, so no one was interested in analyzing them. Even now, AFAIK, the academic interest to that phenomenon is concentrated in topics having some application right now, such as which pro-natalist measures worked well, and not the fundamental questions
6Daniel Kokotajlo
The declining birth rates aren't the main savior, it was the food production and transportation improvements.
So the analogy to AI would be: Alignment research makes enough progress fast enough (perhaps at AI companies partially motivated by mundane alignment concerns like trying to tamp down on sycophancy and reward hacking) that Claude Mythos 3 is aligned enough to trust with alignment research, and so when Anthropic hands off everything to Claude Mythos 3, it's able to quickly solve the rest of the problems and align its successor, and so on to ASI. In retrospect there are some heroes like Borlaug, but also just a lot of normal science research that happened to go fast enough to work.