Linch's Shortform

Linch

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Shower thought I had:

One man's overhang is another man's differential technological development, and it's pretty hard in practice to separate the two.

For example I've noted before that I suspect current levels of AI persuasion/manipulation capabilities has lagged behind AI capabilities overall (this is nonobvious and I don't defend it here but my impression from talking to empirical researchers on AI persuasion is that they broadly agree with me).

Now imo this is probably on net a good thing, though it carries with it real risk (of rapid catchup growth). Like personally, at any given capabilities level I'd be happy that the models are worse at manipulating humans!

But I could imagine that ppl who are more into overhang-style arguments would rather the persuasion capabilities develop smoothly on a predictable curve, so society has time to incrementally respond for every new generation.

For example I've noted before that I suspect current levels of AI persuasion/manipulation capabilities has lagged behind AI capabilities overall (this is nonobvious and I don't defend it here but my impression from talking to empirical researchers on AI persuasion is that they broadly agree with me).

IMO this is also visible in AI writing. I would imagine persuasion and writing capabilities should go hand in hand, and while AI is getting better at producing stuff people are willing to read, it's still obviously not a human-replacement level (and indeed has ... (read more)

3Linch6mo

I guess a different framing here that's consistent with your claims in the first paragraph is that the current overhang isn't very high.

2TsviBT6mo

Yeah that's fair.

Linch's Shortform

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Linch's Shortform

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