Agreed, the initial announcement read like AI safety washing and more political action is needed, hence the call to action to improve this.
But read the taskforce leader’s op-ed:
Also the PM just tweeted about AI safety.
Generally, this development seems more robustly good and the path to a big policy win for AI safety seems clearer here than past efforts trying to control US AGI firms optimizing for profit. Timing also seems much better as things looks way more ‘on’ now. And again, even if the EV sign of the taskforce flips, then $125M is .5% of the $21B invested in AGI firms this year.
Are you saying that, as a rule, ~EAs should stay clear of policy for fear of tacit endorsement, which has caused harm and made damage control much harder and we suffer from cluelessness/clumsiness? Yes, ~EA involvement has in the past sometimes been bad, accelerated AI, and people got involved to get power for later leverage or damage control (cf. OpenAI), with uncertain outcomes (though not sure it’s all robustly bad - e.g. some say that RLHF was pretty overdetermined).
I agree though that ~EA policy pushing for mild accelerationism vs. harmful actors is less robust (cf. the CHIPs Act, which I heard a wonk call the most aggressive US foreign policy in 20 years), so would love to hear your more fleshed out push back on this - I remember reading somewhere recently that you’ve also had a major rethink recently vis-a-vis unintended consequences from EA work?
Ian Hogarth is leading the task force who's on record saying that AGI could lead to “obsolescence or destruction of the human race” if there’s no regulation on the technology’s progress.
Matt Clifford is also advising the task force - on record having said the same thing and knows a lot about AI safety. He had Jess Whittlestone & Jack Clark on his podcast.
If mainstream AI safety is useful and doesn't increase capabilities, then the taskforce and the $125M seem valuable.
If it improves capabilities, then it's a drop in the bucket in terms of overall investment going into AI.
[Years of life lost due to C19]
A recent meta-analysis looks at C-19-related mortality by age groups in Europe and finds the following age distribution:
< 40: 0.1%
40-69: 12.8%
≥ 70: 84.8%
In this spreadsheet model I combine this data with Metaculus predictions to get at the years of life lost (YLLs) due to C19.
I find C19 might cause 6m - 87m YYLs (highly dependending on # of deaths). For comparison, substance abuse causes 13m, diarrhea causes 85m YLLs.
Countries often spend 1-3x GDP per capita to avert a DALY, and so the world might want to spend $2-8trn to avert C19 YYLs (could also be a rough proxy for the cost of C19).
One of the many simplifying assumptions of this model is that excludes disability caused by C19 - which might be severe.
Very good analysis.
I also thought your recent blog was excellent and think you should make it a top level post:
https://entersingularity.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/covid-19-vs-influenza/
Cruise Ship passenger are a non random sample with perhaps higher co-morbidities.
The cruise ships analysed are non-random sample: "at least 25 other cruise ships have confirmed COVID-19 cases"
Being on a cruise ship might increase your risk because of dose response https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1242655704663691264
Onboard IFR. as 1.2% (0.38-2.7%) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v2
Ioannidis: “A whole country is not a ship.”
Thanks Pablo for your comment and helping to clarify this point. I'm sorry if I was being unclear.
I understand what you're saying. However:
ARC's GPT-4 evaluation is cited in the FT article, in case that was ambiguous.