Cross posting from my personal blog: https://spiralprogress.com/2024/10/28/the-shallow-bench/

Spoilers for "Project Hail Mary", stop reading here if you don't want to be spoiled.

Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace, a disgraced academic turned high school biology teacher who gets selected as part of a crew of three tasked with saving all of humanity from an impending alien threat.

Not even in sci-fi does a premise this absurd get presented without explanation. What does PHM offer?

“They found a collection of genes that give a human ‘coma resistance.”

“The main problem is this: On average, only one in every seven thousand humans has that genetic sequence.”

“We wouldn’t be able to send the most qualified people. We’d be sending the seven-thousandth most qualified people.”

In real life, I work in a complex and niche field that my skill set only very tangentially qualifies me for.

Periodically, I’ll meet people who ask how I ended up there. They’re not trying to be mean, it’s more like incredulity. “Seriously, you’re who humanity tasked with this job?” And I look at them and want to say “Yes, I am also not who I would have picked.”

And yet… and yet here I am. And there is no one else.

A lot of the AI Alignment people I’ve met have a similar vibe. Sometimes they used to work in finance, or neuroscience or software engineering on pretty mundane products. And then they spent a few months in self-study, maybe did a “fellowship” or went to some workshops, or otherwise transitioned into the field, and now they are some of the top people at top labs tasked with this fairly important problem.

One insider estimates that there are 300 alignment researchers total, and only 7 at OpenAI. He was on the team and later fired along with several colleagues, so maybe the number is now closer to 0. In any case, it’s an incredibly small field with an incredibly small talent pool to pull from.

In sports, a deep bench refers to a team that has not only a great starting line up, but also great players ready to sub in. This is hugely intimating to face. You can exhaust the starters. You can’t foul them. Even if someone gets hurt there’s another massively talented player ready to take his place. This is the opposite of how things feel in every important field I’ve gotten a look at. The bench for human capital is incredibly shallow.

I am not any kind of powerful insider. I get invited to som...

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