I don't think you need a vision for how to solve the entire alignment problem yourself. It's setting the bar too high. When you start a startup, you can't possibly have the whole plan laid out up front. You're going to change it as you go along, as you get feedback from users and discover what people really need.

What you can do is make sure that your startup's incentives are aligned correctly at the start. Solve your own alignment. The most important questions here are, who is your customer? and how do you make money?

For example, if you make money by selling e-commerce ads against a consumer product, the incentives on your company will inevitably push you toward making a more addictive, more mass-market product.

For another example, if you make money by selling services to companies training AI models, your company's incentives will be to broaden the market as much as possible, help all sorts of companies train all sorts of AI models, and offer all the sorts of services they want.

In the long run, it seems like companies often follow their own natural incentives, more than they follow the personal preferences of the founder.

All of this makes it tricky to start a pro-alignment company but I think it is worth trying because when people do create a successful company it creates a nexus of smart people and money to spend that can attack a lot of problems that aren't possible in the "nonprofit research" world.

I think you actually do not have very much power as a board member. During normal operations, you can give advice to the CEO, but you have no power beyond the "access to the CEO". If the CEO resigns or is being forced out, you briefly have an important power, but it is a very narrow power, the ability to find and vote in a replacement CEO.

The position is very public and respected so it may feel like "a lot of power" but quite often even a mid level employee at the organization has more real power over the direction of the company than a board member does.

I suspect this question is misworded:

Will there be a 4 year interval in which world GDP growth doubles before the first 1 year interval in which world GDP growth doubles?

Do you mean in which world GDP doubles? World GDP growth doubles when it goes from, say, 0.5% yearly growth to 1% yearly growth.

Personally, I suspect world GDP is most likely to next double in a period after a severe war or depression, so you might want to rephrase to avoid that scenario if that isn't what you're thinking about.

I believe there already is a powerful AI persuasion tool: the Facebook algorithm. It is attempting to persuade you to stay on Facebook, to keep reading Facebook so that their "engagement" metrics are optimized. Indeed, many of the world's top AI researchers are employed in building this tool. So far it is focused much more on ranking than on text generation, but if AI text generation improves to the extent that it's interesting for humans to read, I would expect Facebook to incorporate that into newsfeed. AI-generated "news summaries" might be one area that this happens first.

I don't think the metaphor about writing code works. You say, "Imagine a company has to solve a problem that takes about 900,000 lines of code." But in practice, a company never possesses that information. They know what problem they have to solve, but not how many lines of code it will take. Certainly not when it's on the order of a million lines.

For example, let's say you're working for a pizza chain that already does delivery, and you want to launch a mobile app to let people order your food. You can decompose that into parts pretty reasonably - you need an iOS app, you need an Android app, and you need an API into your existing order management system that the mobile apps can call. But how are you going to know how many lines of code those subproblems are? It probably isn't helpful to think about it in that way.

The factoring into subproblems also doesn't quite make sense in this example: "Your team still has to implement 300k lines of code, but regardless of how difficult this is, it's only marginally harder than implementing a project that consists entirely of 300k lines." In this case, if you entirely ignore the work done by other teams, the Android app will actually get harder, because you can't just copy over the design work that's already been done by the iOS team. I feel like all the pros and cons of breaking a problem into smaller parts are lost by this high-level way of looking at it.

My null hypothesis about this area of "factored cognition" would be that useful mechanisms of factoring a problem into multiple smaller problems are common, but they are entirely dependent on the specific nature of the problem you are solving.

I would not spend $500 on such an event because an event held by my local rationality community doesn't seem very important to me. You may have a different opinion about your $500 and your local rationality community and that's fine.

We could in theory try to kill all AI researchers (or just go whole hog and try to kill all software engineers, better safe than sorry /s).

I think this is a good way of putting it. Many people in the debate refer to "regulation". But in practice, regulation is not very effective for weaponry. If you look at how the international community handles dangerous weapons like nuclear weapons, there are many cases of assassinations, bombing, and war in order to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. This is what it would look like if the world was convinced that AI research was an existential threat - a world where work on AI happens in secret, in private military programs, with governments making the decisions, and participants are risking their lives. Probably the US and China would race to be the first one to achieve AGI dominance, gambling that they would be able to control the software they produced.