If the discovery is real and the short to medium-term economic impact is massive, that might give people who are currently desperate to turn the Dial of Progress forward by any means an outlet other than pushing AI capabilities forward as fast as possible, and also just generally give people more slack and time to think and act marginally more sanely.
Can you go into more details about this? As far as I’m aware, portable mass-producable fMRI machines, alone, will shorten AGI timelines far more than the effect from a big economic transformation diverting attention away from AI (e.g. by contributing valuable layers to foundation models).
Well, one question I’m interested in and don’t know the answer to is, given that the discovery is real, how easy is it to actually get to cheap portable fMRI machines, actually mass produced and not just mass produce-able in theory?
Also, people can already get a lot of fMRI data if they want to, I think? It’s not that expensive or inconvenient. So I’m skeptical that even a 10x or 100x increase in scale / quality / availability of fMRI data will have a particularly big or unique impact on AI or alignment research. Maybe you can build some kind of super-CFAR with them, and that leads to a bunch of alignment progress? But that seems kinda indirect, and something you could also do in some form if everyone is suddenly rich and prosperous and has lots of slack generally.
Oh, right, I should have mentioned that this is on the scale of a 10000-100000x increase in fMRI machines, such as one inside the notch of every smartphone, which is something that a ton of people have wanted to invest in for a very long time. The idea of a super-CFAR is less about extrapolating the 2010s CFAR upwards, and more about how CFAR’s entire existence was totally defined by the absense of fMRI saturation, making the fMRI saturation scenario pretty far out-of-distribution from any historical precedent. I definitely agree that effects from fMRI saturation would definitely be contingent on how quickly LK shortens the timeline for miniaturization of fMRI machines, and you’d need even more time to get useable results out of a super-CFAR(s).
Also, I now see your point with things like slack and prosperity and other macro-scale societal/civilizational upheavals being larger factors (not to mention siphoning substantial investment dollars away from AI which currently doesn’t have many better alternatives).
Can you go into more details about this? As far as I’m aware, portable mass-producable fMRI machines, alone, will shorten AGI timelines far more than the effect from a big economic transformation diverting attention away from AI (e.g. by contributing valuable layers to foundation models).
Well, one question I’m interested in and don’t know the answer to is, given that the discovery is real, how easy is it to actually get to cheap portable fMRI machines, actually mass produced and not just mass produce-able in theory?
Also, people can already get a lot of fMRI data if they want to, I think? It’s not that expensive or inconvenient. So I’m skeptical that even a 10x or 100x increase in scale / quality / availability of fMRI data will have a particularly big or unique impact on AI or alignment research. Maybe you can build some kind of super-CFAR with them, and that leads to a bunch of alignment progress? But that seems kinda indirect, and something you could also do in some form if everyone is suddenly rich and prosperous and has lots of slack generally.
Oh, right, I should have mentioned that this is on the scale of a 10000-100000x increase in fMRI machines, such as one inside the notch of every smartphone, which is something that a ton of people have wanted to invest in for a very long time. The idea of a super-CFAR is less about extrapolating the 2010s CFAR upwards, and more about how CFAR’s entire existence was totally defined by the absense of fMRI saturation, making the fMRI saturation scenario pretty far out-of-distribution from any historical precedent. I definitely agree that effects from fMRI saturation would definitely be contingent on how quickly LK shortens the timeline for miniaturization of fMRI machines, and you’d need even more time to get useable results out of a super-CFAR(s).
Also, I now see your point with things like slack and prosperity and other macro-scale societal/civilizational upheavals being larger factors (not to mention siphoning substantial investment dollars away from AI which currently doesn’t have many better alternatives).