I think I basically agree with you Richard about the risks of falling into scenario 2, and think this is a wise comment, but I also think you are strawmanning the reason for the change—it’s not that people have come to think that making technical progress is hopeless (or even harder than it used to be!) it’s rather that people have come to have shorter timelines, and so the probability that sufficient technical progress will be made in time has gone down, and the usefulness of calling for a pause has gone up. (e.g. if you think AGI is 15 years away, then pausing now is plausibly useless or even harmful.)
That’s my theory at any rate. And it’s sorta what I think, I think.
Oh, also, I think that the counterproductive rot in environmentalism took at least 5 years to build up, probably, and I’m hopeful that therefore even if we are on a path to rot, it’ll take too long for the rot to build up to matter. But this is just a guess about the growth rate of rot which is informed by anecdotes like the stories about what happened to your friends, and over the coming months and years more data will be collected to better calibrate my guess about the rate of rot.
I think I basically agree with you Richard about the risks of falling into scenario 2, and think this is a wise comment, but I also think you are strawmanning the reason for the change—it’s not that people have come to think that making technical progress is hopeless (or even harder than it used to be!) it’s rather that people have come to have shorter timelines, and so the probability that sufficient technical progress will be made in time has gone down, and the usefulness of calling for a pause has gone up. (e.g. if you think AGI is 15 years away, then pausing now is plausibly useless or even harmful.)
That’s my theory at any rate. And it’s sorta what I think, I think.
Oh, also, I think that the counterproductive rot in environmentalism took at least 5 years to build up, probably, and I’m hopeful that therefore even if we are on a path to rot, it’ll take too long for the rot to build up to matter. But this is just a guess about the growth rate of rot which is informed by anecdotes like the stories about what happened to your friends, and over the coming months and years more data will be collected to better calibrate my guess about the rate of rot.