There are a lot of things I can critique in this paper, but other people are doing that so I’m going to just bring up the bit I don’t see others mentioning.
Where are the probability calculations for potential biotech advancements as an alternative for hitting the immortality event horizon in the next 20, 30, 40 years?
You meticulously model eight scenarios of safety progress rates, three discount rates, multiple CRRA parameters, safety testing POMDPs… but treat the single most reasonable alternative pathway to saving people’s lives beside “build ASI as soon as possible and keep it in a box until it’s safe” (?!) as a sensitivity check in Tables 10-11 rather than integrating it into the main analysis with probability estimates to compare.
For a paper whose entire emotional engine runs on “170,000 people die every day, and will continue to until we launch ASI,” that seems like a glaring omission that has me scratching my head. I admit to only reading the paper over once, so maybe I missed it, but Claude didn’t find it either. And of course there’s cryonics, which doesn’t get so much as a mention.
Without those calculations, the idea that this paper was written from a “mundane person-affecting stance” seems false. It seems more accurate instead to describe it as centrally from a“60+ year old with cancer and no family” stance. That you acknowledge different demographics doesn’t matter if you’re computing their optimal timelines within the same model that handwaves away the chances of alternative life extension pathways.
There are a lot of things I can critique in this paper, but other people are doing that so I’m going to just bring up the bit I don’t see others mentioning.
Where are the probability calculations for potential biotech advancements as an alternative for hitting the immortality event horizon in the next 20, 30, 40 years?
You meticulously model eight scenarios of safety progress rates, three discount rates, multiple CRRA parameters, safety testing POMDPs… but treat the single most reasonable alternative pathway to saving people’s lives beside “build ASI as soon as possible and keep it in a box until it’s safe” (?!) as a sensitivity check in Tables 10-11 rather than integrating it into the main analysis with probability estimates to compare.
For a paper whose entire emotional engine runs on “170,000 people die every day, and will continue to until we launch ASI,” that seems like a glaring omission that has me scratching my head. I admit to only reading the paper over once, so maybe I missed it, but Claude didn’t find it either. And of course there’s cryonics, which doesn’t get so much as a mention.
Without those calculations, the idea that this paper was written from a “mundane person-affecting stance” seems false. It seems more accurate instead to describe it as centrally from a “60+ year old with cancer and no family” stance. That you acknowledge different demographics doesn’t matter if you’re computing their optimal timelines within the same model that handwaves away the chances of alternative life extension pathways.