Here’s a simple story for the emotional state of a pessimist. Not sure it’s true but it’s a story I have in mind.
In disaster movies, everything happens all at once. In reality climate disasters are more gradual, tsunamis and hurricanes and so on happen at different places at different times, but suppose for this story the disasters caused by climate change are all happening in a single period stretching on a few months. 100s of millions of people will be dead in a couple of months.
It’s about a week before the disaster hits, and it’s been shown very clearly (to most people’s satisfaction) that it’s about to hit.
Some people say “it is clearly time to do something, let us gather the troops and make lots of great plans”. And that’s true, in the world where there’s work to be done. But it’s also true that… the right time to solve this problem was 20+ years prior. Then there were real opportunities you could take that would have prevented the entire thing. Today there is noaction that can prevent it, even though the threat is in the future. Fortunately it is not an existential threat, and there is triage to be done, and marginal effort can reliably save lives. But the time to solve it was decades ago, the opportunities lay unused, they were lost to time, and the catastrophe is here.
Returning to the reality we ourselves live in, insofar as someone is like “Huh, seems like these companies are producing what will soon be wildly lucrative products, and the search mechanism of gradient descent seems like it has the potential to produce a generally capable agent, and given the competitive nature of our economy and lack of political coordination it doesn’t seem like we can stop lots of people from just pouring in money and having high-IQ people scale up their search mechanisms and potentially build an AGI — this is a big problem” I would say, hopefully without fear of contradiction, that the best time to avoid this catastrophe was decades ago, and that at this point the opportunities to avoidbeing in this situation have too been lost.
(When reading the description above, I feel that Quirinus Quirrell would say the right thing to do is not get into that situation, and head it off way earlier in the timeline, because it sounds like an extremely doomed situation that required a miracle to avert catastrophe, and plans that successfully cause a miracle to happen are pretty fragile and typically fail.)
I’m not saying this story about being a week before disaster is fully analogous to the one we’re in, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about, and I think has been somewhat missing when people talk about the emotional state of pessimists.
It’s interesting that climate change keeps coming up as an analogy. Climate change activists have always had a very specific path that they favored: global government regulation (or tax) of carbon emissions. As the years went on and no effective regulation emerged, they grew increasingly frustrated and pessimistic. (Similarly, alignment pessimists are frustrated that their preferred path, technical alignment, is not paying off.) In my view, even though they did not get what specifically wanted, climate change activist’s work did pay off in the form of Obama’s “All of the Above” energy strategy (shotgun approach), which led to solar innovation and scaled up manufacturing, which led to dramatically falling prices for solar energy, which is now leading to fossil fuels being out-competed in the market.
In disaster movies, everything happens all at once.
And, in general, I think I’ve seen very few movies where the villainous plan is thwarted before it succeeds, instead of afterwards; the villain gets the MacGuffin that gives him ultimate power, and then the heroes have to defeat him anyways, as opposed to that being the “well, now we’ve lost” moment.
Here’s a simple story for the emotional state of a pessimist. Not sure it’s true but it’s a story I have in mind.
In disaster movies, everything happens all at once. In reality climate disasters are more gradual, tsunamis and hurricanes and so on happen at different places at different times, but suppose for this story the disasters caused by climate change are all happening in a single period stretching on a few months. 100s of millions of people will be dead in a couple of months.
It’s about a week before the disaster hits, and it’s been shown very clearly (to most people’s satisfaction) that it’s about to hit.
Some people say “it is clearly time to do something, let us gather the troops and make lots of great plans”. And that’s true, in the world where there’s work to be done. But it’s also true that… the right time to solve this problem was 20+ years prior. Then there were real opportunities you could take that would have prevented the entire thing. Today there is no action that can prevent it, even though the threat is in the future. Fortunately it is not an existential threat, and there is triage to be done, and marginal effort can reliably save lives. But the time to solve it was decades ago, the opportunities lay unused, they were lost to time, and the catastrophe is here.
Returning to the reality we ourselves live in, insofar as someone is like “Huh, seems like these companies are producing what will soon be wildly lucrative products, and the search mechanism of gradient descent seems like it has the potential to produce a generally capable agent, and given the competitive nature of our economy and lack of political coordination it doesn’t seem like we can stop lots of people from just pouring in money and having high-IQ people scale up their search mechanisms and potentially build an AGI — this is a big problem” I would say, hopefully without fear of contradiction, that the best time to avoid this catastrophe was decades ago, and that at this point the opportunities to avoid being in this situation have too been lost.
(When reading the description above, I feel that Quirinus Quirrell would say the right thing to do is not get into that situation, and head it off way earlier in the timeline, because it sounds like an extremely doomed situation that required a miracle to avert catastrophe, and plans that successfully cause a miracle to happen are pretty fragile and typically fail.)
I’m not saying this story about being a week before disaster is fully analogous to the one we’re in, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about, and I think has been somewhat missing when people talk about the emotional state of pessimists.
It’s interesting that climate change keeps coming up as an analogy. Climate change activists have always had a very specific path that they favored: global government regulation (or tax) of carbon emissions. As the years went on and no effective regulation emerged, they grew increasingly frustrated and pessimistic. (Similarly, alignment pessimists are frustrated that their preferred path, technical alignment, is not paying off.) In my view, even though they did not get what specifically wanted, climate change activist’s work did pay off in the form of Obama’s “All of the Above” energy strategy (shotgun approach), which led to solar innovation and scaled up manufacturing, which led to dramatically falling prices for solar energy, which is now leading to fossil fuels being out-competed in the market.
And, in general, I think I’ve seen very few movies where the villainous plan is thwarted before it succeeds, instead of afterwards; the villain gets the MacGuffin that gives him ultimate power, and then the heroes have to defeat him anyways, as opposed to that being the “well, now we’ve lost” moment.