What does college (in the absence of much other work experience) actually signal?
You either can afford it or have the background and educational achievements to win significant financial aid. (More expensive colleges do better at this.)
You have the independence to live away from your parents, care for yourself in an unfamiliar environment, and not do anything that would scare HR over several years.
You have the security at home to commit to doing something for several years in a row; e.g. you don’t have an ailing parent or grandparent you need to care for, and you’re not likely to have to leave the workforce to care for an infant or two.
You have the commitment to stay focused on one broad project for years at a time and the diligence to study for and pass tests.
You can learn material similar to that required for the job and/or are willing to do pointless work in order to please employers. Maybe you even learned something relevant!
You personally have a baseline level of literacy and mathematical competence. High school education in the US won’t guarantee it; our standardized test scores don’t look good on the whole.
None of these signals are strong differentiators, but most of them look like things that long-term employers genuinely want regardless of the field you end up in. After all, if college isn’t that useful and on-the-job training lasts a while, these traits make a candidate more likely to stick around and be useful afterwards, and if college is necessary, they’re still helpful.
Most of these things are also signaled by a few years of suitable work experience; it’s just hard to get that when companies expect degrees even for the few entry-level positions available, because they’d rather see these things up front than put their cash on the line to let you prove them.
I would focus on more humble things: you are able to wake up every morning even if you don’t feel like doing so; you do not have the kind of mental illnesses that would make you rage-quit or attack people and get fired.
In theory, previous degrees of education should be sufficient to prove that, but in practice we have grade inflation, loss of discipline in classrooms, and it is generally difficult to fire underage kids from school. So the behavior that would in the past get you expelled from lower levels of school, today only gets you expelled from college.
tl;dr—college is the new elementary school; it signals what the elementary school would signal in 1900
How could someone expect AI in (median) 30 years and expect the same 30 years later?
If you assume their expectations are normally distributed, this seems absurd; half the probability mass of their expectations is gone and the rest is grouped much closer to the present, so they’d have a much sooner estimate if they were being consistent.
However, if their expectations are geometrically distributed, they’d have just over a 2% expectation of success in a given year. If you didn’t have a mechanistic explanation of how AGI might come about—and most people don’t and haven’t—you could just think that we might discover what we need for it next year, or just as likely the year after, but it would take an unlikely breakthrough for that to happen.
Equivalently, if you think we’re waiting to find the right paradigm, we could have a 3% chance to find that each year (median = 22 years) and then 8 years to follow through on it afterwards. You’d have to increase your probability moderately over time, as the right paradigm might have been found and you just can’t tell it’s arrived yet, but your median time-to-AGI would stay consistent over time. (I’ve noticed many people here think something like this, though with a higher chance than 3%.)
Having an estimate like this and stating your median value is misleading; “pause our efforts in a few years because we were wrong and we need to recalibrate” is sensible advice when you pass the bulk of a normal distribution, but it doesn’t reflect any change in this model. If you say “AI 2027″ and there is no AGI in 2027, people will not react like it was 50⁄50.
That being said, I’m inclined to put a lot more than 3% chance annually on a breakthrough in the current conditions, so I don’t think people should be predicting 25-30 years anymore. (I think a market crash is fairly likely and also don’t think it would change the calculation much.)
A guess as to how lifeforms evolve defensive toxins (i.e. become poisonous):
Being poisonous doesn’t benefit an individual animal much; if you taste bad, a predator might give up in the middle of eating you, but you’re still hurt and likely to be attacked by another predator.
However, genes are selected for only in terms of the animals that do reproduce; a poisonous animal can make its kin, who share the relevant genes, more likely to reproduce in a few ways:
Many insects, like ants, have only a few individuals responsible for reproducing; the metabolic cost of producing poison makes worker ants less efficient, but reduces how many get eaten, and it has little effect on the queen (who probably won’t be eaten regardless).
Healthy animals are in general less likely to be attacked and far more likely to successfully reproduce than unhealthy ones; the poison pushes a few more animals into the ‘unhealthy’ category, but makes all the animals less attractive to predators. If the poison isn’t very costly, it should be able to spread by chance up to the point where this is effective in small populations. (Healthy animals can generally afford a modest additional cost to avoid predators; stotting is a behavioral equivalent.)
Much of the metabolic cost of a poison is in compensating for its negative effects in your own body; if you’re consuming a poisonous animal regularly, it’s cheap to reuse its poison. (Poison dart frogs do this.)
More costly poisons would presumably evolve over time from weaker poisons, in the same way that other defensive features are exaggerated over time.
What does college (in the absence of much other work experience) actually signal?
You either can afford it or have the background and educational achievements to win significant financial aid. (More expensive colleges do better at this.)
You have the independence to live away from your parents, care for yourself in an unfamiliar environment, and not do anything that would scare HR over several years.
You have the security at home to commit to doing something for several years in a row; e.g. you don’t have an ailing parent or grandparent you need to care for, and you’re not likely to have to leave the workforce to care for an infant or two.
You have the commitment to stay focused on one broad project for years at a time and the diligence to study for and pass tests.
You can learn material similar to that required for the job and/or are willing to do pointless work in order to please employers. Maybe you even learned something relevant!
You personally have a baseline level of literacy and mathematical competence. High school education in the US won’t guarantee it; our standardized test scores don’t look good on the whole.
None of these signals are strong differentiators, but most of them look like things that long-term employers genuinely want regardless of the field you end up in. After all, if college isn’t that useful and on-the-job training lasts a while, these traits make a candidate more likely to stick around and be useful afterwards, and if college is necessary, they’re still helpful.
Most of these things are also signaled by a few years of suitable work experience; it’s just hard to get that when companies expect degrees even for the few entry-level positions available, because they’d rather see these things up front than put their cash on the line to let you prove them.
I would focus on more humble things: you are able to wake up every morning even if you don’t feel like doing so; you do not have the kind of mental illnesses that would make you rage-quit or attack people and get fired.
In theory, previous degrees of education should be sufficient to prove that, but in practice we have grade inflation, loss of discipline in classrooms, and it is generally difficult to fire underage kids from school. So the behavior that would in the past get you expelled from lower levels of school, today only gets you expelled from college.
tl;dr—college is the new elementary school; it signals what the elementary school would signal in 1900
How could someone expect AI in (median) 30 years and expect the same 30 years later?
If you assume their expectations are normally distributed, this seems absurd; half the probability mass of their expectations is gone and the rest is grouped much closer to the present, so they’d have a much sooner estimate if they were being consistent.
However, if their expectations are geometrically distributed, they’d have just over a 2% expectation of success in a given year. If you didn’t have a mechanistic explanation of how AGI might come about—and most people don’t and haven’t—you could just think that we might discover what we need for it next year, or just as likely the year after, but it would take an unlikely breakthrough for that to happen.
Equivalently, if you think we’re waiting to find the right paradigm, we could have a 3% chance to find that each year (median = 22 years) and then 8 years to follow through on it afterwards. You’d have to increase your probability moderately over time, as the right paradigm might have been found and you just can’t tell it’s arrived yet, but your median time-to-AGI would stay consistent over time. (I’ve noticed many people here think something like this, though with a higher chance than 3%.)
Having an estimate like this and stating your median value is misleading; “pause our efforts in a few years because we were wrong and we need to recalibrate” is sensible advice when you pass the bulk of a normal distribution, but it doesn’t reflect any change in this model. If you say “AI 2027″ and there is no AGI in 2027, people will not react like it was 50⁄50.
That being said, I’m inclined to put a lot more than 3% chance annually on a breakthrough in the current conditions, so I don’t think people should be predicting 25-30 years anymore. (I think a market crash is fairly likely and also don’t think it would change the calculation much.)
A guess as to how lifeforms evolve defensive toxins (i.e. become poisonous):
Being poisonous doesn’t benefit an individual animal much; if you taste bad, a predator might give up in the middle of eating you, but you’re still hurt and likely to be attacked by another predator.
However, genes are selected for only in terms of the animals that do reproduce; a poisonous animal can make its kin, who share the relevant genes, more likely to reproduce in a few ways:
Many insects, like ants, have only a few individuals responsible for reproducing; the metabolic cost of producing poison makes worker ants less efficient, but reduces how many get eaten, and it has little effect on the queen (who probably won’t be eaten regardless).
Healthy animals are in general less likely to be attacked and far more likely to successfully reproduce than unhealthy ones; the poison pushes a few more animals into the ‘unhealthy’ category, but makes all the animals less attractive to predators. If the poison isn’t very costly, it should be able to spread by chance up to the point where this is effective in small populations. (Healthy animals can generally afford a modest additional cost to avoid predators; stotting is a behavioral equivalent.)
Much of the metabolic cost of a poison is in compensating for its negative effects in your own body; if you’re consuming a poisonous animal regularly, it’s cheap to reuse its poison. (Poison dart frogs do this.)
More costly poisons would presumably evolve over time from weaker poisons, in the same way that other defensive features are exaggerated over time.