“Do you really think Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump or Xi Jinping are not in the winner’s bracket, that they will have less real power than the first person to figure out how to solve aging?” I interpret this as a rhetorical question, intended to suggest that its answer is obviously ‘yes’.
I dispute this, because it’s extremely difficult to compare different kinds of power, especially when they take effect over different timescales. The first person to solve aging would indeed wield a colossal amount of power as a result, because they would hasten the advent of a technology which allowed people to live arbitrarily long, allowing more people to do so. Even doing this by a day could create an arbitrary number of human life-years. Similarly, I think it’s quite likely that Demis Hassabis, for example, is more powerful than Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Donald Trump, because none of them would have been able to create an artificial superintelligence as early as he has facilitated its creation if he never existed; by realizing that AGI was plausible in a much shorter time than others believed, he did something( along with the rest of DeepMind, but he clearly played a pivotal role) which would be simply impossible for anyone lacking this insight. Information is power, but not all information is equally power dense, and the most powerful information often takes the form of deep insights which can’t be extracted from large crowds of people using any amount of status.[1]
While waiting to be able to post again, I anticipated a response of the form ” Many other people had the same or a similar insight, and didn’t become as powerful as Demis Hassabis, therefore that kind of insight doesn’t confer power. ” to which my response would be that it’s true that other factors needed to be present in order for someone like this to make use of the insight, but this doesn’t make it any less important; those other factors would be far less useful without the insight. Something which facilitates power is itself power. Another response might be to point out that leaders such as Donald Trump or Xi Jinping have the ability to coordinate to prevent an ASI from being created, or accelerate its creation. I’m not sure that the former is true, but if it is, it’s only true in the sense that they have the official capacity to coordinate—whether they truly can coordinate without wanting to depends on the definition of free will and whether they have it. While they might be able to accelerate the development of AI, it seems likely to me that it’s not possible to do so by an amount comparable to the effect of starting early.
“Do you really think Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump or Xi Jinping are not in the winner’s bracket, that they will have less real power than the first person to figure out how to solve aging?” I interpret this as a rhetorical question, intended to suggest that its answer is obviously ‘yes’.
I dispute this, because it’s extremely difficult to compare different kinds of power, especially when they take effect over different timescales. The first person to solve aging would indeed wield a colossal amount of power as a result, because they would hasten the advent of a technology which allowed people to live arbitrarily long, allowing more people to do so. Even doing this by a day could create an arbitrary number of human life-years. Similarly, I think it’s quite likely that Demis Hassabis, for example, is more powerful than Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Donald Trump, because none of them would have been able to create an artificial superintelligence as early as he has facilitated its creation if he never existed; by realizing that AGI was plausible in a much shorter time than others believed, he did something( along with the rest of DeepMind, but he clearly played a pivotal role) which would be simply impossible for anyone lacking this insight. Information is power, but not all information is equally power dense, and the most powerful information often takes the form of deep insights which can’t be extracted from large crowds of people using any amount of status.[1]
While waiting to be able to post again, I anticipated a response of the form ” Many other people had the same or a similar insight, and didn’t become as powerful as Demis Hassabis, therefore that kind of insight doesn’t confer power. ” to which my response would be that it’s true that other factors needed to be present in order for someone like this to make use of the insight, but this doesn’t make it any less important; those other factors would be far less useful without the insight. Something which facilitates power is itself power. Another response might be to point out that leaders such as Donald Trump or Xi Jinping have the ability to coordinate to prevent an ASI from being created, or accelerate its creation. I’m not sure that the former is true, but if it is, it’s only true in the sense that they have the official capacity to coordinate—whether they truly can coordinate without wanting to depends on the definition of free will and whether they have it. While they might be able to accelerate the development of AI, it seems likely to me that it’s not possible to do so by an amount comparable to the effect of starting early.