Given your response, it seems like there should be a stronger push towards AI divestment from within the LessWrong and EA communities. Assuming that many members are heavily invested in index funds like S&P500, that means that millions are dollars are being spent by the less wrong community alone on the stock of companies pursuing AI capabilities research (Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia alone make up more than 10% of the Index’s market cap), which is not an intuitively negligible effect in my view. One could rationalize this by saying that they could use the excess gains to invest in AI safety, but you seem to disagree with this (I am uncertain myself given a lack of experience with AI safety non-profits ).
An influential LW participant, Jim Miller, who I think is a professor of economics, has written here that divestment does little good because any reduction in the stock price caused by pulling the investments can be counteracted by profit-motivated actors. For publicly-traded stocks, there is a robust supply of of profit-motivated actors scanning for opportunities. I am eager for more discussion on this topic.
I am alarmed to see that I made a big mistake in my previous comment: where I wrote that “contributing more money to AI-safety charities has almost no positive effects”, I should have written “contributing to technical alignment research has almost no positive effects”. I have nothing bad to say about contributing money to groups addressing the AI threat in other ways, e.g., by spreading the message that AI research is dangerous or lobbying governments to shut it down.
Given your response, it seems like there should be a stronger push towards AI divestment from within the LessWrong and EA communities. Assuming that many members are heavily invested in index funds like S&P500, that means that millions are dollars are being spent by the less wrong community alone on the stock of companies pursuing AI capabilities research (Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia alone make up more than 10% of the Index’s market cap), which is not an intuitively negligible effect in my view. One could rationalize this by saying that they could use the excess gains to invest in AI safety, but you seem to disagree with this (I am uncertain myself given a lack of experience with AI safety non-profits ).
An influential LW participant, Jim Miller, who I think is a professor of economics, has written here that divestment does little good because any reduction in the stock price caused by pulling the investments can be counteracted by profit-motivated actors. For publicly-traded stocks, there is a robust supply of of profit-motivated actors scanning for opportunities. I am eager for more discussion on this topic.
I am alarmed to see that I made a big mistake in my previous comment: where I wrote that “contributing more money to AI-safety charities has almost no positive effects”, I should have written “contributing to technical alignment research has almost no positive effects”. I have nothing bad to say about contributing money to groups addressing the AI threat in other ways, e.g., by spreading the message that AI research is dangerous or lobbying governments to shut it down.
Could you link me to his work? If he is correct, it seems a little bit counterintuitive.