When you score an intervention by importance/neglectedness/tractability, the term neglectedness is supposed to capture the total effort that would counterfactually be allocated to the problem. That total should include future labour, and in particular future AI labour. This is an obvious point, so no credit for raising it.
Unfortunately, the word “neglectedness” doesn’t carry this connotation. If someone says “I’m working on infinite ethics because it’s neglected,” it would be strange for me to reply “actually, it’s not neglected” because I expect future AI to solve it — infinite ethics is neglected in the present, even if it won’t be later. So the word “neglectedness” is poorly chosen, maybe we could replace the N with non-puntable?
I’ll note four features that might make a cause area non-puntable, and therefore worth prioritising.
Time-sensitivity. Does the problem need to be solved by a deadline? For example, maybe your intervention involves a policy window. A good example here is pre-deployment evals — they need to be done by the launch date. Unless the AI labour arrives before the deadline, it can’t help you.
Capability-sensitivity. Does the problem need to be solved by a particular capability level? For example, maybe chain-of-thought monitoring is necessary to safely and usefully deploy human-level AI labour, so it you shouldn’t expect human-level AIs to help you solve it.
AI-intractability. Do you expect AIs won’t actually help with the task? Maybe they aren’t capable. Maybe they are capable but not trusted. A good example is macrostrategy — AIs seem bad at this.
Unattractive. Do you worry that future AIs won’t be allocated to solving the problem? Perhaps because the problem is too illegible, low-status, or taboo. Or because the problem doesn’t align with the incentives of the AI developers.
I currently lack the motivation to derive a full reformulation of INT for pre-crunch-time cause prioritisation, but might do this in future.
Neglectedness should account for AI labour.
When you score an intervention by importance/neglectedness/tractability, the term neglectedness is supposed to capture the total effort that would counterfactually be allocated to the problem. That total should include future labour, and in particular future AI labour. This is an obvious point, so no credit for raising it.
Unfortunately, the word “neglectedness” doesn’t carry this connotation. If someone says “I’m working on infinite ethics because it’s neglected,” it would be strange for me to reply “actually, it’s not neglected” because I expect future AI to solve it — infinite ethics is neglected in the present, even if it won’t be later. So the word “neglectedness” is poorly chosen, maybe we could replace the N with non-puntable?
I’ll note four features that might make a cause area non-puntable, and therefore worth prioritising.
Time-sensitivity. Does the problem need to be solved by a deadline? For example, maybe your intervention involves a policy window. A good example here is pre-deployment evals — they need to be done by the launch date. Unless the AI labour arrives before the deadline, it can’t help you.
Capability-sensitivity. Does the problem need to be solved by a particular capability level? For example, maybe chain-of-thought monitoring is necessary to safely and usefully deploy human-level AI labour, so it you shouldn’t expect human-level AIs to help you solve it.
AI-intractability. Do you expect AIs won’t actually help with the task? Maybe they aren’t capable. Maybe they are capable but not trusted. A good example is macrostrategy — AIs seem bad at this.
Unattractive. Do you worry that future AIs won’t be allocated to solving the problem? Perhaps because the problem is too illegible, low-status, or taboo. Or because the problem doesn’t align with the incentives of the AI developers.
I currently lack the motivation to derive a full reformulation of INT for pre-crunch-time cause prioritisation, but might do this in future.