I teach a course at Smith College called the economics of future technology in which I go over reasons to be pessimistic about AI. Students don’t ask me how I stay sane, but why I don’t devote myself to just having fun. My best response is that for a guy my age with my level of wealth giving into hedonism means going to Thailand for sex and drugs, an outcome my students (who are mostly women) find “icky”.
I strongly suspect that the answer stems from historical analogies. The equivalent of doom was related to catastrophes like epidemics, natural disasters, genocide-threatening wars and destruction of the ecosystem. Genocide-threatening wars could motivate individuals to weaken the aggressive collective as much as possible (so that said collective would either think twice before starting the war or commiting genocide or have a bigger chance of being outcompeted). Epidemics, natural disasters and gradual destruction of the ecosystem historically left survivors who would keep the culture afloat and could even be motivated by it.
AI-related imminent doom would be most equivalent to genocide of mankind and likely to deserve a similar response, which is minimising p(doom), helping those who work on it or at least doing the work which benefitted the society and was expected from you had it not been for imminent doom.
It could be also useful to consider the counterfactual possibility of an unavoidable gamma-ray burst that was predicted to wipe the Earth out. The GRB would require the civilisation to build bunkers and to preserve the ecosystem. Even if nearly every individual is unlikely to actually enter the bunker, living a life of debauchery could be a bad decision due to acausal trade or actively motivating others to do the same and indirectly undermining the chance of mankind to survive.
I teach a course at Smith College called the economics of future technology in which I go over reasons to be pessimistic about AI. Students don’t ask me how I stay sane, but why I don’t devote myself to just having fun. My best response is that for a guy my age with my level of wealth giving into hedonism means going to Thailand for sex and drugs, an outcome my students (who are mostly women) find “icky”.
I strongly suspect that the answer stems from historical analogies. The equivalent of doom was related to catastrophes like epidemics, natural disasters, genocide-threatening wars and destruction of the ecosystem. Genocide-threatening wars could motivate individuals to weaken the aggressive collective as much as possible (so that said collective would either think twice before starting the war or commiting genocide or have a bigger chance of being outcompeted). Epidemics, natural disasters and gradual destruction of the ecosystem historically left survivors who would keep the culture afloat and could even be motivated by it.
AI-related imminent doom would be most equivalent to genocide of mankind and likely to deserve a similar response, which is minimising p(doom), helping those who work on it or at least doing the work which benefitted the society and was expected from you had it not been for imminent doom.
It could be also useful to consider the counterfactual possibility of an unavoidable gamma-ray burst that was predicted to wipe the Earth out. The GRB would require the civilisation to build bunkers and to preserve the ecosystem. Even if nearly every individual is unlikely to actually enter the bunker, living a life of debauchery could be a bad decision due to acausal trade or actively motivating others to do the same and indirectly undermining the chance of mankind to survive.