I guess I fall into the stereotypical pessimist camp? But maybe it depends on what the actual label of the y-axis on this graph is.
Does an alignment scheme that will definitely not work, but is “close” to a working plan in units of number of breakthroughs needed count as high or low on the y-axis? Because I think we occupy a situation where we have some good ideas, but all of them are broken in several ways, and we would obviously be toast if computers got 5 orders of magnitude faster overnight and we had to implement our best guesses.
On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s too much disagreement about that—so maybe what makes me a pessimist is that I think fixing those problems still involves work in the genre of “theory” rather than just “application”?
I guess I fall into the stereotypical pessimist camp? But maybe it depends on what the actual label of the y-axis on this graph is.
Does an alignment scheme that will definitely not work, but is “close” to a working plan in units of number of breakthroughs needed count as high or low on the y-axis? Because I think we occupy a situation where we have some good ideas, but all of them are broken in several ways, and we would obviously be toast if computers got 5 orders of magnitude faster overnight and we had to implement our best guesses.
On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s too much disagreement about that—so maybe what makes me a pessimist is that I think fixing those problems still involves work in the genre of “theory” rather than just “application”?