I think that time later is significantly more valuable than time now (and time now is much more valuable than time in the old days). Safety investment and other kinds of adaptation increase greatly as the risks become more immediate (capabilities investment also increases, but that’s already included); safety research gets way more useful (I think most of the safety community’s work is 10x+ less valuable than work done closer to catastrophe, even if the average is lower than that). Having a longer period closer to the end seems really really good to me.
If we lose 1 year now, and get back 0.5 years later., and if years later are 2x as good as years now, you’d be breaking even.
My view is that progress probably switched from being net positive to net negative (in expectation) sometime around GPT-3. If we had built GPT-3 in 2010, I think the world’s situation would probably have been better. We’d maybe be at our current capability level in 2018, scaling up further would be going more slowly because the community had already picked low hanging fruit and was doing bigger training runs, the world would have had more time to respond to the looming risk, and we would have done more good safety research.
If I had to steelman the view, I’d go with Paul’s argument here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Pi3WhFb4jPphBzme/don-t-accelerate-problems-you-re-trying-to-solve?commentId=z5xfeyA9poywne9Mx