If “realistically simulating human impacts in silico” means something like high-fidelity models of how humans respond psychologically to AI interaction, that seems like one of the higher-risk cases of safety research also being capabilities research. A good sim for “how AI affects humans psychologically” is a good sim for “how to affect humans psychologically, using AI”.
The hardest part of CogSec evals is figuring out an eval meaningful enough to detect dangerous effects, while not being meaningful enough to hill climb on. Maybe eval is too benchmark coded, when actually what we want is comprehensive user surveying, similar to Anthropic’s What 81,000 people want from AI, but conducted independently, tied to usage data in a privacy-respecting way. One of the genuinely good uses of AI here may be qualitative research at scale: preserving the nuance of how people feel about and relate to AI, rather than immediately collapsing it into 1–5 survey responses.
Even ignoring AI, current expectations are that world population will peak in ~60 years at a population of ~10 billion. This seems totally workable with relatively incremental improvements in technology for resource management, energy extraction, and habitat preservation. This is only bolstered by much of our future energy supply growth coming from non-extractive solar rather than fossil fuels, which we continue to find new sources of regardless.
When you add on the fact that almost all population growth in the next 50 years is due to occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where there is plentiful land and the only limiting factors are energy supply to tame it, we’re actually pretty well situated re: overpopulation concerns.