Apologize for long wall of text, at the bottom I dived into your aside more as that’s highly relevant to deciding the course of my next 10 years and would appreciate your weighing-in.
Pre-Lesswrong/my entire life I’ve been really interested in longevity, and I would do anything to help people have more time with their loved ones (and as a child I thought solving this was the only worthy kind of fame I’d ever want.)
I didn’t know how to get there, but it was probably somewhere in math and science so I decided I had to do anything to get into MIT.
My hobbies ended up being CS-y instead of biology-y, and I realized that not only was CS profitable for earn to give, but it also might be the best shot for longevity since AI was just infinitely better at problem solving.
So that’s where my AI interest comes from. Not in being afraid of it but in using it to solve mortal problems. But the AI safety thing is something that I of course just hear smart people like Eliezer mention and then I think to myself “hmm well they know more about AI than me and I can’t use it to cure aging without the AI also maybe destroying us so I should look into that.”
Your crypto comment is surprising though and I’d like to go further on that. I should be more clear, I’m pretty interested in cryptocurrency not just cryptography and so far trading it has been really profitable, and this summer I’m essentially trying to decide if I’ll stop my schooling to do a crypto startup or if I’ll do my Masters in AI (or potentially also a crypto thing).
Startups seem like the best thing to do for profit and people are falling over themselves to fund them nowadays so I assumed given how many people have offered me funding to do so, that the crypto startup thing would be far easier to profit from than an ML startup (with ML maybe overtaking it in 7 years or so)
If this isn’t the case, or we’re a year away from the flip to ML being the easier startup, I’d love to know, because I’m right on the precipice between pursuing as much ML knowledge as I can and trying to get a pHd (probably eventually do an ML spin-off), versus trying to crypto startup earn-to-give ala FTX Sam.
I and two of my friends are on the precipice of our careers right now. We are senior CS majors at MIT, and next year we’re all doing our Master’s here and have been going back and forth on what to pick.
All of us have heavily considered AI of course. I’m torn between that and Distributed Systems/Cryptography things to do Earn to Give. I’ve been mostly on the AI side of things until today.
This post has singlehandedly convinced two of us (myself included) to not work on AI or help with AI alignment, as if Eliezer, an expert in that field. is correct, then it’s hopeless for us to try. So our only hope is that he’s wrong and the field is somewhat ridiculous or easily solved.
We’re just two people, so it might not mean the world of difference. But I’m sure we’re not the only ones who this /type/ of message will reach.
I made an account just to post this, so I’m not sure if it will abide by the rules (I didn’t mean for this to be an arguing against people thing) or be deleted. But thought I should post the actual real world impact this piece had on two young AI-prospectives.