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lemonhope
Karma: 1,326
Almost all growth is exponential growth
Nobody has a deal where they’ll pay you to not take an offer from an AI lab right? I realize that would be weird incentives, just curious.
Kinda sucks how it is easy to have infinity rules or zero rules but really hard to have a reasonable amount of rules. It reminds me of how I check my email — either every 5 seconds or every 5 weeks.
Could you say more about where the whole sequence is going / what motivated it? I am curious.
I believe I did explain/decompose the underlying mechanism
A simple way to see this: even a relatively crappy factory will make more goods in a month than it & its employees consume in a month. Likewise for farms, mines, fishing vessels, etc etc.
I could also have mentioned that it’s relatively easy for two people to make three.
If someone prints money for themselves, they’ll devalue their currency, but they won’t be making factories less productive.
Intel makes more stuff than they use, no technical progress required.
I should’ve said “a dollar’s worth of stuff can produce 1.03 dollar’s worth of stuff”. That would have been more clear.
Easy to say when you’re already known by almost everyone in your world, have total career security, and have a full-sized family! I’ve never really done teaser links, but I can see why anyone would. You’re more likely to gain some reputation or a job or a spouse if the reader goes to your website and sees your name there at the top.
Also, in terms of value to the reader: my life has changed in a big way because of a blog post I read two times that I can think of, but never from Twitter, despite spending more time reading Twitter than blogs by now. When I see something important on Twitter, I usually bookmark it and forget about it; when I see something important in a blog post, I often act. This is my own fault, but I suspect it’s a common experience. Infinite scroll certainly doesn’t help.
No that should be one of the fastest and most cachable queries
I appreciate this post very much! What a great question you have found. Some old thoughts I had on this topic came back to me.
Personally I think of wealth as neither extractive nor hyper-efficient. I think of it as blind dumb compounding growth. A dollar has a lifespan of 1 year and bears 1.07 offspring in that time. A simple way to see this: even a relatively crappy factory will make more goods in a month than it & its employees consume in a month. Likewise for farms, mines, fishing vessels, etc etc. If nothing major goes wrong, money just grows, like a pile of rabbits if the air were made of carrots. Sometimes there’s lots of opportunity to be clever and bump up a couple productivity notches and go rags to riches. Other times there’s no low fruit on the technological/economic tech tree and you can only get richer quick by stealing/scamming/pillaging. But the core dynamic is that it’s relatively easy for anyone to make more than they use, once they have 1/.07=14x their annual spending available as liquid cash (or tied up in decent investments).
This is all because we live in a universe that clearly wants things to happen. We have the greatest endowment ever, a whole damn star, and others nearby! Nuclear energy sitting in the ground if you need cash fast. It’s better than ZIRP, better than a stimulus check! You don’t even have to find a trade partner; you can use it directly to do anything you want, no questions asked. No credit check or collateral. No minimum hours per week; in fact, nothing is asked in exchange at all; you couldn’t give anything back even if you tried — usable energy seems to only go down — but we start with so much that it won’t matter for a trillion years.
This notion hasn’t made me rich and it’s not much use for my day-to-day decisions, but I think it does describe the reality I see. My parent’s friends are all rich (compared to young people) from a lifetime of saving, even the dumb ones. Half the crappy stocks I owned doubled simply because the companies stayed in business; if energy is free then “stay in business” is all you need to do once you reach $10M in annual profits or so. If an individual holds more than ~$100M, they’ll make a good profit indiscriminately investing in every single startup and land offering that shows up in their face: with compounding growth and diminishing losses, the losses just don’t really matter. This seems to me to essentially be the fundamental law of our universe, at least until some pine tree is tall enough to block out everyone’s light at once. (That pine tree may only be 1-4 years away now.)
Wrt swimsuit+umbrella, I feel similarly to Dave Orr. I don’t see why eg the matter of AI Safety vs Global Health has to be settled. Effective altruism is more coherent IMO than most social movements and even some governments (eg I know someone who is paid by the US federal govt to help immigrants avoid ICE). I don’t know if coherence much beyond the current level can be achieved without just falling into blind ideology. Even a very thoughtful and rational collective decision making process might be worse than the current chaotic one, due to missed opportunities. You disagree?
I am glad to see somebody make the point properly. It’s a weird state of affairs. We know the models can implement PoCs for CVEs better than most coders. We know the models can persuade people pretty effectively. Obviously the models can spread and change very easily. It’s also easy for a rogue deployment to hide because datacenter GPUs draw 70W idle and update scripts constantly use tons of bandwidth. There’s just no urgency to any of it.
How do you measure results?
If you wanted to take this idea to an absurd level, you could install a dropped ceiling made partially of furnace filters, and a grid of fans above it. Maybe have the outer perimeter of fans blowing up and the inner area blowing down, to try to get one large convection through the entire room.
How do you figure out the optimal filter thickness? If you hypothetically had a very weak fan then it wouldn’t push much air through even furnace filters. If you had a magic constant air flow source then you would want the thickest filter possible.
I guess I am just wondering if you could use something better-looking and cheaper, like semi-transparent paper with lights behind it or a washable sheet/tapestry.
Have you heard of Big Ass Fans? It’s a company that makes what you would expect. Do you think your ceiling fan filter could work with a 30ft fan?
What is the current popular (or ideally wise) wisdom wrt publishing demos of scary/spooky AI capabilities? I’ve heard the argument that moderately scary demos drive capability development into secrecy. Maybe it’s just all in the details of who you show what when and what you say. But has someone written a good post about this question?
Einstein started doing research a few years before he actually had his miracle year. If he started at 26, he might have never found anything. He went to physics school at 17 or 18. You can’t go to “AI safety school” at that age, but if you have funding then you can start learning on your own. It’s harder to learn than (eg) learning to code, but not impossibly hard.
I am not opposed to funding 25 or 30 or 35 or 40 year olds, but I expect that the most successful people got started in their field (or a very similar one) as a teenager. I wouldn’t expect funding an 18-year-old to pay off in less than 4 years. Sorry for being unclear on this in original post.
I don’t have a witty, insightful, neutral-sounding way to say this. The grantmakers should let the money flow. There are thousands of talented young safety researchers with decent ideas and exceptional minds, but they probably can’t prove it to you. They only need one thing and it is money.
They will be 10x less productive in a big nonprofit and they certainly won’t find the next big breakthrough there.
(Meanwhile, there are becoming much better ways to make money that don’t involve any good deeds at all.)
My friends were a good deal sharper and more motivated at 18 than now at 25. None of them had any chance at getting grants back then, but they have an ok shot now. At 35, their resumes will be much better and their minds much duller. And it will be too late to shape AGI at all.
I can’t find a good LW voice for this point but I feel this is incredibly important. Managers will find all the big nonprofits and eat their gooey centers and leave behind empty husks. They will do this quickly, within a couple years of each nonprofit being founded. The founders themselves will not be spared. Look how the writing of Altman or Demis changed over the years.
The funding situation needs to change very much and very quickly. If a man has an idea just give him money and don’t ask questions. (No, I don’t mean me.)
Wasted opportunity to guarantee this post keeps getting holywar comments for the next hundred years.
This is pretty inspiring to me. Thank you for sharing.
OK I’ll bite. Memes and genes are obvious enough, but why is the rate of technological improvement proportional to the current technological level (or basically zero)? Don’t ideas get harder to find?
Well Big Ideas do get harder to find, but if you make a 1% improvement to the US’s steel production, then you get an extra 800,000 tons of steel. That doesn’t help you think up new improvements but it does mean that the next 1% improvement will yield 808,000 tons.
Basically, any cost reduction or speedup or quality improvement is on top of what you have. How would you save a silicon foundry $500,000 flat, without saving them more money as they expand? Maybe you could get a one-time government grant or a one-time supplier discount. You have to do a lot of one-time things like this for it to add up to anything significant.
Consider a technological improvement that seems to be constant or linear. Say you come up with a voltage regulator that uses 1 microwatt less than its predecessor. There’s two reasons this isn’t actually so linear. First, the total power consumption reduction is proportional to the number of times that circuit is used across all chips/devices. Second, if someone later finds a 1% power save across all transistors, then your little circuit will probably get that improvement too. It ends up being like a deposit into a savings account with interest.
If your savings account doesn’t have interest, then you probably will never be a millionaire from small deposits. If some branch of technology hasn’t found a few sequential compounding improvements then it probably won’t go anywhere.