Holden Karnofsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…There's a famous comedian who has a bit where he's imagining what it must have been like to live in 10BC. Let's say somebody comes with the proof that current deep learning techniques are not scalable for some reason and that transformative AI is very unlikely this century. I don't know if this is a hypothetical where that would happen, but let's just say that it is. Even if this is a weird time in terms of economic growth, does that have any implications other than transformative AI? I encourage people to go to my series because I have a bunch of charts illustrating this and it could be a little bit hard to do concisely now. But having learned about just how strange the time we live in is when you look at it in context, I think the biggest thing I take away from this is how we should really look for the next big thing. If you'd been living 300 years ago and you'd been talking about the best way to help people, a lot of people might have been talking about various forms of helping low-income people. They probably would have been talking about spreading various religious beliefs. It would have seemed crazy to think that what you should be thinking about, for example, was the steam engine and how that might change the world, but I think the Industrial Revolution was actually an enormous deal and was probably the right thing to be thinking about if there's any way to be thinking about it how that would change the world and what one might do to make that a world that could be better. So that's basically where I'm at. I just think that as a world, as a global civilization, we should place a really high priority on saying that we live in a weird time. Growth has been exploding, accelerating over the last blink of an eye. We really need to be nervous and vigilant about what comes next and think about all the things that could radically transform the world. We should make a list of all the things that might radically transform the world, make sure we've done everything we can to think about them and identify the ways we might be able to do something today that would actually help. Maybe after we're done doing all that, we can have a lot of the world's brightest minds doing their best to think of stuff and when can't think of any more, then we can go back to all the other things that we worry about Right now the world invests so little in that kind of speculative, “Hey, what's the next big thing?” Even if it's not super productive to do so, even if there's not that much to learn, I feel the world should be investing more in that because the stakes are extremely high. I think it’s a reasonable guess that we're living in a world that's recently been incredibly transformed by the Industrial Revolution and the future could be incredibly transformed by the next thing. I just don't think this gets a lot of discussion in basically any circles. If it got some, I would feel a lot more comfortable. I don't think the whole world should just obsess over what the next transformative event is, but I think right now there's so little attention to it. I'm glad you brought up the Industrial Revolution because I feel like there are two implicit claims within the most important century thesis that don't seem perfectly compatible. One is that we live in an extremely wild time and that the transition here is potentially wilder than any other transition there has been before. The second is we have some sense of what we can be doing to make sure this transition goes well. Do you think that somebody at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, knowing what they knew then, could have done something significant to make sure that it went as favorably as possible? Or do you think that that's a bad analogy for some reason?…

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