Ben Todd: prediction

Transcript context

…As one kind of calibration point too for just how helpful AI can be on some of these things, I'll say, we'll put that in the show notes. And then the show notes these days are now fully AI generated, generally not even really reviewed by me, but they do tend to come out with a couple dozen links. So all of the organizations that we've mentioned, you're like the list of lists that you mentioned, I think that Claude will be able to find that with some help from the Brave Search API, I should say, and that all that stuff will be in there. And if you go check that out, know that I probably didn't look at it between now and the time that it hits the website, which means that there could be some errors in there. I wouldn't say you should trust it to be fully comprehensive or fully error-free, but that kind of scale of project, I'm confident enough now, just letting the AI run with, and it's clear that it's doing a pretty good job and adding value even to the point where I'm usually a bit precious about publishing AI stuff without a review, but at the helpful links level, it's reliable to the point where I let it fly. Do you think much, we've focused obviously very squarely on these big picture risks from AI and what to do about it. I know that you also have over time put a lot of thought into other ways to help people and the world and there's been 80,000 hours career guides for how to help the global poor and improve public health and improve animal welfare and all those sorts of things. If somebody is really interested in those topics, but also is developing an AI skill set, how much room do you think there is to go apply AI for those organizations that are executing already in those different domains? My guess would be that they probably have not caught up to the AI frontier or anywhere close in a lot of cases, although I could be wrong. What would you say is the state of just mundane opportunity to apply AI for mundane, but ideally well chosen causes and make a difference that way? Yeah, I do think the skill set of managing teams of AI agents to do real work is, that's going to be one of the most valuable skill sets of the next few years. And you can apply that skill set to any problem. And I think you're right that most industries are still and fields are still not really applying AI anywhere near where they could be. And you could work on global poverty, but just be an expert in doing it as effectively as possible using the best tools. And those tools will also, they'll continue to get better. So your leverage will increase as AI improves. But yeah, in general, I think there is a bit of a disconnect here because The people who want to work on these other issues tend to kind of like, there's a reason why they don't want to bet on AI being the key thing. Often they want to do something that's more grounded or evidence backed or common sense. And then that same thing would like also prevent them from wanting to make a big bet on AI being a steal. Because if you did believe that, then it's like, it's harder to see the case for these issues in some ways. If we avoid concentration of power and loss of control of autonomous AI and a massive bio attack and all of these things, then we're probably going to end up in a world that is far wealthier than today because we'll have this massive population of digital workers who can hopefully give us super good advice about all these problems. And I mean, many economic models show that you would, if you really work that through, you could easily have GDP that's 100, even 1000 times more than what it is today, eventually, potentially even higher. And yeah, part of the way that happens is just that loads of goods services become basically free because you just get the models become rapidly commoditized and just it's like very small cost of compute to get basically world class services. This is like eventually where it goes on any topic. And then you have robots that produce goods far more cheaply than now because the robot eventually costs like a dollar an hour, whereas human workers are like $10 or $20 an hour. And that just makes it a lot easier to reduce poverty because the world is much richer, everything is much cheaper. And that will make a huge difference to reducing it by itself. The main kind of lever there would be just making sure that the global poor don't get cut out of the kind of AI windfall, which that kind of gets us back to the concentration of power stuff, because I do think there is a good chance that America really draws ahead of other countries. And it's not particularly guaranteed that they share the benefits with the rest of the world. but making sure that everyone would get some of the spillovers because we would get the cheaper services and things like that. larly guaranteed that they share the benefits with the rest of the world. but making sure that everyone would get some of the spillovers because we would get the cheaper services and things like that. But sometimes I talk about this is another policy idea is like eventually we want to work towards there being a grand bargain on AI where all the major countries agree not to race and struggle over it in exchange for sharing of the benefits among everyone. And if we could come to that type of agreement, it could reduce the risks a lot and also be a not avoid concentration of power and be like a fair outcome for people. And I think working on something like that would be more what comes to mind for me when I think about what could be a really high leverage neglected thing to help with global poverty these days. But it comes back to a more AI focused approach rather than just going and using AI to distribute malaria next another like 10% more efficiently. Though, I mean, that's still a good thing to do, but it's not what comes to mind to me as like the highest leverage thing you could do if you're really taking AGI seriously.…

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