Holden Karnofsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…A month. Let's say three months. So it's a little bit more. Yeah, I would find that extremely scary. I kind of feel like that's one of the worlds in which I might not even be able to offer an enormous amount. My job is in philanthropy (and a lot of what philanthropists do historically or have done well historically), is we help fields grow. We help do things that operate on very long timescales. So an example of something Open Philanthropy does a lot of right now is we fund people who do research on alignment and we fund people who are thinking about what it would look like to get through the most important century successfully. A lot of these people right now are very early in their careers and just figuring stuff out. So a lot of the world I picture is like 10 years from now, 20 years from now, or 50 years from now. There's this whole field of expertise that got support when traditional institutions wouldn't support it. That was because of us. Then you come to me and you say, “We've got one week left. What do we do?” I’d be like, “I don't know. We did what we could do. We can’t go back in time and try to prepare for this better. ” So that would be an answer. I could say more specific things about what I'd say in the one to three-month time frame, but a lot of it would be flailing around and freaking out, frankly. Gotcha. Okay. Maybe we can reverse the question. Let's say you found out that AI actually is going to take much longer than you thought, and you have more than five decades. What changes? What are you able to do that you might not otherwise be able to do?…

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