Ben Todd: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's quite the double bank shot if it is. Let's do maybe just a minute of marketing for the AI companies, or at least I will. Obviously, all those top cause areas that you laid out are downside risks. And I think 80,000 hours, fair to say, has been associated with downside prevention or downside mitigation over time. Is it fair to say that is in part because, speaking for myself, my gut says if we can avoid all those problems, we're going to have it pretty good. And I don't know what life is going to look like. It's definitely kind of a fuzzy picture. I do think one of my own personal cause areas that I recommend all the time is just trying to develop more concrete visions of what a positive future and of rewarding life in the context of AGI abundance could look like. But are you coming at it from the same perspective where your belief is like there is a lot of upside as long as we make it to the other side of some transition? Or how do you think about upside, making sure we realize the upside. Do we need to or does it just take care of itself? Yeah, in general, I just want to focus on whatever has the most impact, which could be increasing upside or it could be avoiding downsides. And the question is just, what are the best opportunities right now? And yeah, my, maybe this is going to get too theoretical, but I think it's interesting. So there's like, you can think of roughly two ways to improve the future. there's speeding it up. So there's like bringing better future earlier in time. And then there's making sure it happens at all or changing where it ends up in the final reckoning. And yeah, there's this interesting point that if you think the future is going to get way better in the future and you can speed that up one year, it doesn't only help people now, it helps, it actually means you have one extra year of that great future. And Beth Jesus actually makes this point in the AI doc. He's, well, we need to develop AI ASAP because we're bringing forward the glorious future of everyone being in space and like crazy technology and all these things. And this is the argument that Nick Austrum makes in Astronomical Waste. And that is the astronomical waste he's talking about. But then there's like a second-half of the paper where he points out that we're going to get to this great future. it up only gets you like a little bit extra of that. But if you can avoid an extinction risk that means the whole future never happens at all, that's like way higher value if you actually believe in this better future. And so yeah, like I was joking that Beth Jesus is like someone, he's read the first half of Astronomical Waste, but then kind of got bored and didn't read the second-half where this is natural to focus on. And Toby Ord has a paper where he works this through in more detail. So that's the very high level perspective I come at this with is like AI development is already going extremely fast. And by working on just bringing that a little bit earlier, that's not having that big an effect on the world. If there's these risks that might jeopardize the entire future, and that might be a lot better because of this technology, then there's like huge value in reducing those risks. And then at the same time, that's way more neglected because as we just said, there's already like a million or so people just working on accelerating AI capabilities, but the number of people trying to avoid these big downside risks is in the thousands. And so that's, yeah, that's how we see the basic case for focusing on those right now. Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr…

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