Scott Alexander

AI has gone from "dumber than a child" to "expert level" in a few years in many domains. The gap between "expert level" and "above top geniuses" is smaller, so we expect it to take less time. This has been a pattern in fields like chess and Go, where...

I think there's only a 20% chance of an AI-related underclass that lasts more than a generation, let alone a permanent underclass.

If AI doesn't kill us, and there's no permanent dictatorship, and there's no permanent underclass, then we get a post-scarcity society, plus superintelligent AIs that we can set to working on other problems like disease and social decay.

A good pause strategy would involve both sides being able to monitor the other's data centers to prevent illegal training, then limiting training to some slow mutually-agreeable rate that lets alignment researchers thoroughly test each generation of ...

Someday AIs really will be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could...

I think if we were to implement a Basic Income Guarantee we might save more money in psychiatric care than we think – since we compete with the prison system to be the warehouse for people who can’t make it out in the world and nobody knows what to d...