Scott Alexander

Plan A feels like our best hope to do something actually good.

Then, in the mid-2030s, they pause at AIs around the level of top human geniuses. These AIs are close enough to current AIs that the same alignment techniques that mostly-sort-of-work for ours might mostly-sort-of-work for them too... The plan is to ...

Hunting down all existing chips is only slightly harder. Most of these chips are in giant data centers the size of small cities using entire power plants' worth of electricity - so hard to hide. The rest can be traced to their final locations using c...

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...

The new map provides extra evidence for natural origins, showing several previously-unmentioned infected animals and animal vendors. A natural interpretation is that one part of the CCP was trying to cover this up and another part accidentally releas...

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 ...

Still, this is faint praise for a method that hoped to be able to resolve these kinds of disagreements.

For what it's worth, I was close to 50-50 before the debate, and now I'm 90-10 in favor of zoonosis.

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...