#6: FTX collapse, value lock-in, and counterarguments to AI x-risk

Future Matters

Future Matters is a newsletter about longtermism by Matthew van der Merwe and Pablo Stafforini. Each month we curate and summarize relevant research and news from the community, and feature a conversation with a prominent researcher. You can also subscribe on Substack, read on the EA Forum and follow on Twitter. Future Matters is also available in Spanish. 00:00 Welcome to Future Matters. 01:05 A message to our readers. 01:54 Finnveden, Riedel & Shulman — Artificial general intelligence and lock-in. 02:33 Grace — Counterarguments to the basic AI x-risk case. 03:17 Grace — Let’s think about slowing down AI. 04:18 Piper — Review of What We Owe the Future. 05:04 Clare & Martin — How bad could a war get? 05:26 Rodríguez — What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would cause technological stagnation? 06:28 Ord — What kind of institution is needed for existential security? 07:00 Ezell — A lunar backup record of humanity. 07:37 Tegmark — Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war. 08:31 Hobbhahn — The next decades might be wild. 08:54 Karnosfky — Why would AI "aim" to defeat humanity? 09:44 Karnosfky — High-level hopes for AI alignment. 10:27 Karnosfky — AI safety seems hard to measure. 11:10 Karnosfky — Racing through a minefield. 12:07 Barak & Edelman — AI will change the world, but won’t take it over by playing “3-dimensional chess”. 12:53 Our World in Data — New page on artificial intelligence. 14:06 Luu — Futurist prediction methods and accuracy. 14:38 Kenton et al. — Clarifying AI x-risk. 15:39 Wyg — A theologian's response to anthropogenic existential risk. 16:12 Wilkinson — The unexpected value of the future. 16:38 Aaronson — Talk on AI safety. 17:20 Tarsney & Wilkinson — Longtermism in an infinite world. 18:13 One-line summaries. 25:01 News. 28:29 Conversation with Katja Grace. 28:42 Could you walk us through the basic case for existential risk from AI? 29:42 What are the most important weak points in the argument? 30:37 Comparison between misaligned AI and corporations. 32:07 How do you think people in the AI safety community are thinking about this basic case wrong? 33:23 If these arguments were supplemented with clearer claims, does that rescue some of the plausibility? 34:30 Does the disagreement about basic intuitive case for AI risk undermine the case itself? 35:34 Could describe how your views on AI risk have changed over time? 36:14 Could you quantify your credence in the probability of existential catastrophe from AI? 36:52 When you reached that number, did it surprise you?