Is it crazy to claim we're in the most important century‪?‬ Alignment Newsletter Podcast

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com
More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg
 
HIGHLIGHTS The "most important century" series (Holden Karnofsky) (summarized by Rohin): In some sense, it is really weird for us to claim that there is a non-trivial chance that in the near future, we might build transformative AI and either (1) go extinct or (2) exceed a growth rate of (say) 100% per year. It feels like an extraordinary claim, and thus should require extraordinary evidence. One way of cashing this out: if the claim were true, this century would be the most important century, with the most opportunity for individuals to have an impact. Given the sheer number of centuries there are, this is an extraordinary claim; it should really have extraordinary evidence. This series argues that while the claim does seem extraordinary, all views seem extraordinary -- there isn’t some default baseline view that is “ordinary” to which we should be assigning most of our probability.
Specifically, consider three possibilities for the long-run future:
1. Radical: We will have a productivity explosion by 2100, which will enable us to become technologically mature. Think of a civilization that sends spacecraft throughout the galaxy, builds permanent settlements on other planets, harvests large fractions of the energy output from stars, etc.
2. Conservative: We get to a technologically mature civilization, but it takes hundreds or thousands of years. Let’s say even 100,000 years to be ultra conservative.
3. Skeptical: We never become technologically mature, for some reason. Perhaps we run into fundamental technological limits, or we choose not to expand into the galaxy, or we’re in a simulation, etc.
It’s pretty clear why the radical view is extraordinary. What about the other two?
The conservative view implies that we are currently in the most important 100,000-year period. Given that life is billions of years old, and would presumably continue for billions of years to come once we reach a stable galaxy-wide civilization, that would make this the most important 100,000 year period out of tens of thousands of such periods. Thus the conservative view is also extraordinary, for the same reason that the radical view is extraordinary (albeit it is perhaps only half as extraordinary as the radical view).
The skeptical view by itself does not seem obviously extraordinary. However, while you could assign 70% probability to the skeptical view, it seems unreasonable to assign 99% probability to such a view -- that suggests some very strong or confident claims about what prevents us from colonizing the galaxy, that we probably shouldn’t have given our current knowledge. So, we need to have a non-trivial chunk of probability on the other views, which still opens us up to critique of having extraordinary claims.
Okay, so we’ve established that we should at least be willing to say something as extreme as “there’s a non-trivial chance we’re in the most important 100,000-year period”. Can we tighten the argument, to talk about the most important century? In fact, we can, by looking at the economic growth rate.
You are probably aware that the US economy grows around 2-3% per year (after adjusting for inflation), so a business-as-usual, non-crazy, default view might be to expect this to continue. You are probably also aware that exponential growth can grow very quickly. At the lower end of 2% per year, the economy would double every ~35 years. If this continued for 8200 years, we'd need to be sustaining multiple economies as big as today's entire world economy per atom in the universe. While this is not a priori impossible, it seems quite unlikely to happen. This suggests that we’re in one of fewer than 82 centuries that will have growth rates at 2% or larger, making i