Publicly pondering about how to spend the next 100 megaseconds before “the discontinuity".

Here are some thoughts about the future, and what people like me should be doing. By people like me, I mean anyone who is:

• Suffering-focused: Not necessarily full neg-utilitarian black-pilled, but someone who prioritizes the elimination of (extreme) suffering as an ethical emergency above other goals.
• Anti-speciesist/anti-substratist: Cares strongly about non-humans, with significant uncertainty about who/what is a moral patient and/or how much.

Thinking about how to steer the future is hard, and I have found these ethical assumptions mostly make things harder. I don't have anything close to complete answers, but these are the main considerations I'm currently tracking:

There is a point at which things stop making sense.

Advanced AI will soon radically transform the world, totally breaking our assumptions about how things work. This shift splits potential impact into two categories[1]:

• Pre-transition: When we can still make sense of things by extrapolating from current trends.
• Post-transition: When the world becomes truly alien, and it becomes increasingly hard to predict ANYTHING from where we are now.

Working to improve either era has its pros and [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) The event horizon

(03:10) Preparing for transition

(05:07) Short-term wins can build momentum

(06:17) The end of semi-anarchy

(10:05) Avoiding the worst outcomes

(11:54) Taking over San Francisco

(13:54) We cant all work at Anthropic

(16:11) Allying with the AIs

(19:18) Conclusion

(20:14) Appendix: Scenarios without lock-in

(20:25) Scenario #1: The treaty

(21:09) Scenario #2: War

(21:57) Scenario #3: Biological weapon ends humanity

(23:10) Appendix: Fighting for team humanity

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First published:

Source:

Linkpost URL:
https://lovedoesnotscale.substack.com/p/how-im-thinking-about-the-next-3

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.