Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI Summer Harvest, published by Cleo Nardo on April 4, 2023 on LessWrong.

Trending metaphor

I've noticed that AI Notkilleveryonists have begun appealing to a new(?) metaphor of an AI Summer Harvest.

Here's the FLI open letter Pause Giant AI Experiments:

Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an "AI summer" in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society.[5] We can do so here. Let's enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.

(source)

And here's Yud talking on the Lex podcast:

If it were up to me I would be like — okay, like this far and no further.

Time for the Summer of AI, where we have planted our seeds and now we wait and reap the rewards of the technology we've already developed, and don't do any larger training runs that that."

(source, time-stamped)

Maybe I'm out-of-the-loop, but I haven't seen this metaphor until recently.

Brief thoughts

I really like the metaphor and this post is a signal-boost. It's concise, easily accessible, and immediately intuitive. It represents a compromise (Hegelian synthesis?) between decelerationist and acelerationist concerns.

We should call it a "AI Summer Harvest" because "AI Summer" is an existing phrase referrring to fast AI development — trying to capture an existing phrase is difficult, confusing, and impolite.

Buying time is more important than anything else, including alignment research! I believe we should limit AI development to below 0.2 OOMs/year. This metaphor succicintly expresses why slowing down won't impose significant economic costs.

The benefits of an AI Summer Harvest should be communicated clearly and repeatedly to policy-makers and the general public. It should be the primary angle by which we communicate decelerationism to the public.

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