Recent Discussion

If a technology may introduce catastrophic risks, how do you develop it?

It occurred to me that the Wright Brothers’ approach to inventing the airplane might make a good case study.

The catastrophic risk for them, of course, was dying in a crash. This is exactly what happened to one of the Wrights’ predecessors, Otto Lilienthal, who attempted to fly using a kind of glider. He had many successful experiments, but one day he lost control, fell, and broke his neck.

Otto Lilienthal gliding experiment. Wikimedia / Library of Congress

Believe it or not, the news of Lilienthal’s death motivated the Wrights to take up the challenge of flying. Someone had to carry on the work! But they weren’t reckless. They wanted to avoid Lilienthal’s fate. So what was their approach?

First,...

I am working on a project to extract and summarize the best actionable policy recommendations to help accelerate nuclear power development.

I am especially interested in "solutionist" perspectives and ideally focused on or applicable to the US.

Here's what I've got so far:

  • Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop
  • The nuclear policy America Needs (and other blogs by Matt Yglesias)
  • Can Nuclear Power Manage Another Comeback?
  • The Nuclear Energy Option
  • The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future
  • The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear
  • The Breakthrough Institute: Advancing Nuclear Energy, How to Make Nuclear Innovative
  • Report: Planting the Seeds of a Distributed Nuclear Revolution

Any recommendations or leads will be much appreciated!

This is a link post for: https://dda.ndus.edu/ddreview/four-horsemen-of-technological-change-farmers-elevator-operators-coal-miners-bank-tellers/

Technology has changed the dynamic between labor and capital in the broader economy since the Industrial Revolution. The new steam and manufacturing innovations transformed large parts of the economy by explicitly changing the economics of labor and wages—and increasing inequality along the way. Ever since the early 19th century, when Luddites smashed looms out of fear that newfangled machines would decimate their wages and way of life by replacing specific labor, people have been fearful of technological change.

Technofuturists, however, have always dreamed of technology bringing us a brighter future. They envision a day when machines free workers from the drudgery of factory toil, of 10-hour workweeks, and more leisure time to explore their creativity and forge human connections.

Who is right? With...

Hi everyone! Some context on this question: I've been working on making some predictions about the economy of the future, and recently wrote a piece laying out the most aggressive possible case for AI-accelerated automation and job loss.

It's often held as true that new jobs will always replace old ones, though some research by Daron Acemoglu has suggested that technological unemployment can at times outstrip re-employment. I'm interested in tracking both trends over time, and have been thinking of building a tool that that pulls detailed occupational data from the Census' Current Population Survey (specifically to PTIO1OCD variable), and highlights any significant trends (e.g. where might technological unemployment be increasing the most, and where is it being offset by increases in hiring in other occupations?). I'm also...

Earlier this year, I was very fortunate to work on a paper for the Tony Blair Institute in collaboration with Lord Hague. Titled “A New National Purpose”, it laid out a science and tech policy roadmap that we believed the UK needs to embrace in order to stave off further decline.

Much has happened since then which underscores the importance of our argument there. No more so than in Artificial Intelligence. As soon as we had hit publish on the initial report, we were thinking about how we would catch lightning in a bottle again, this time doing a NNP-style paper focused specifically on AI.

AI’s unpredictable development, the rate at which it changes and its ever-increasing power mean its arrival may present the most substantial policy challenge we...

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Authors: Kartik Akileswaran, Jeffrey Mason, Jonathan Mazumdar

Progress Studies (PS) has set out to understand the massive improvement in living standards in recent centuries and how scientific, technological, economic, and institutional factors have influenced that transformation. Naturally, the movement has focused on the places that have experienced these transformations most dramatically – today’s high-income countries. 

But given the need for ever greater investment – financial and human capital – in pushing the knowledge frontier, developing countries with large and growing untapped talent pools will have an increasingly important role to play too. This is why more attention should be paid to catch-up growth in developing countries in the wider PS movement, because it has the potential to influence dynamics at the global frontier and indeed is already affecting the...

I don't think most of these "next einstein" arguments prove what you think they do. 

If you want to increase the chances of string theory breakthroughs, you want to find the sort of people that have a high chance of understanding string theory, and push them even further. If any genetic component is relatively modest, then it becomes mostly pick someone, and throw lots of resources at educating them. If genetics or randomness control a lot, but are easily observed, then it's looking out for young maths prodigies and helping them. 

Ensuring widely s... (read more)

"One day your youngest daughter develops a nasty cough. Smoke from the indoor fire is weakening her lungs. You can’t afford antibiotics, and one month later she is dead. This is extreme poverty." 

— Factfulness, Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund. 

With millions living in Canada and the United States suffering abysmal indoor and outdoor air quality as a result of hundreds of wildfires burning in Quebec, it’s easy to forget that most humans were subjected to crippling indoor air quality for nearly all of history. Our mastery of fire as hunter-gathers provided warmth for heating, cooking, and forging tools; however, it also made air pollution part of our daily life. As...

Will AI kill us all?

This question has rapidly gone mainstream. A few months ago, it wasn’t seriously debated very far outside the rationalist community of LessWrong; now it’s reported in major media outlets including the NY Times, The Guardian, the Times of London, BBC, WIRED, Time, Fortune, U.S. News, and CNBC.

For years, the rationalists lamented that the world was neglecting the existential risk from AI, and despaired of ever convincing the mainstream of the danger. But it turns out, of course, that our culture is fully prepared to believe that technology can be dangerous. The reason AI fears didn’t go mainstream earlier wasn’t society’s optimism, but its pessimism: most people didn’t believe AI would actually work. Once there was a working demo that got sufficient publicity, it...

This essay was written not written for the doomers. It was written for the anti-doomers who are inclined to dismiss any concerns about AI safety at all.

I may write something later about where I agree/disagree with the doom argument and what I think we should actually do.