Hey, good list fellow traveler.

In the spirit of collaboration, might I just add a few that came to mind. They may have occurred to you and simply not met your criteria.

Ecocide and ecological destruction is a broader issue than climate change. Perhaps, that is the worst of the bunch, but I believe that industrial scale destruction of land, air, and water is noteworthy. Look at eg. ocean acidification, poisoned water shelves, soil erosion, bio-accumulation of forever chemicals. I find that EA can be kind of a contrarian space such that when ecological issues are brought up it is mostly to emphasize how little we care, but these are public goods we all rely on and the piper will demand a certain level of payment.

Also, people should work less. They should have better conditions. A significant fraction of the world does back breaking work for shit money and that's not utopian. A bunch of the work is pretty much pointless anyways, it's just that the workers lives aren't considered worthwhile because they are poor.

People should live longer lives and have less disease.

People should have more friends and better communities. A lot of people smoke cigarettes and scroll Facebook and they'd probably rather do something better in a more perfect world.

There should be less war.

Also, a few points where I at least superficially disagree with you:

1. "growth" as such is not an obvious target to me. I feel there is a bit of slight of hand here where what people mean to say is "it is good when more good stuff happens" and what they end up saying is "it is good when commerce of any kind happens". You actually approach some of the most significant aspects of this critique in your critique of slave cotton and cruel farms, so I suspect we're not as far apart on this as we could be.

GDP for example often comes up as the implied metric of "economic growth" and I would argue that it actually includes a lot of bad things as well. Doing evil commerce is bad. Enclosing previously non-economic spheres of life such that they are now added to the index is bad. All manner of environmental destruction and poisoning the commons are bad and the long term negative impacts are not suitably captured by this index. Working people into pain and despair is bad. And depending on what is actually being produced, elements of this index can also just be irrelevant or unnecessary for the further increase of human living standards.

It feels like a case of "graph madness" to simplify the whole world into just "more stuff" being produced and to be a complete nihilist about what that stuff actually is. Certainly, some forms of production are more or less essential to human well being. I would argue there's not much reason to think that this index captures all of that nuance even under relatively favorable "graph world" assumptions. In the real world, especially given you've already shown a commendable willingness to differentiate between "who has wealth right now" and "morality", it seems even less likely that GDP would have much to say in the face of these obstacles.

I would argue that these problems are so deep that it is not even productive as short hand to say that it is good in terms of human well being when GDP goes up. I found your explanation really appealingly parsimonious and I'm not being facetious when I say it resonated more than most cases for growth.

"Economic growth means increasing the amount of goods that a society produces. This increases how resources people have, which increases their quality of life."

But I would invite you to maybe interrogate:

1. If that is what growth means, a lot of economic activity is bullshit. Environmentally harmful activities could easily leave us with less. If we are doing commerce instead of something else, the pie might not have grown at all so much as become commercialized.
2. Even if the pie did get bigger, rising tides need not lift all ships. Consider the case of eg. wages stagnation, cost of living rises, and investors hoovering up all of the actual profit being made; arguably kind of the default case. I would argue it is in general quite relevant who is materially benefiting from commerce/industry and "growing the pie" is just a bulwark against this kind of analysis. Real, "don't look behind the curtain" shit.
3. There are a lot of things other than commerce that make life worth living. If I work more and spend more, that's more commerce, but I would often enjoy my life less.

That's just a cursory sketch of a critique of growth. I hope you kind of see what I'm getting at and why "growth" per say might not be exactly worth aiming for in its own right.

To be really honest, I would go as far as to say the idea of "growth" / GDP as the one true economic index is often employed as sort of just a cynical "pro-wealthy people" talking point. There are certainly true believers, but also it has received a lot financial funding and laundered prestige it doesn't deserve. In my humble opinion, that's sort of a recurring problem within the ~"science" of economics; loads of "Nobel" Prize winning economists have said things to that effect. Would you believe it, according to the king's top wealth scientist, it's actually really good that the king is wealthy lol. I critique because I love; my undergrad minor was econ and I am a serial econ book enjoyer, but I also read books about con artists lol.

2. Slavery never ended in the United States. Chattel slavery did, but forced work of men in chains under threat of violence and torture happens every day until we stop it.

Sometimes they pay them shit money, <$1 a day, but not always. Personally, I don't really see why they bother except so that it can be brought up in conversations like this. It's an obviously insulting amount of money and there is no pretext of consent. I guess it's the same logic as growth in a way, "commerce washes all sins". The real reason the convicts work is to avoid being assaulted by the guards and/or thrown into solitary.

The 13th amendment explicitly allows this and under US jurisprudence this is justified as a legal form of slavery. In the end, the civil war just sort of nationalized the slave trade and changed how it operates a bit. They still pick cotton and everything.

Not that it matters, but 90%+ of these people aren't even alleged to have done anything violent. And they sure ain't white collar crimes either lol. For whatever reason, people mostly don't care about slavery as long as it's happening to the right people I guess. I think most people don't really know because a prison is the perfect place to hide a bunch of people in chains and you get taught in school that slavery is over. They do work for the federal government and also private corporations like Walmart and McDonald's [https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e].

You already touched on prison reform, so forgive me for preaching to the converted.

Solid list! Good to have you as an accomplice!

Brilliant. "maintaining access to the frontier of animal suffering" is so cursed it made me laugh out loud. So many gems here.

I believe Anthropic engages in quite aggressive anti-regulation lobbying with one side of it's mouth even as it's all like "oh no, our products are delivering too much value, we're so scared" with the other. And ya, literally pushing forward the frontier all the time to attract investment is suspiciously similar to what an evil company would do, so thank god we know they're on our side.

I find the "make money doing evil stuff, but be slightly less evil than the imagined counterfactual" theory of change sort of mesmerizing. I can kind of imagine versions of it that work on paper maybe in a sort of trolley problem way, but it smells too clever by half.

In the actual case of AI companies:

• It is not obvious how much the existence of Anthropic is zero-sum relative to the rest of the capabilities sector. Part of the case has to be that they exist more or less instead of some other actor, but they might just be increasing the total supply of digital minds. Even if their specific competitors today don't like them, they could still be contributing to the power of the industry through their contribution to eg. tool use through MCP, to the general lobbying accelerationist effort, to the talent pool / salaries of capabilities work, creating demand for LLM products, attracting investment etc. Even if eventually there is only room for a few AI firms, they are all unprofitable money pits right now anyway, so it probably isn't easy to displace someone else and they could basically be growing the space more than displacing nefarious actors.

• It is not obvious that Anthropic produces lower x-risk per dollar invested or token produced or whatever metric than their competitors. I mean, maybe. They write some thoughtful blog posts and some insane nationalist ones, I like some of their "safety" research. The bar is really low, I kind of hate Google and Sam Altman is a known abuser (employees have said so, he lies constantly, and his sister credibly claims he sexually assaulted her). But, if you entertain the perspective that actually ~all of their production ready "safety" work is unserious in the face of the alignment / disempowerment problems at stake, then it could easily just be a wash. Like, buying from a factory farm with 20% more thumb twiddling, but essentially the same approach to mass torture.

And between those two objections, there's nothing really left to be said for the "make money doing evil stuff, but be slightly less evil than the imagined counterfactual" theory of change. I will caveat that I personally lack strong confidence on how this nets out per say... generally I think the "it's bad to do evil stuff" case wins on simplicity. Maybe, like, a true fast follower company that mostly just distilled and did for-profit safety and security work would be cool.

I tend to think safety-washing or moral cover aren't necessarily a huge deal for the companies because EA's brand isn't that important to most people and AI Safety isn't that important to most people. Like, I don't know that the talent-attracting boost from not being evil is such a big deal. Nihilistic companies do evil stuff all the time in my opinion. Meta was using their LLMs to sensually chat up kids (fully automated grooming! robo-pedos!) and it only made their hiring a little bit harder. I'm sure there are plenty of creeps who know ML or schmucks who can be made to look the other way for a check.

But I will say, I think the whole "good guy with an ASI company" line of thinking and the for-profit interests promoting it may have significantly corroded the EA AI Safety scene itself and it's ability to judge right from wrong. 80,000 Hours consultation recommended that I just get any "ops" job at Google s long as it vaguely related to AI, like wtf. So much for careful philosophy, y'know, just get right up to the finish line and say "ya, idk, I guess just try to be a lab aid for who-ever is making the deadliest humanoid viruses". Look at how much hate Holly Elmore got for promoting moratorium advocacy as a cause area. And the level of conflict of interest going all the way to the very top of eg. Coefficient Giving, CEA was never "epistemically virtuous" shall we say; seems sort of corrupt.

Just a few thoughts. Really good satire. Thanks!

Hey, you seem so sincere, enthusiastic, and well meaning. I appreciate that; one of the things I love about this forum is how many people on here are trying to "save the world" in various sincere ways.

I apologize because I haven't actually read the Abundance book, but I am familiar with the ideas and I used to listen to Ezra Klein's NYT feed pretty often around the time it came out.

Where I agree:

• better government services would be better; responsive government is good
• instilling broadly positive bureaucratic norms (whatever that means)
• probably zoning regulations should be more aggressively pro-housing, but I recognize there are trade offs there. I particularly like cheap prefab housing like Graceland portable buildings for example, but also urban infill generally seems broadly good to me.
• pro-social scientific research is often good and maybe national governments should fund it more
• the opportunity costs of delaying regulatory approval for medicine are often horrific; nations should probably have international reciprocity around drug testing; rapid turn around time for vaccines is a top priority of our time for both normal healthcare and plague prevention reasons
• sometimes the state stands in the way of productive activity which would occur otherwise. For example, I did scouting as a kid and I can build a small shelter out of branches and brush in about an afternoon. It is a shame that it is illegal merely to even be homeless and that it is often illegal to improve land.

Where I disagree:

• This shouldn't be a priority for EA. Supply-side progressivism via deregulation is distant from priority areas like global poverty abolition, existential risk prevention, and animal welfare. The benefits of eg. reforming zoning policy would be very indirect at best and yet it's already backed by Open Phil and Emergent Ventures. I do not think there is a case that this should not prioritized more by scope sensitive, broad moral circle philanthropists on the margins.
• Abundance is not neglected. It is an extremely mainstream idea popular within the democratic party in the US and elsewhere. It is also not terribly new if you don't mind my saying so. It is the current poster child of self-identified "center left reformists" who hold a good number of seats in the US legislature. It also already gets a lot of corporate sponsorship from tech and oil money.
• There is not an infinite well of purely technocratic government cruft you can just keep cutting for more free lunches; you will hit a lot of very real tradeoffs very immediately.
  • Environmental health and safety is under-prioritized at least as often as it is over-prioritized. For example, there are well known contemporary stories about unacceptable lead pollution levels or entire poor black neighborhoods being suffocated by fumes at the mere whimsy of a tech oligarch. You hit real tradeoffs quickly and one could be forgiven for not agreeing that there is an infinite spool of environmental red tape left to cut.
  • Federal procurement requirements may or may not be overused as a policy tool. I don't have strong feelings here and it feels like a purely technocratic point. It is probably not a silver bullet, but I share your enthusiasm for excellence in government.
• I strongly disagree with the assertions you are making about "economic growth" as a singular target for welfare. That doesn't pass muster. Especially not to the exclusion of a focus on wealth inequality.
• Raising people's material standard of living is more complicated than this book and this post acknowledges. I don't really think that there are credible solutions to cost of living questions on offer here. For example, I think there are unaddressed tensions and unstated assumptions related to whether lowering prices is actually desirable. Lower housing prices could harm homeowners and lowering the CPI is considered contractionary.

That's just my 2 cents. Hopefully some of that made sense :)

What could be more topical on the EAF than the theory of change and ethics of Anthropic PBC?

You were very thorough and I think the listicle format worked well. I largely agree with what you laid out here and I appreciate you doing the footwork of making so much of this more explicit / legible. 

A lot of this stuff feels shady and even cuts against certain justifications I have heard for Anthropic recently from eg. Holden Karnofsky on 80k and Joe Carlsmith in his blog post. It definitely seems worth being clear headed about. 

 

There was a lot in here that felt insightful and well considered. 

I agree that thinking about the end state and humanity in the limit is a fruitful area of philosophy with potentially quite important implications. I wrestle with this sort of thing a lot.

One perspective I would note here (I associate this line of thinking with Will McAskill) is that we ought to be immediately aiming for a wiser, more stable sort of middle-ground and then aim for the "end state" from there. I think that can make sense for a lot of practical reasons. I think there is enough of a complex truth to what is and isn't morally good that I am inclined to believe the "moral error as an x-risk" framing and, as such, I tend to place a high premium on option value. I think, given the practical uncertainties of the situation, I feel pretty comfortable aiming for / punting to some more general ""process of wise deliberation" over directly locking my current best guess into the cosmos. 

That said, y'know, we make decisions every day and it is still definitely worth tracking what my current best guess is for what ought actually be done with the physical matter and energy extant in the cosmos. I am partial to much of the substance that you put forward here. 
 

1. "ensuring the ongoing existence of sentience"

   "sentience" is a bit tricky for me to parse, but I will put in for positively valenced subjective experience :) 

2. "gaining total knowledge except that knowledge which requires inducing suffering"

   I mean, sure, why not? I think that sort of thing is cool and inspiring for the most part. There are probably things that would count as "knowledge" to me, but which are so trivial that I wouldn't necessarily care about them much. But, y'know, I will put in for the practical necessity of learning more about the universe as well as the aesthetic/ profound beauty of discovery the rules of the universe and the nature of nature. 

3. "ending all suffering"

   Fuck ya dude! I'm against evil and suffering seems like a central example of that. There may even be more aesthetic or injustice like things that I would consider evil even in the absence of negatively valenced experience per se which I might also entertain abolishing. 

There is a lot to be said about the "end state" which you don't really mention here. Like, for example, I think it is good for people to be really, exceptionally happy if we can swing it. I don't know how to think about population ethics honestly. 

One issue that really bites for me when I try to picture the end of the struggle and the steady end state is:

1. people often intrinsically value reproducing
2. I want immortality
3. Each person may require a minimum subsistence amount of stuff to live happily (even if we shrink everyone or make provably morally relevant simulations or something)
4. Finite materials / scarcity

I have no reasonable way out of this conundrum and I hate biting the "population control" bullet. That reeks of, like, "one child policy" and overpopulation motivated genocides (cf. The Legacy of India’s Quest to Sterilize Millions of Men / Uttawar forced sterilizations). I think concerns in this general vein about the resources people use and the limits to growth are also pretty closely ties to the not uncommon concerns people have around over population / climate heads not wanting to have kids.

Also, to make it less abstract, I will admit that my morals / impulses are fundamentally quite natalist and I would quite like to be a Dad some day. Even if we grant that resource growth exceeds population growth for now, it seems hard to escape the Malthusian trap forever and I think this is a very fundamental tension in the limit.

Wow, I love that you ended your post in questions. I found your thesis compelling; it reminded me of how much value I used to get from more actively networking with and reaching out to people in online EA spaces. Also, I loved that it was short and salient. 

• What helps you ask for help when it feels uncomfortable?

Knowing relevant people who have signaled they are okay being asked for help on a given topic. Having a personalish connection to people. A lack of fear of stigma or social consequence for asking a dumb question that I shouldn't have needed help with. A sense of worthiness that I am even allowed to ask things of other people in this context.

• When was the last time you asked for help, and what happened?

I ask for help multiple times every day. I am a working stiff and my day job is bench work as a technician in a clinical diagnostics lab (microbiology department). I ask the more senior technicians and medical directors for advice constantly, multiple times a day. That usually goes well and people either give me some kind of answer or at least tell me who to ask. The main downside is that it can take up my time and tbh sometimes they don't give me great advice.

Also I ask my wife for help with all the time and that goes great because they are an amazing partner that I am lucky to have! :) I love my wife!

Hey nice! AGI and improvements to representative democracy systems are both right up my alley!

That said, I think the AGI tie in might seem kind of superficial in that having more functional governance and societal coordination mechanisms would help with all sorts of stuff so I think it makes sense to frame this reasonably in a reasonably AGI timeline agnostic sort of way. That said, ya, I see your point that this sort of thing is made all the more dire when thrown into relief by our "time of troubles" and "longtermists on the precipice" style thinking. Your call here, but I am sure it is not necessary to believe random "LLMs will change the world" predictions to believe that certain democratic reforms make sense.

In my experience, a lot of people in online EA spaces are pretty willing to talk to you if you reach out, so I think you'll have decent luck there if that's what you're after. Not as confident about how to find more serious collaborators for a project like this.

A few ideas I would throw out there for the sake of brainstorming (many or all of which you may already be familiar with):

• independent redistricting / anti gerrymandering schemes
• merging voting districts and proportionally allocating positions > requiring majorities (ie. Mixed-member proportional representation) to negate "winner take all"/ minority under representation
• ranked choice / transferable voting to diminish spoiler effect
• open primaries might be a good idea to disincentivize the party system from filtering for radical candidates as hard
• liquid democracy to let people vote directly on issues that matter to them instead of going through their rep at all (eg. imagine being able to disagree with your senator whenever you want and cast your individual .0000002% of a vote directly on whatever issue)
• People talk about quadratic voting too which is probably worth knowing something about from a mechanism design standpoint, but in my opinion doesn't really stand out as a solution to anything on its own without a better way of defining what each actors budget of voting credits would actually need be applied to / split between in any given round.

Also, I definitely second the idea of using a citizen's assembly. In my opinion, the power of random sampling + time to learn about and focus on an issue is really OP and really under utilized by representative democracies. The statistical mathematics around approximating large populations with small random samples are really underutilized here and working in our favor. Honestly, there is tons of adverse selection in the electoral process (eg. this book deals with some elements of that). 

If you haven't seen CGP Grey's "Politics in the Animal Kingdom" series, you might love it! Also the Forward Party in the US tends to push for similar ideas / platforms, so they might be worth checking out.

I think this kind of work is very valuable! Nation states might yet be the death of us. It has been terrible watch the democratic backsliding and corruption in my own US of A (in fact I will be one of the protestors this 10/18 No Kings Day). Plus, I agree with your sentiment that there is a lot of headroom. Personally, I think this has less to do with the rise of cyberspace and more to do with the fact that existing polities were just never particularly optimized around the sorts of ideals we are aspiring towards here. Classical Age Greece and the revolutionary United States were both slave states with a lot of backwards ideas after all.

In the case of a government locking in their own power, it seems like you are holding the motivations constant and just saying "power lets you accumulate more power" or something right?

The obvious dis-analogy here that I am sure you are aware of on some level, but which I didn't really see you foreground here is that in the case of either the pause bootstrap or the constitutional deliberation bootstrap, the motivations of the actors are themselves in flux for this period. There isn't as clear of a story you can tell here necessarily about why acceleration should occur at all, but I take it the implied accelerant to our explosion is something like "additional deliberation/ pausing is factually correct and good" and that "additional deliberation/ pausing will improve epistemic condition". 

Also, let me just flag that the "constitutional conventions of ever greater length" example you gave illustrates a world that is gradually locked in for larger and larger stretches of time not merely one where there is an ever increasing amount of deliberation or something. Like, plausibly, that is an account of gradually sliding into lock in first for a one month interval, then for one year interval, etc.

Good stuff though. I've been wrestling with this kind of morality laden futurology and "what victory looks like" a lot lately, not all in the context of AI but also just against Malthusian traps and the wild state of nature. I tend to agree that viatopia, the great reflection, and any really "any scenario where wise deliberation will occur and be acted upon" are beautiful and desirable waystations.

Ambitious stuff indeed! There's a lot going on here. 

I really appreciate discussions about "big picture strategy about avoiding misalignment". 

For starters, in my opinion, solving technical alignment and control such that one could  elicit the main benefits of having a "superintelligent servant" are merely one threat model / AGI-driven challenge. That said, ofc, getting that sort of thing right also basically means the rest  of the planning is better left to someone else and if you are willing to additionally postulate a strong "decisive strategic advantage" is basically also a win condition for whatever else you could want. 

I would point to eg.

• robo powered ultra tyranny
• gradual disempowerment / full unemployment / the intelligence curse
• misinformation slop /  mass psychosis
• terrorism, scammers, and a flood of many competent robo psychopaths
• machines feeling pain and robot rights
• accelerated R&D and needing to adapt at machine speeds

as issues that can all still bite more or less even in worlds where you get some level "alignment" esp. if you operationalize alignment as more ~"robust instruction tuning++" rather than ~"optimizing for the true moral law itself". 

That said, takeover by rogue models or systems of models is a super salient threat model in any world where machines are being made to "think" more and better.

I found your list of competing framings which cut against AI Safety quite compelling. Safety washing is indeed all over the place. One thing I didn't see noted specifically is that a pretty significant contingency within EA / AI Safety works pretty actively on apologetics for hyperscalers because they directly financially benefit and/or they have kind of groomed themselves into being the kind of person who can work at a top AI Safety lab.

To draw contrast with how this might have been. You don't, for example, see many EAs working at and founding hot new synthetic virology companies in order to "do biocontainment better than the competitors". Ostensibly, there could be a similar grim logic of inevitably and a sense that "we ought to do all of the virology experiments first and more responsibly". Then, idk, once we've built really powerful AIs or learned everything about virology, we can use this to exit the time of troubles. I don't actually know what eg. Anthropic's plan is for this, but in the case of synthetic virology / gain of function research you might imagine that once you've learned the right stuff about all the potential pathogens, you would be super duper prepared to stop them with all your new medical interventions. 

Like, I guess I am just noting my surprise at not seeing good old "keeping safety at the frontier" / "racing through a minefield" Anthropic show up more in a screed about safety washing. The EA/rat space in general is one of the few places where catastrophic risk from AI is a priority and the conflicts of interest here literally could not run deeper. This whole place is largely funded by one of the Meta cofounders and there are a lot of very influential EAs with a lot of personal connection to and complete financial exposure to existing AI companies. This place was a safety adjacent trade show before it was cool lol. 

Lots of loving people here who really care on some level I'm sure, but if we are talking about mixed signals, then I would reconsider the mote in our team's eye lol. 

***

Beyond that, I guess there is the matter of timelines. 

I do not share your confidence in short timelines and think interventions that take a while to pay off can be super worthwhile. 

Also, idk, I feel like the assumption that it is all right around the corner and that any day now the singularity is about to happen is really central to the views of a lot of people into x-safety in a way that might explain part of why the worldview kind of struggles to spread outside the relatively limited pool of people who are open to that. 

I don't know what you'd call marginal or just fiddling around the edges because I would agree that it is bad if we don't do enough soon enough and someone builds a lethally intelligent super mind and it does rise up and game over. 

Maybe the only way to really push for x-safety is with If Anyone Builds It style "you too should believe in and seek to stop the impending singularity" outreach. That just feels like such a tough sell even if people would believe in the x-safety conditional on believing in the singularity. Agh. I'm conflicted here. No idea.

I would love it if we could do more to ally with people who do not see the singularity as being particularly near without things descending into idle "safety washing" nor "trust and safety"-level corporate bullshit. 
Like the "AI is insane hype" contingency has some real stuff going for them too. I don't think they are all just blind. In my humble opinion, I also think Sam Altman looks like an asshole when he calls ChatGPT "PhD level" and talks about it doing "new science". You know, in some sense, if we're just being cute, then Wikipedia has been PhD level for a while now and it makes less shit up. There is a lot of hype. These people are marketing and sometimes they get excited.
 

Plus, it gives me bad vibes when I am trying to push for x-safety and I encounter (often quite justified) skepticism about the power levels of current LLMs and I end up basically just having to do marketing work or whatever for model providers. Idk. 

I'm pretty sure LLM providers aren't even profitable at this point and general robotics isn't obviously much more "right around the corner" than it would've seemed to disinterested layperson over the past few decades. I'm conflicted on this stuff; idk how much effort should go into "singularity is near" vs "if singularity, then doom by default". 

Red lines and RSPs are actually probably a pretty good way of unifying "singularity near" x-safety people with "singularity far" or even "singularity who?" x-safety allies.

***

As far as strategic takeaways:

I do think it is good sense to "be ready" and have good ideas "sitting around" for when they are needed. I believe there was a recent UN general assembly where world leaders were literally asking around for, like, ideas for AI red lines. If this is a world where intelligent machines are rising, then there is a good chance we continue to see signs of that (until we don't). The natural tide of "oh shit guys" and "wow this is real" may be attenuated somewhat by frog boiling effects, but still. Also, the weirdness of AI Safety regulation and such under consideration will benefit from frog boiling.

Preparedness seems like a great idle time activity when the space isn't receiving the love/attention it deserves :) .