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Sign Flips Are Common For Ambitious Work

jason.ml · 495 words · saved by 1 readers

If I screw up, and don't consider some factor, then maybe my actions (helping track and disrupt foreign AI development, to slow down overall progress / beginning a social movement) result in an increased chance of US-China war, hundreds of millions of lives who died from preventable aging, more permanent authoritarianism, astronomical suffering. What is it about the nature of ambition that has this property? The large obvious easy-to-do good things have been done already (but many haven't, too) Many technologies are capabilities at core, so they will be dual-use. The overall sign of technological development is not clear, given existential risk to humanity. Interventions on complex systems have non-obvious dependencies. If something is working, you broadly don't want to change it. Ambitious things, by definition, affects many people. Value is fragile. So many things had to go right. It's hard to keep those things going right. There are many historical examples of this. Communism was on

Sign Flips Are Common For Ambitious Work Most things that I do that are extraordinarily ambitious, I notice, tend to "sign-flip" a lot. If I screw up, and don't consider some factor , then maybe my actions (helping track and disrupt foreign AI development, to slow down overall progress / beginning a social movement) result in an increased chance of US-China war, hundreds of millions of lives who died from preventable aging, more permanent authoritarianism, astronomical suffering. What is it about the nature of ambition that has this property? The large obvious easy-to-do good things have been

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