With new charts, and a newly open-source codebase| AI Impacts blog
We’re delighted to announce the winners of the Essay competition on the Automation of Wisdom and Philosophy.| AI Impacts blog
Recently, Nathan Young and I wrote about arguments for AI risk and put them on the AI Impacts wiki. In the process, we ran a casual little survey of the American public regarding how they feel about the arguments, initially (if I recall) just because we were curious whether the arguments we found least compelling would also fail to compel a wide variety of people.| AI Impacts blog
and polls on which are the most compelling| AI Impacts blog
Freer societies have faster economic growth.| AI Impacts blog
Numerically expressing uncertainty when talking to the public is fine. It causes people to be less confident in the number itself (as it should), but does not cause people to lose trust in the source of that number.| AI Impacts blog
Other movements should try to avoid becoming as partisan as the environmental movement. Partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular, it made legislation more difficult to pass, and it resulted in fluctuating executive action. Looking at the history of environmentalism can give insight into what to avoid in order to stay bipartisan.| AI Impacts blog
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.| AI Impacts blog
This post describes the history of how particular partisan alliances were made involving the environmental movement between 1980 and 2008. Since individual decisions are central to understanding why this happened, this history is best presented as a narrative following the key people and organizations.| AI Impacts blog
Environmentalism in the United States is unusually partisan, compared to other issues, compared to other countries, and compared to the United States itself at other times.| AI Impacts blog
The first serious attempt at building a subway in New York City occurred in 1866. The following decades saw a sequence of 15 failed attempts, and the first subway in New York City would not begin operations until 1904. When we consider how popular the subway was, these failures are remarkable. Many of the important actors were indifferent or opposed, and those who supported building a subway were comically bad at coordinating. Only widespread, mostly decentralized public support was able to p...| AI Impacts blog
Artificial intelligence is not the only exciting emerging technology.| AI Impacts blog
Five examples and what we can take away from them| AI Impacts blog
Every quarter, we have a newsletter with updates on what’s happening at AI Impacts, with an emphasis on what we’ve been working on.| AI Impacts blog
Visiting researcher Rose Hadshar recently published a review of some evidence for existential risk from AI, focused on empirical evidence for misalignment and power seeking. (Previously from this project: a blogpost outlining some of the key claims that are often made about AI risk| AI Impacts blog
Summary: There are historical precedents where bans or crushing regulations stop the progress of technology in one industry, while progress in the rest of society continues.| AI Impacts blog
Many people have argued that AI poses an existential risk, using lots of different terms.| blog.aiimpacts.org
We’re pleased to announce an essay competition on the automation of wisdom and philosophy. Submissions are due by July 14th. The first prize is $10,000, and there is a total of $25,000 in prizes available.| blog.aiimpacts.org
The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is out, this time with 2778 participants from six top AI venues (up from about 700 and two in the 2022 ESPAI), making it probably the biggest ever survey of AI researchers.| blog.aiimpacts.org
The uncertainty in the location of the pinball grows by a factor of about 5 every time the ball collides with one of the disks. After 12 bounces, an initial uncertainty in position the size of an atom grows to be as large as the disks themselves. Since you cannot measure the location of a pinball with more than atom-scale precision, it is in principle impossible to predict the motion of a pinball as it bounces between the disks for more than 12 bounces.| blog.aiimpacts.org
Jeffrey Heninger, 14 February 2023| blog.aiimpacts.org
