Scenario scrutiny turns AI forecasts into concrete decisions

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:22:38

   You did a great video about the AI 2027 thing. One of the best videos that's come out about AI this year. Thanks, man. What do you reckon about the 2040 thing? Do you think it tracks where you were as impressed as Liv? I thought it was fascinating. And yeah, I was impressed in a lot of ways. They're doing a very different thing. So with 2027, they were doing pure prediction. This is how we think things will play out most likely and they are like uncannily good at calling that they called agents before those were a thing um this one is is prescriptive it's like here's what we think we should do and they they're explicit about that um and there's all kinds of like fascinating ideas and game theory at one point adventure yeah i mean they at one point they're like okay well so like the deal is going to be like this china is going to put its data centers in canada and

2. 1:23:23

   the u.s is going to put its data centers in mongolia which are like neutral states but nearby the other person so we can blow them up if there's ever like a breakdown of the deal like you know they really did some galaxy brain stuff who knows how realistic that is but what i loved about it is they introduced this phrase like scenario scrutiny and they're like it's very easy to talk and we've been doing it for the past hour and a half it's very easy to talk in terms of like high level trends you know what do we make of like the history of technological progress so far what does that teach us etc and they're like it's a very different thing to sit down and just actually tell a month by month story about the future like actually put yourself in the head of the different actors what are their incentives at this moment what do they choose to do how does

3. 1:24:03

   that cascade the way that you know the military tries to do with war games and they're trying to to do that uh and i i do wish that we were doing more of that and less kind of like i'm guilty of this as much as anybody else but less sort of like armchair philosophizing in some of these discussions because i think you're going to always be able to find an argument that that suits your thesis mark andreason can point to the fact that there is this very real invisible graveyard uh from technological progress going wrong and then folks who are worried about catastrophic risk can point to all the near misses with with nuclear and and how we live in this time of perils um yeah what i love about their report is that they're just like here is what it would actually look like for a bunch of real countries to try to respond to incentives and they basically

4. 1:24:49

   throw it out as a challenge and say we think this is a bad plan but we haven't seen anything better and so someone else please like tell us a story for how we don't have to worry uh and and i mean it's kind of a very rigorous example of like someone trying to write a white mirror. You know, we've got so many black mirror type dystopian sci-fis about the future of how technology could go. And I think that's a big part of our cultural issue is that we don't have at least, you know, the amount of utopian fiction to dystopian fiction is outnumbered like 100 to 1 or something. And that's a big problem for our collective psyche.

5. 1:25:26

   Yes, OK, it is harder to imagine the way we manage to spread the needle and make something go unbelievably right, you know, because you're fighting against entropy effectively. It's much easier to imagine all these ways things can go wrong. But we should be trying to create these stories. And that's kind of what AI 2040 is. It's like a really robust story of a way that coordination could actually work.

6. 1:25:51

   And it's not, I'm not talking about like, oh, everyone's like linking arms and being happy. You know, we're all on the same team, you know, team humanity. No, it's still realistic. It's grounded in like very real geopolitical tensions. There's still a ton of competition. There's still a lot of potential for defection and things going wrong and people lying and so on. And yet it lays out a path of game-theoretically sound coordination to an actual techno-abundant future.