80000 Hours

1 week ago | 80000hours.org | Robert Wiblin

I do think that there is something to celebrate here. … But we’re far from done. … There’s an opportunity to actually really make this work — I think that’s an optimistic way of looking at it. Now that they have said the nonprofit will be in control, what we’re hoping for is to see details that will show us how the nonprofit will actually be in control. Like, the words are great… but what’s going to back that up?

1 week ago | 80000hours.org | Robert Wiblin

TranscriptIan Dunt: Britain can tend to be a bit lost in the opium dreams of its own past. Whenever you hear a prime minister talk about Downing Street, the thing they always talk about is the staircase with all of the portraits of the various prime ministers. And I get it: some of those prime ministers were people that were crucial in the history of liberal democracy, or some of them fought off Nazism. I get that that is obviously a powerful thing.

3 weeks ago | 80000hours.org | Cody Fenwick

Why is this a pressing problem? New technologies can drastically shift the balance of power in society. Great Britain’s early dominance in the Industrial Revolution, for example, helped empower its global empire.1With AI technology rapidly advancing, there’s a serious risk that it might enable an even more extreme global power grab. Advanced AI is particularly concerning because it could be controlled by a small number of people, or even just one.

4 weeks ago | 80000hours.org | Robert Wiblin |Lukas Finnveden

Once we get to a world where it is technologically possible to replace those researchers with AI systems — which could just be fully obedient, instruction-following AI systems — then you could feasibly have a situation where there’s just one person at the top of the organisation that gives a command: “This is how I want the next AI system to be developed.” And then this army of loyal, obedient AIs will then do all of the technical work.

1 month ago | 80000hours.org | Cal Newport

We are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. It’s of course the case that in trying to optimise the good, we will always be falling short. The question is how much, and in what ways are we not there yet? And if we then extrapolate that to how much and in what ways am I not enough, that’s where we run into trouble. — Hannah BoettcherWhat happens when your desire to do good starts to undermine your own wellbeing?