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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
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.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
Disclaimer: Be careful about definitions and interpreting metaculus questions. The latter involves resolution criteria on defining AGI that does not align with my own (e.g. meeting the named criteria would not replace all human tasks). Also, there has been an inflow of additional forecasters based on recent developments which should be factored in.
I listed some of my current sources down below. I hope this helps!
“My probability is at least 16% [on the IMO grand challenge falling], though I'd have to think more and Look into Things, and maybe ask for such sad little metrics as are available before I was confident saying how much more.”
"I'd put 4% on "For the 2022, 2023, 2024, or 2025 IMO an AI built before the IMO is able to solve the single hardest problem"
I think the IMO challenge would be significant direct evidence that powerful AI would be sooner, or at least would be technologically possible sooner. I think this would be fairly significant evidence, perhaps pushing my 2040 TAI probability up from 25% to 40% or something like that."
Thanks for putting in the effort. This is helpful information. I've got a few clarifying questions, though please don't feel obliged to answer them if you don't have the time or don't have a sense of the answer. You've already helped much and I can search for answers elsewhere if need be.
a. The low/near end of the predicted distribution of the timeline for AI being at or near general intelligence is roughly 5 years out.
b. The median prediction for when super-human AGI will be achieved, i.e., ‘transformative AI,’ or ‘superintelligence,’ is 10-20 years out.
c. The average point at the 75% percentile for the spread of predicted timelines is over 20 years out.
Is that correct?
The meaning of weakly general AI isn't clarified on the corresponding Metaculus webpage. I'm guessing it's intended meaning is something like: "AI competitive with performance near the recorded human peak for a full range of all cognitive tasks, but not all such tasks being performed at super-human levels." Is that accurate?
How much confidence can we have that the timelines dovetailed on by many long-termists in effective altruism are accurately reflected by:
Different kinds of aggregated forecast models from Metaculus or other prediction/forecasting platforms?
Prominent experts and professionals in the field, such as Legg, Hassabis, Yudkowsky, Christiano or Cotra?