BLUF:
* To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’.
* Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our...
TL;DR
* The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team.
* The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital...
Public service announcement
1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what’s different this round here and apply...
I enjoyed Cloud Atlas (fiction, both book and movie). It's a movie where relatively normal people did hard things because they were the right thing to do, not because movie morality entailed a just world hypothesis where good things happen to good people, or because the movie's characters were personally and emotionally invested in specific outcomes.
I think this is relatively rare in fiction, which is why I like the movie. I've told several EA friends about the movie and they liked it too.
I also watch movies about ordinary people resisting during World War II (eg, John Rabe for nonfiction and Jojo Rabbit for fiction), especially if it's from the perspective of the Axis.
+1, a lot of David Mitchell's metafiction-y books have EA vibes (huge scope, interwoven characters doing the right thing for unknown future others)