Cost of Space Weather Hardening

Crossposted to Less Wrong ‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’ J Dmitri Gallow Epistemic status I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...

Let’s imagine it’s November 2031. We’re both still here, AI is much more capable than it is today, but governments are governing, civilisation is still (mostly) civilised, and there has been no catastrophic loss of control. It just kind of didn’t happen.  What happens to the AI safety field then?  I expect people who currently believe catastrophe could happen within two or three years will start saying five or ten years. Then 15. Then ‘who cares if we’re a few decades of...

Thanks to Bruce Friedrich, Seth Ariel Green, Tobias Leenaert, Jan Willem Bolderdijk, Martine van Haperen, Herman Rohrbach, Chris Popa and Elizabeth Alvarez for comments. Claude helped structure the text. Ideas and mistakes are my own. I currently work with ProVeg International. The prize I propose would be defined and judged by an independent committee, and its money would fund scaling the winning solution(s), not ProVeg or the winner. TL/DR * EA could d...