Fantastic job, Justin! I was very surprised by the quality of the video. FWIW I initially skipped watching it when I saw the title and thumbnail here because I assumed it wouldn't contain much information that was new to me or be particularly enjoyable to watch. (My assumption was wrong on both counts!) I suspect this means more experimentation with titles and thumbnails is warranted.
I was reminded of this comment of mine today and just thought I'd comment again to note that 5 years later my social-impact career prospects have gotten even worse. Concretely, I quit my last job (a sales job just for money) a year and a half ago and have just been living on savings since without applying anywhere in 18 months. Things definitely have not gone as I had hoped when I wrote this comment. Some things have gotten better in life (e.g. my mental health is better than it has been in over five years), but career-wise I'm doing very poorly (not even earning money with a random job) and have no positive trajectory to speak of.
Thanks! Are many of the ~14B new chicks each year coming from a relatively small number of breeding hens who have many offspring? Or is it mostly 2 chicks per hen?
4:30 "Most of the world's 8 billion egg-laying hens, roughly one for every person alive on Earth today, are confined right now in cages like these."
4:56 "The egg industry has no need for the 7 billion male chicks born annually, so it kills them on their first day alive in this world."
Just to check my understanding of the numbers here:
Google tells me "Egg-laying hens on factory farms typically live for 12 to 18 months, or about a year and a half, before they are slaughtered when their egg production begins to decline."
So I guess once each year on average the population of 8 billion egg-laying hens is replaced by a new population of 8 billion egg-laying hens. So the breeding hens are having about 15 billion chicks annually (7 billion male, 8 billion female). (Broiler chickens for meat are separate.)
It received 507,000 views, and at 27 minutes long, if the average viewer watched 1/3 of it, then that's 507,000*27*1/3=4,563,000 VM.
I don't recall whether the $20,000 Grand Prize it received was enough to reimburse Suzy for her cost to produce it and pay for her time, but if so, that'd be 4,563,000VM/$20,000=228 VM/$.
Not sure how to do the quality adjustment using the OP framework, but naively my intuition is that short films like this one are more effective at changing peoples' minds on the importance of the problem per minute than average videos of the AI Safety channels. How valuable it is probably depends mostly on how valuable shifting the opinion of the general public is. It's not a video that I'd expect to create AI safety researchers, but I expect it did help shift the Overton window on AI risk.
Footnote 2 completely changes the meaning of the statement from common sense interpretations of the statement. It makes it so that e.g. a future scenario in which AI takes over and causes existential catastrophe and the extinction of biological humans this century does not count as extinction, so long as the AI continues to exist. As such, I chose to ignore it with my "fairly strongly agree" answer.
This thumbnail is much better IMO:
Yet if I go to share the video on Reddit currently the thumbnail of you sitting on the floor still shows up as the only option.
Fantastic job, Justin! I was very surprised by the quality of the video. FWIW I initially skipped watching it when I saw the title and thumbnail here because I assumed it wouldn't contain much information that was new to me or be particularly enjoyable to watch. (My assumption was wrong on both counts!) I suspect this means more experimentation with titles and thumbnails is warranted.
I've re-read this post a few times over the last decade, and am commenting now to recommend it generally. A lot of important people in AI are still making the standard progress and prosperity argument that Paul counters in this post.
I was reminded of this comment of mine today and just thought I'd comment again to note that 5 years later my social-impact career prospects have gotten even worse. Concretely, I quit my last job (a sales job just for money) a year and a half ago and have just been living on savings since without applying anywhere in 18 months. Things definitely have not gone as I had hoped when I wrote this comment. Some things have gotten better in life (e.g. my mental health is better than it has been in over five years), but career-wise I'm doing very poorly (not even earning money with a random job) and have no positive trajectory to speak of.
Any update?
Thanks! Are many of the ~14B new chicks each year coming from a relatively small number of breeding hens who have many offspring? Or is it mostly 2 chicks per hen?
4:30 "Most of the world's 8 billion egg-laying hens, roughly one for every person alive on Earth today, are confined right now in cages like these."
4:56 "The egg industry has no need for the 7 billion male chicks born annually, so it kills them on their first day alive in this world."
Just to check my understanding of the numbers here:
Google tells me "Egg-laying hens on factory farms typically live for 12 to 18 months, or about a year and a half, before they are slaughtered when their egg production begins to decline."
So I guess once each year on average the population of 8 billion egg-laying hens is replaced by a new population of 8 billion egg-laying hens. So the breeding hens are having about 15 billion chicks annually (7 billion male, 8 billion female). (Broiler chickens for meat are separate.)
How would you evaluate the cost-effectiveness of Writing Doom – Award-Winning Short Film on Superintelligence (2024) in this framework?
(More info on the film's creation in the FLI interview: Suzy Shepherd on Imagining Superintelligence and "Writing Doom")
It received 507,000 views, and at 27 minutes long, if the average viewer watched 1/3 of it, then that's 507,000*27*1/3=4,563,000 VM.
I don't recall whether the $20,000 Grand Prize it received was enough to reimburse Suzy for her cost to produce it and pay for her time, but if so, that'd be 4,563,000VM/$20,000=228 VM/$.
Not sure how to do the quality adjustment using the OP framework, but naively my intuition is that short films like this one are more effective at changing peoples' minds on the importance of the problem per minute than average videos of the AI Safety channels. How valuable it is probably depends mostly on how valuable shifting the opinion of the general public is. It's not a video that I'd expect to create AI safety researchers, but I expect it did help shift the Overton window on AI risk.
Drew Spartz's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AISpecies
Footnote 2 completely changes the meaning of the statement from common sense interpretations of the statement. It makes it so that e.g. a future scenario in which AI takes over and causes existential catastrophe and the extinction of biological humans this century does not count as extinction, so long as the AI continues to exist. As such, I chose to ignore it with my "fairly strongly agree" answer.