A few thousand person-hours isn't a lot. I think even a lot of AI x-risk critics nowadays would agree that it's worth one or two people working on it. The controversy is over much stronger claims.

@StevenK Would they really?

@IsaacKing work on mechanistic interpretability, arguably motivated by x-risk especially if you consider where the funding comes from (e.g. redwood research) got accepted into major conferences, so I guess at least the reviewers for those conferences did not think that say Chris Olah's time would have been better spent playing the didgeridoo or something. However nips reviewers are not necessarily x-risk critics.

"Non-negligible" means that Turing would have supported at least a few thousand person-hours by academics and computer scientists looking into the issue further.

Would have supported people in his time doing that, or people in our time doing that?

Would have supported if asked, or would have supported after deliberation/argument?

@StevenK Hmm, not sure.

Neither of those passages seem to support the conclusion at all. The closest is when he mentions machines taking control, but that doesn't necessarily mean enslavement. More likely it's just, "humans put machines in control because they run things better than we do."

'Could' and 'Would' are two very different things - IMO his tone implies a possibility but not a strong probability.

Although I have less faith than you do that there will come a point in the future when 'people are less likely to engage in tribalism and motivated reasoning' so it may be a while before we can resolve the market 🤣

@PipFoweraker About this issue in particular, I mean. Once "Is AI risk a pseudoscientific cult that we can dismiss and belittle, or do we have to actually engage with their arguments?" is no longer a pertinent question.

@IsaacKing Looking very much forward to that day, too!