Ege Erdil

technological maturity.

It's just orders of magnitude greater than whatever change happened between the 1500s and today.

So it's an even worse position than someone in the 1500s thinking about what they could do to have an impact, positive impact in expectation, like predictably positive today.

And so I think it's just pretty hopeless.

Like, I don't know if we could do anything or find any candidate set of actions that would just make things better post lock-in.

Yeah, I think the overall takeaway I take from the way that I think about it, and I guess we think about it as be more humble in what you think you can achieve.

Yeah.

And like just focus on,

the nearer term, not because it's more morally important than the longer term, but just because it's much easier to have a predictably positive impact on that.

I think it's very hard to predict what happens because of –

This acceleration basically means that you find it much harder to predict what the world might be in 10 years' time.

I think these questions are also just, like, very difficult and we don't have very strong empirical evidence.

And then there's, like, a lot of this kind of disagreement that exists.

Because one thing you could do is you could look at, say, the history of war planning and how successful war planning has been for actually anticipating what actually happens when the war actually happens.

An important underlying theme of much of what we've discussed is how powerful just reasoning about things is to making progress about what specific plans you want to make to prepare and make this transition to advanced AI go well.

And our view is, well, it's actually quite hard and

you need to make contact with the actual world in order to inform most of your beliefs about what actually happens.

And so it's somewhat futile to think, to do a lot of wargaming and figure out how AI might go and what we can do today to make that go a lot better, because a lot of the policies you might come up with might just look fairly silly.

And I think in the thinking about how AI actually has this impact,

Again, people think, oh, just AI reasoning about doing science and doing R&D just has this drastic impact on the overall economy or technology.