All the training in the world
The US has about 150 million workers. How long did it take them to learn to do what they do?
Defenses in Depth
Preparing the world for advancing technology
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Once intelligence is too cheap to meter, the world will be unrecognizable
Intelligence is cheap now because it isn't very good, and it will be cheap again once there are billions of AIs. In between, AI will be priced like the workers it replaces.
When they can perform a task, AIs are much cheaper than humans
The tasks AIs can perform are expanding rapidly, and on the hundreds in my dataset I find the compute required is already cheap.
Post-AGI, we are all jobless aristocrats
Comparative advantage guarantees that human labor is worth something post-AGI, but not that it is worth more than the worker's leisure.
AI risk and the rational voter
Voters frequently vote 'irrationally' for rational reasons: a single vote has very little impact on the outcome. For most people, beliefs and actions on AI risk are likewise only weakly correlated with the true risk.
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The Four Pillars: A Hypothesis for Countering Catastrophic Biological Risk
Biological risks are more severe than has been widely appreciated. Here we outline a hypothesis for ‘four pillars’ of biodefense that should work against even the most sophisticated engineered pathogens or ‘unknown unknowns’.
The AI Industrial Explosion — Part 1: Maximum growth rates with current production methods
How fast can an AI-driven economy grow? Economists expect a few percentage points; at best those closer to AI development imagine Dyson spheres within years. Who is correct?
10 big projects for reducing bio x-risk
The field of people working on reducing bio x-risk is distressingly small. I sketch out 10 big, urgent projects I'd be excited for new people to come work on and own.
Why biological weapons are scary, and what we can do about it
Comparing conventional, chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons on cost per death and mass per death puts biological weapons in a class of their own.