Three polls: on timelines and cause prio

Consequentialists should be strong longtermists

Disagree on the basis of cluelessness. 

Uncertainty about how to reliably affect the longterm future is much worse than uncertainty over our effects on the near-term.

I find the Hilary Greaves argument that neartermist interventions are just as unpredictable as longtermist interventions unconvincing because you could apply the same reason to treating a sick person (maybe they'll go on to cause disaster), or getting out of bed in the morning (maybe I'll go on to cause disaster). This paralysis is not tenable.

Bioweapons are an existential risk

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

This question is already probabilistic, so arguably I should put my vote all the way on the "disagree" side, because I don't think it's more likely than not.

But I also don't think it's that far from a 50% chance either—maybe 40% although I don't have a strong belief. So my answer is that I weakly disagree.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

Most of my uncertainty is from potentially not understanding the criteria. They seem extremely weak to me:
 

• * Able to reliably pass a Turing test of the type that would win the Loebner Silver Prize.
• Able to score 90% or more on a robust version of the Winograd Schema Challenge, e.g. the "Winogrande" challenge or comparable data set for which human performance is at 90+%
• Be able to score 75th percentile (as compared to the corresponding year's human students; this was a score of 600 in 2016) on all the full mathematics section of a circa-2015-2020 standard SAT exam, using just images of the exam pages.
• Be able to learn the classic Atari game "Montezuma's revenge" (based on just visual inputs and standard controls) and explore all 24 rooms based on the equivalent of less than 100 hours of real-time play (see closely-related question.)
  
   

I wouldn't be surprised if we've already passed this.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

Look at the resolution criteria which is based on the specific metaculus Q, seems like a very low bar

Consequentialists should be strong longtermists

I disagree, mostly due to the should wording, as believing in consequentialism doesn't obligate you to have any particular discount rate or have any particular discount function, and these are basically free parameters, so discount rates are independent of consequentialism.

Bioweapons are an existential risk

I'll just repeat @weeatquince's comment, since he already covered the issue better than I did:

With current technology probably not an x-risk. With future technology I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of bio-sciences reaching the point where extinction is possible. It is a very rapidly evolving field with huge potential.

Bioweapons are an existential risk.

With current technology probably not an x-risk. With future technology I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of bio-sciences reaching the point where extinction is possible. It is a very rapidly evolving field with huge potential.

Consequentialists should be strong longtermists

I'm skeptical of Pascal's Muggings

Bioweapons are an existential risk

If this includes AI created/enhanced bioweapons it seems plausible, without that I'm much less sure, though if there's another few decades of synth bio progress but no AGI, seems plausible too

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

I hope to write about this at length once school ends, but in short, here are the two core reasons I feel AGI in three years is quite implausible:
 

• The models aren't generalizing. LLM's are not stochastic parrots, they are able to learn, but the learning heuristics they adopt seem to be random or imperfect. And no, I don't think METR's newest is evidence against this.^[1]
   
• It is unclear if models are situationally aware, and currently, it seems more likely than not that they do not possess this capability. Laine et al. (2024) shows that current models are far below human baselines of situational awareness when tested on MCQ-like questions. I am unsure how models would be able to perform long-term planning—a capability I would consider is crucial for AGI—without being sufficiently situationally aware.

1. ^{^}

   As Beth Barnes put it, their latest benchmark specifically shows that "there's an exponential trend with doubling time between ~2 -12 months on automatically-scoreable, relatively clean + green-field software tasks from a few distributions." Real world tasks rarely have such clean feedback loops; see Section 6 of METR's RE-bench paper for a thorough list of drawbacks and limitations.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

While I think AGI by 2028 is reasonably plausible, I think that there are way too many factors that have to go right in order to get AGI by 2028, and this is true even if AI timelines are short.

To be clear, I do agree that if we don't get AGI by the early 2030s at latest, AI progress will slow down, I don't have nearly enough credence for the supporting arguments to have my median be in 2028.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

I think it's 20% likely based on the model I made.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

Bioweapons are an existential risk

Note that imo almost all the x-risk from bio routes through AI, and is better thought of as an AI-risk threat model.

Bioweapons are an existential risk

Not sure how to interpret this question but the interpretation that comes to mind is "there is some risk that bioweapons cause extinction", on other words "there is a non-infinitesimal probability that bioweapons cause extinction", in which case yes that is certainly true.

Or, a slightly stronger interpretation could be "the risk from bioweapons is at least as large as the risk from asteroids", which I am also pretty confident is true.

Bioweapons are an existential risk

I'm interpreting this question as "an existential risk that we should be concerned about", which I think the case for is much weaker than whether or not they are generally an existential risk (though I still think the answer is yes).

Consequentialists should be strong longtermists, la mayor parte de la población piensa solo en el futuro inmediato y nunca en las generaciones futuras

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

Ai 2027

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

My current analysis, as well as a lot of other analysis I've seen, suggests AGI is most likely to be possible around 2030.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

I think we should focus on short timelines, still I think there are not the most likely scenario. Most likely is imo a delay of maybe two years.

Consequentialists should be strong longtermists

It just makes theoretically sense. In practice it doesn't matter, e.g. RSI and loss of control is a near term risk.

Bioweapons are an existential risk

Mainly thinking about A(G)I engineered bioweapons.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

Bioweapons are an existential risk

I don't buy the Parfitian argument, so I'm not sure what a binary yes-no about existential risk would mean to me. 

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

I agree with a bunch of the standard arguments against this, but I'll throw in two more that I haven't seen fleshed out as much: 

1. The intuitive definition of AGI includes some physical capabilities (and even ones that nominally exclude physical capabilities probably necessitate some), and we seem really far behind on where I would expect AI systems to be in manipulating physical objects.
2. AIs make errors in systematically different ways than humans, and often have major vulnerabilities. This means we'll probably want AI that works with humans in every step, and so will want more specialized AI. I don't really buy some arguments that I've seen against this but I don't know enough to have a super confident rebuttal.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

I gave a number of reasons I think AGI by 2030 is extremely unlikely in a post here.

Consequentialists should be strong longtermists

Technically I agree that 100% consequentialists should be strong longtermists, but I think if you are moderately consequentialist, you should only sometimes be a longtermist. When it comes to choosing your career, yes, focus on the far future. When it comes to abandoning family members to squeeze out another hour of work, no. We're humans not machines.

Consequentialists should be strong longtermists

For me, the strongest arguments against strong longtermism are simulation theory and the youngness paradox (as well as yet-to-be-discovered crucial considerations).^[1]

(Also, nitpickily, I’d personally reword this poll from ‘Consequentialists should be strong longtermists’ to ‘I am a strong longtermist,’ because I’m not convinced that anyone ‘should’ be anything, normatively speaking.)

1. ^{^}

   I also worry about cluelessness, though cluelessness seems just as threatening to neartermist interventions as it does to longtermist ones.