Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My simple AGI investment & insurance strategy, published by lc on March 31, 2024 on LessWrong.
TL;DR:
Options traders think it's extremely unlikely that the stock market will appreciate more than 30 or 40 percent over the next two to three years, as it did over the last year. So they will sell you the option to buy current indexes for 30 or 40% above their currently traded value for very cheap.
But slow takeoff, or expectations of one, would almost certainly cause the stock market to rise dramatically. Like many people here, I think institutional market makers are basically not pricing this in, and gravely underestimating volatility as a result.
To take advantage of this, instead of trying to buy individual tech stocks, I allocate a sizable chunk of my portfolio to buying LEAPS (Long-term Equity AnticiPation Securities) at high strike prices and faraway expiration dates on these indexes. If a slow takeoff does happen, and public companies capture some of the increased productivity, I'll at least be duly compensated for it when my skills become worthless.
If it doesn't happen, this part of my portfolio will vanish, but that seems like an acceptable risk given the upside.
I started doing this in January,[1] and so far the mark price of the basket of options I've bought has doubled.[2]
FAQ
The options contracts you're talking about expire in "two to three years". Does this strategy only make sense if you think visible slow takeoff will begin before 2027?
That's not quite necessary. If large parts of the economy get automated "only" in 2030, near-term AGI progress could start to impress market makers enough that they "wake up" and increase the price of these securities and options in anticipation of a boom. Which is why I choose to buy now instead of closer to my expected timelines, while Nvidia is only a two trillion dollar company and my alpha on this could run out any given year.
But I think takeoff before 2027 is possible. As a layman, the simplest argument for shorter timelines I can empathize with is that GPT-3 was released in 2020, GPT-4 was released in 2023, and prediction markets expect GPT-5 to release later this year. That plus the enormous amount of capital investment in AI makes me think that there's a possibility of large portions of software engineering getting automated soon, which would precede further speedups.
Why not buy futures instead of options, if your thesis is about the next ten years rather than the next three?
Futures involve lots of leveraged downside risk. If the timing is wrong, I could lose a lot more money with futures than I can with options. On the other hand, if I'm right and GDP starts speeding up dramatically, then the deep OTM call options will be more valuable than futures contracts.
The only benefit to futures is that I would get more than zero percent of my investment in the "sane" scenarios where Nasdaq and the S&P 500 rise gradually but not the stratospheric amounts I expect. That probably only happens if AGI isn't here, in which case I'm agnostic about the performance of these indices and don't really have a thesis either way.
What is money going to be worth to you post-AGI anyways?
Possibly a lot.
First, I expect there to be large returns before any kind of catastrophe happens. Some of those returns could be directed toward either alignment research or high-leverage political opportunities, maybe to greater effect than the opportunities I have now.
But also, from my vantage point I think there's a strong chance that:
RLHF (and trivial improvements on RLHF such as DPO), along with some workshopping, turns out to be broadly sufficient for AI alignment.
Existing property rights get respected by the successor species.
There is no significant wealth redistribution, and the vast majority of the lightcone will go to people with absu...

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