The Nonlinear Library EA - I bet Greg Colbourn 10 k€ that AI will not kill us all by the end of 2027 by Vasco Grilo
Jun 4, 2024
05:47
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: I bet Greg Colbourn 10 k€ that AI will not kill us all by the end of 2027, published by Vasco Grilo on June 4, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Agreement
78 % of my donations so far have gone to the Long-Term Future Fund[1] (LTFF), which mainly supports AI safety interventions. However, I have become increasingly sceptical about the value of existential risk mitigation, and currently think the best interventions are in the area of animal welfare[2]. As a result, I realised it made sense for me to arrange a bet with someone very worried about AI in order to increase my donations to animal welfare interventions.
Gregory Colbourn (Greg) was the 1st person I thought of. He said:
I think AGI [artificial general intelligence] is 0-5 years away and p(doom|AGI) is ~90%
I doubt doom in the sense of human extinction is anywhere as likely as suggested by the above. I guess the annual extinction risk over the next 10 years is 10^-7, so I proposed a bet to Greg similar to the end-of-the-world bet between Bryan Caplan and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Meanwhile, I transferred 10 k€ to PauseAI[3], which is supported by Greg, and he agreed to the following. If Greg or any of his heirs are still alive by the end of 2027, they transfer to me or an organisation of my choice 20 k€ times the ratio between the consumer price index for all urban consumers and items in the United States, as reported by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), in December 2027 and April 2024. I expect inflation in this period, i.e. a ratio higher than 1.
Some more details:
The transfer must be made in January 2028.
I will decide in December 2027 whether the transfer should go to me or an organisation of choice. My current preference is for it to go directly to an organisation, such that 10 % of it is not lost in taxes.
If for some reason I am not able to decide (e.g. if I die before 2028), the transfer must be made to my lastly stated organisation of choice, currently The Humane League (THL).
As Founders Pledge's Patient Philanthropy Fund, I have my investments in Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF USD Acc. This is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking global stocks, which have provided annual real returns of 5.0 % since 1900.
In addition, Lewis Bollard expects the marginal cost-effectiveness of Open Philanthropy's (OP's) farmed animal welfare grantmaking "will only decrease slightly, if at all, through January 2028"[4], so I suppose I do not have to worry much about donating less over the period of the bet of 3.67 years (= 2028 + 1/12 - (2024 + 5/12)). Consequently, I think my bet is worth it if its benefit-to-cost ratio is higher than 1.20 (= (1 + 0.050)^3.67).
It would be 2 (= 20*10^3/(10*10^3)) if the transfer to me or an organisation of my choice was fully made, and Person X fulfils the agreement, so I need 60 % (= 1.20/2) of the transfer to be made and agreement with Person X to be fulfilled. I expect this to be the case based on what I know about Greg and Person X, and information Greg shared, so I went ahead with the bet.
Here are my and Greg's informal signatures:
Me: Vasco Henrique Amaral Grilo.
Greg: Gregory Hamish Colbourn.
Impact
I expect 90 % of the potential benefits of the bet to be realised. So I believe the bet will lead to additional donations of 8 k€ (= (0.9*20 - 10)*10^3). Saulius estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare improve 41 chicken-years per $, and OP thinks "the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius' analysis", which means my donations will affect 8.20 chicken-years per $ (= 41/5).
Therefore I expect my bet to improve 65.6 k chicken-years (= 8*10^3*8.20).
I also estimate corporate campaigns for chicken welfare have a cost-effectiveness of 14.3 DALY/$[5]. So I expect the benefits of the bet to be equiv...
Agreement
78 % of my donations so far have gone to the Long-Term Future Fund[1] (LTFF), which mainly supports AI safety interventions. However, I have become increasingly sceptical about the value of existential risk mitigation, and currently think the best interventions are in the area of animal welfare[2]. As a result, I realised it made sense for me to arrange a bet with someone very worried about AI in order to increase my donations to animal welfare interventions.
Gregory Colbourn (Greg) was the 1st person I thought of. He said:
I think AGI [artificial general intelligence] is 0-5 years away and p(doom|AGI) is ~90%
I doubt doom in the sense of human extinction is anywhere as likely as suggested by the above. I guess the annual extinction risk over the next 10 years is 10^-7, so I proposed a bet to Greg similar to the end-of-the-world bet between Bryan Caplan and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Meanwhile, I transferred 10 k€ to PauseAI[3], which is supported by Greg, and he agreed to the following. If Greg or any of his heirs are still alive by the end of 2027, they transfer to me or an organisation of my choice 20 k€ times the ratio between the consumer price index for all urban consumers and items in the United States, as reported by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), in December 2027 and April 2024. I expect inflation in this period, i.e. a ratio higher than 1.
Some more details:
The transfer must be made in January 2028.
I will decide in December 2027 whether the transfer should go to me or an organisation of choice. My current preference is for it to go directly to an organisation, such that 10 % of it is not lost in taxes.
If for some reason I am not able to decide (e.g. if I die before 2028), the transfer must be made to my lastly stated organisation of choice, currently The Humane League (THL).
As Founders Pledge's Patient Philanthropy Fund, I have my investments in Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF USD Acc. This is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking global stocks, which have provided annual real returns of 5.0 % since 1900.
In addition, Lewis Bollard expects the marginal cost-effectiveness of Open Philanthropy's (OP's) farmed animal welfare grantmaking "will only decrease slightly, if at all, through January 2028"[4], so I suppose I do not have to worry much about donating less over the period of the bet of 3.67 years (= 2028 + 1/12 - (2024 + 5/12)). Consequently, I think my bet is worth it if its benefit-to-cost ratio is higher than 1.20 (= (1 + 0.050)^3.67).
It would be 2 (= 20*10^3/(10*10^3)) if the transfer to me or an organisation of my choice was fully made, and Person X fulfils the agreement, so I need 60 % (= 1.20/2) of the transfer to be made and agreement with Person X to be fulfilled. I expect this to be the case based on what I know about Greg and Person X, and information Greg shared, so I went ahead with the bet.
Here are my and Greg's informal signatures:
Me: Vasco Henrique Amaral Grilo.
Greg: Gregory Hamish Colbourn.
Impact
I expect 90 % of the potential benefits of the bet to be realised. So I believe the bet will lead to additional donations of 8 k€ (= (0.9*20 - 10)*10^3). Saulius estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare improve 41 chicken-years per $, and OP thinks "the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius' analysis", which means my donations will affect 8.20 chicken-years per $ (= 41/5).
Therefore I expect my bet to improve 65.6 k chicken-years (= 8*10^3*8.20).
I also estimate corporate campaigns for chicken welfare have a cost-effectiveness of 14.3 DALY/$[5]. So I expect the benefits of the bet to be equiv...