Google AI PM; Foundation board member
This is very well written and compelling. Thanks for posting it!
This is a great post. I knew that at the top end of the income distribution in the US people have more kids, but didn't understand how robust the relationship seems to be.
I think the standard evbio explanation here would ride on status -- people at the top of the tribe can afford to expend more resources for kids, and also have more access to opportunities to have kids. That would predict that we wouldn't see a radical change as everyone got more rich -- the curve would slide right and the top end of the distribution would have more kids but not necessarily everyone else.
But the gdp per capita graphs I think are evidence against that view. It looks like the curve is a lot flatter than when fertility is rising than when it's dropping, but if this holds into the future I really don't worry too much. We're on the cusp of all getting a lot richer, or else AI will kill us all anyway.
Heh, that's why I put "strong" in there!
One big one is that the first big spreading event happened at a wet market where people and animals are in close proximity. You could check densely peopled places within some proximity of the lab to figure out how surprising it is that it happened in a wet market, but certainly animal spillover is much more likely where there are animals.
Edit: also it's honestly kind of a bad sign that you aren't aware of evidence that tends against your favored explanation, since that mostly happens during motivated reasoning.
We're here to test the so-called tower of babel theory. What if, due to some bizarre happenstance, humanity had thousands of languages that change all the time instead of a single universal language like all known intelligent species?
You should ignore the EY style "no future" takes when thinking about your future. This is because if the world is about to end, nothing you do will matter much. But if the world isn't about to end, what you do might matter quite a bit -- so you should focus on the latter.
One quick question to ask yourself is: are you more likely to have an impact on technology, or on policy? Either one is useful. (If neither seems great, then consider earning to give, or just find a way to add value in society in other ways.)
Once you figure that out, the next step is almost certainly building relevant skills, knowledge, and networks. Connect with senior folks with relevant roles, ask and otherwise try to figure out what skills and such are useful, try to get some experience by working or volunteering with great people or organizations.
Do that for a while and I bet some gaps and opportunities will become pretty clear. 😀
I agree that it's bad to raise a child in an environment of extreme anxiety. Don't do that.
Also try to avoid being very doomy and anxious in general, it's not a healthy state to be in. (Easier said than done, I realize.)
I think you should have a kid if you would have wanted one without recent AI progress. Timelines are still very uncertain, and strong AGI could still be decades away. Parenthood is strongly value creating and extremely rewarding (if hard at times) and that's true in many many worlds.
In fact it's hard to find probable worlds where having kids is a really bad idea, IMO. If we solve alignment and end up in AI utopia, having kids is great! If we don't solve alignment and EY is right about what happens in a fast takeoff world, it doesn't really matter if you have kids or not.
In that sense, it's basically a freeroll, though of course there are intermediate outcomes. I don't immediately see any strong argument in favor of not having kids if you would otherwise want them.
The thing you're missing is called instruction tuning. You gather a series of prompt/response pairs and fine tune the model over that data. Do it right and you have a chatty model.
I went back to finish college as an adult, and my main surprise was how much fun it was. It probably depends on what classes you have left, but I took every AI class offered and learned a ton that is still relevant to my work today, 20 years later. Even the general classes were fun -- it turns out it's easy to be an excellent student if you're used to working a full work week, and being a good student is way more pleasant and less stressful than being a bad one, or at least it was for me.
I'm not sure what you should do necessarily, but given that you're thinking about this less as useful for anyone in particular and more for other reasons, fun might be a good goal.
As it happened I think the credential ended up useful too, but it was a top school so more valuable than many.