2026-02-07
ASI still matters if timelines are long
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Target audience - people with long ASI timelines who have put some thought into what their timelines are.
Main
- One of the core arguments for why you should pay attention to what happens to ASI is that intelligence is what enabled humans to dominate apes, and ASI could dominate humans even more. This makes creation of ASI one of the most important events in ~10,000 years of human history, and possibly billions of years of life on Earth.
- Let's suppose that by long timelines you mean it will take 30 years or 100 years or even 200 years. Let's say that by then the world has changed significantly. We may have many other technologies (maybe you're imagining space travel or cheap energy or something) and we may have changes in politics (like new forms of government or different geopolitical arrangement or new popular ideologies and so on). Even in this world, ASI may still be the most important thing to happen.
- If you could use magic to spawn an ASI out of nowhere, at any point in human history so far, I think it would have been the most important event of its time. If people in 1800s got an ASI, they would have considered it more important than who won the election back then. If people in the 1700s got an ASI, they would have considered it more important than the first industrial revolution. If people building the pyramids got an ASI, they would have considered it more important than the pyramids. (I mean, if they actually saw an ASI deployed in real time. It is possible an ASI kills you before you're aware it has been deployed.)
- Biological humans from the past actually have a lot in common with you. A lot of their art is still relatable to people today - famous examples include Shakespeare or Mozart or similar. You can go read people's dairy notes and what not from hundreds of years ago. They had similar concerns around money and relationship and whatnot, they too enjoyed similar hobbies and so on.
- Side note - maybe collecting these in a persuasive form is a good idea? I do think longtermism will be persuasive to more people if we could empathise more with people from the past, for instance by reading about all the things they considered vulnerable to them.
- See also: Most important century series by Holden Karnofsky
- I think Karnofsky is making very similar point as me, but with additional assumptions that aren't necessary. Like, he jumps straight to billions of years, and he assumes that ASI will colonise the universe.
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