Category: Uncategorized

Why Artificial Intelligence Increases the Importance of Humans in War

by  Tyler Cowen

Recent scholarship on artificial intelligence (AI) and international security focuses on the political and ethical consequences of replacing human warriors with machines. Yet AI is not a simple substitute for human decision-making. The advances in commercial machine learning that are reducing the costs of statistical prediction are simultaneously increasing the value of data (which enable prediction) and judgment (which determines why prediction matters). But these key complements—quality data and clear judgment—may not be present, or present to the same degree, in the uncertain and conflictual business of war. This has two important strategic implications. First, military organizations that adopt AI will tend to become more complex to accommodate the challenges of data and judgment across a variety of decision-making tasks. Second, data and judgment will tend to become attractive targets in strategic competition. As a result, conflicts involving AI complements are likely to unfold very differently than visions of AI substitution would suggest. Rather than rapid robotic wars and decisive shifts in military power, AI-enabled conflict will likely involve significant uncertainty, organizational friction, and chronic controversy. Greater military reliance on AI will therefore make the human element in war even more important, not less.

That is from a new paper by Avi Goldfarb and Jon R. Lindsay, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Claims about the evolution of memes

by  Tyler Cowen in

GoodToSell serves up a cyclical/asymptotic model of meme evolution and competition:

This is also an industry dominated by network effects. The forces that lead to such explosive growth, such as the scalability of info-tech, also lead to its downfall, as one or two companies dominate each niche. This means that the profitabilty component of evolution lessens its selective power, as platforms collect monopoly rents once all our attention has been accounted for.

Finally, algo-generated memes competed a little too well there for a minute. The shrillness reached its peak sometime in the past 3 years, and yet here we are, not in a civil war. The ideas were selected, in the inital expansion and takeover of memes, for pure potency and engagement, but not for accuracy or longevity. As people catch on, we will build up a societal defense immune system against purely mimetic viruses. Even now, I see many people simply detaching, having been burned thinking we were entering a societal event horizon—it turns out material reality was still dictated by material necessity, and the old powers that be are still in control, if temporarily perturbed. 4chan may still spin off a potent meme every once in a while, causing people to think that vaccines are population control, but after getting burned enough, and evading fact-checkers and censorship, people will eventually fall into habituation, and learned epistemic helplessness, back into the arms of traditional media, willing and occaisonally able to interpret things accurately…

Here is the entire post.

Immigration as a problem of “optimal harvesting”

by  Tyler Cowen

Assume you are judging immigration policy from a nationalistic point of view for the receiving country.  Furthermore, assume that you have in place, or could have in place, a mechanism for positive selection of migrants.  That is, you can attract some real talent, some Edward Tellers and Piet Mondrians.

I then wonder if for any desired amount of immigration, whether it should not be taken from countries with equal or lower birth rates than the receiving country.

Let’s say you have country X — Ruritania — with a relatively high birth rate.  In that country, the relatively talented people are having a fair number of children and producing a decent “rate of return” on their talent.  Why pluck them from that multiplicative environment?  A generation or two later, the prospects from that country will be all the brighter.

Conversely, if you take in talent from a country with an equal or lower birth rate to yours, you are not lowering the future rate of potentially talented babies born.

Note that if you wait to take in talent from Ruritania, it is not because you don’t want them.  It is because you want more/better of them later in the future.

Furthermore, if you are taking migrants from Ruritania in the future, when their birth rates are declining, you are also taking in individuals who, in the Beckerian sense, are receiving relatively high quality human capital investments from their parents, at least relative to that country’s past.

The perceptive will note that this argument holds regardless of the absolute number of migrants you might wish to take in, high or low.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Redux of my 2018 post “My Favorite Things Ukraine,” closes with this: “Overall, this is a stunningly impressive list, though there are legitimate questions as to who and what exactly counts as Ukrainian.  They’re still trying to sort that one out, which is part of the problem.”  The comments are interesting too.

2. Is progress in mathematics understudied?

3. “Insurance reduces anxiety and repetitious thoughts related to the mishap; with fewer thoughts about the mishap, its cognitive availability is lower and so it seems less likely to occur.”

4. Using AI to decode pig calls.

5. Why was Norway a welfare state laggard?

Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.

Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.

Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers.  Substack here.

Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!

Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.

Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.

Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore.  Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.

Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.

Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.

Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.

James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.

Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.

Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.

Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.

Congratulations to you all!  We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.

My Conversation with the excellent Sam Bankman-Fried

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the summary:

He joined Tyler to discuss the Sam Bankman-Fried production function, the secret to his trading success, how games like Magic: The Gathering have shaped his approach to business, why a legal mind is crucial when thinking about cryptocurrencies, the most important thing he’s learned about managing, what Bill Belichick can teach us about being a good leader, the real constraints in the effective altruism space, why he’s not very compelled by life extension research, challenges to his Benthamite utilitarianism, whether it’s possible to coherently regulate stablecoins, the implicit leverage in DeFi, Elon Musk’s greatest product, why he thinks Ethereum is overrated, where in the world has the best French fries, why he’s bullish on the Bahamas, and more.

And an excerpt:

COWEN: Now, for mathematical finance, as you know, we at least pretend we can rationally price equities and bonds. People started with CAPM. It’s much more complicated than that now. But based on similar kinds of ideas — ultimately arbitrage, right? — if you think of crypto assets, do we even have a pretense that we have a rational theory of how they’re priced?

BANKMAN-FRIED: With a few of them, not with most. In particular, let’s talk about Dogecoin for a second, which I think is the purest of a type of coin, of the meme coin. I think the whole thing with Dogecoin is that it does away with that pretense. There is no sense in which any reasonable person could look at Dogecoin and be like, “Yes, discounted cash flow.” I think that there’s something bizarre and wacky and dangerous, but also powerful about that, about getting rid of the pretense.

I think that’s one example of a place where there is no pretense anymore that there is any real sense of how do you price this thing other than supply and demand, like memes versus — I don’t know — anti-memes? I think that more generally, though, that’s happened to a lot of assets. It’s just less explicit in a lot of them.

What is Elon Musk’s greatest product ever, or what’s his most successful product ever? I don’t think it’s an electric car. I don’t think it’s a rocket ship. I think one product of his has outperformed all of his other products in demand, and that’s TSLA, the ticker. That is his masterpiece. How is that priced? I don’t know, it’s worth Tesla. It’s a product people want, Tesla stock.

COWEN: But the prevalence of memes, Dogecoin, your point about Musk — which I would all accept — does that then make you go back and revisit how everything else is priced? The stuff that was supposed to be more rational in the first place — is that actually now quite general, and you’ve seen it through crypto? Or not?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Absolutely. It absolutely forces you to go back and say, “Well, okay, that’s how cryptocurrencies are priced. Is it really just crypto that’s priced that way?” Or maybe, are there other asset classes that may claim to have some pricing, or purport to, or people may often assume it does, but which in practice is not exactly that? I think the answer to that is a pretty straightforward yes.

It’s a pretty straightforward answer that you look at Tesla, you look at a lot of stocks right now, you think about what determines their market cap — the discounted cash flow? Yeah, sort of, that plays a role in it. That’s 30 percent of the answer. It’s when we look at the meme stocks and the meme coins that we feel like we can see the answer for ourselves for the first time, but it was always there in the other stocks as well, and social media has been amplifying this all over the place.

COWEN: Is this a new account of how your background as a gamer with memes has made you the appropriate person for pricing and arbitrage in crypto?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Yeah, there’s probably some truth to that. [laughs]

Interesting throughout, and not just for crypto fans.

How do Effective Altruist recommendations change in time of war?

by  Tyler Cowen

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

During wartime, basic human needs become more pressing, most of all food. For instance, Ukraine supplies much of the world’s grain, including to many of the world’s poorer countries. The largest importers of Ukrainian grain are Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan, and in percentage terms Yemen, Libya and Lebanon are especially dependent. To the extent the conflict and sanctions disrupt Russia as well, Russia is not only a major grain exporter but also the largest exporter of fertilizer.

With so much of Ukraine under siege, these supplies are a mix of blockaded or endangered, thereby creating hunger and malnutrition risk for grain importers.

Increasing the productivity of agriculture, especially in poorer countries, now should be a higher priority. When food supply from one source such as Ukraine is shut off, poorer nations should have other supply options. The Green Revolution has been wonderful for India and Pakistan by increasing crop yields — but it turns much more agricultural innovation is necessary…

In a world at peace, public health interventions yield high returns, and they probably still will in wartime. But their relative benefits, compared to other interventions, may diminish. Saving lives with medicine is worthwhile, but many medicines are expensive. If lives can be saved by the mere shipment and trade of food, and at a profit at that, that will be preferred over saving lives with medicine.

Migration, or the discovery and reallocation of talent, also becomes a higher priority in wartime.  Do read the whole thing.

Holden Karnofsky emails me on transformative AI

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is Holden, our discussion started with this post of mine, for his words I will use quotation marks rather than dealing with double indentation:

“…debates about specifics between climate scientists get incredibly intricate (and are often very sensitive to parameters we just can’t reasonably estimate), and if you tried to get oriented to climate science by reading one it would be a nightmare, but this doesn’t mean the big-picture ways in which climatologists diverge from conventional wisdom should be discounted.

I think the broad-brush picture here is a better starting point than an exchange between Eliezer, Ajeya, me and Scott.

Even shorter version:

  • You can run the bio anchors analysis in a lot of different ways, but they all point to transformative AI this century;
  • As do the expert surveys, as does Metaculus;
  • Eliezer’s argument is that he thinks it will be sooner;
  • The most naive extrapolations of economic growth trends imply singularity (or at least “new growth mode”) this century;
  • Other angles of analysis (including the very-outside-view semi-informative priors) are basically about rebutting the idea that there’s a giant burden of proof here.
  • Specific arguments for “later than 2100,” including outside-view arguments, seem reasonably close to nonexistent; Robin Hanson has a (unconvincing IMO) case for synthetic AI taking longer, but Robin is also forecasting transformative AI of a sort (ems, which he says will lead to an explosion in economic growth and a relatively quick transition to something even stranger) this century.

So I ultimately don’t see how you get under P=1/3 or so for this century, and if you are way under P=1/3, I’d be interested if there were any more you could say about why (though recognize forecasts can’t always totally be explained).

P=1/3 would put “transformative AI this century” within 2x of “nuclear war this century,” and I think the average “nuclear war” is way less likely (like at least 10x) to have super-long-run impacts than the average “transformative AI is developed.”

That’s my basic thinking! It’s based on numerous angles and is not very sensitive to specific takes on the rate at which FLOPs get cheaper, although at some point I hope we can nail that parameter down better via prediction markets or something of the sort. Prediction markets on transformative AI itself are going to be harder, but I’m hopeful about that too. I think a very fast transition is plausible, so it could be very bad news if folks like you continue thinking it’s a remote possibility until it’s obviously upon us. (In my analogy, today might be like early January was for COVID. We don’t know enough to be sure, but we know enough to be highly alert, and we won’t necessarily be sure very long before it’s too late.)”

End of Holden, now back to TC.  And here is Holden’s “most important century” page.  That is our century, people!  This is all a bit of a follow-up on an in-person dialogue we had, but I will give him the last word (for now).

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen

1. John Elliott Cairnes, The Slave Power, from 1862.  Cairnes remains greatly underrated as an economist.  But The Slave Power is most remarkable for seeing that slavery was a system that pervaded (and corrupted) all aspects of the economy and society of the South.  An excellent early integration of economic reasoning and sociology.  And to think he wrote this from Galway, not Mississippi.

2. Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: A Biography.  A revelatory book that proves Stettheimer’s reputation deserves to be upgraded to the top tier of American artists of her time.  The color plates are wonderful.  I hadn’t known of her inspiration coming from Ballet Russe works.  For those who care, definitely recommended, deserves to make the best of the year list.

3. Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible.  One of the better Lems, reminds me of a Star Trek episode, with shades of gray goo hypotheses and an East Bloc ending.

I liked Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.

John Davis, Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher is mostly a social history.

There is also Penelope J. Corfield, The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain.

Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy elicited this blurb from me: “How does the concept of intangible capital help explain some features of what has gone wrong in our world? How is the concept of intangible capital key to fixing what has gone wrong and improving our world? This is the go-to book for those and other critical questions for boosting economic growth.”

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The great Leonard Kessler has passed away (he wrote my very first “favorite book“).  Plus he was “woke” in the good sense of that term.

2. And “economist” Gary North has passed away as well (NYT).  Hadn’t known he married Rushdoony’s daughter.

3. Excellent Matt Yglesias Bloomberg column on why Russian yacht seizure is ill-advised.

4. Devon Zuegel Buenos Aires guide.

5. The new Texas abortion law didn’t matter that much (NYT).

6. Is Moldova next?  With a disquisition on Transnistria.