After seemingly endless rounds of talks with its Polish and Czech counterparts about fielding a missile defense system in Europe, the United States made some progressin early February when Warsaw and Washington jointly announced they had reached an agreement in principle to move forward with the deployment of ten interceptors in Poland.
ATHENS The blades of the wind turbines on the mountain range opposite my window are turning especially energetically today. Last night’s storm has abated but high winds continue, contributing extra kilowatts to the electricity grid at precisely zero additional cost, or marginal cost, in the language of the economists. But the people struggling to make ends meet during a
I've been pondering whether we'll get any further warningsabout when AI(s) will
exceed human levels at general-purpose tasks, and that doing so would entail
enough risk that AI researchers ought to take some precautions. I feel pretty
uncertain about this.
I haven't even been able to make useful progress at clarifying what I mean by
that threshold of general intelligence.
As a weak substitute, I've brainstormed a bunch of scenarios describing
not-obviously-wrong ways in which people might notice, or fail to notice, that
AI is transforming the world.
I've given probabilities for each scenario, which I've pulled out of my ass and
don't plan to defend.
These probabilities add up to more than 100% - they're not mutually exclusive.
I'll estimate an additional 15% chance that we get a fire alarm some other way,
and a 25% chance that we get neither an alarm nor an interesting story about
what prevented the alarm.
What do I mean by "a fire