Ramblings of a somewhat libertarian stock market speculator
The folks who wrote AI 2027 have written a more optimistic narrative, which focuses more on hopes for good policies than on predictions about what policies we ll get. Plan A s narrative seems halfway between a science fiction story and a proposed treaty. Like most science fiction, I expect it to err in the direction of [ ]
Brian Albrecht s A compute tax is a REALLY dumb idea disputes a claim that I made in Safety Net When AIs Take Our Jobs about a possible need for a tax on GPUs and similar hardware. Albrecht and I are answering different questions. He asks what s the optimal tax for normal times. Whereas I ask [ ]
I recently attended a talk at Manifest by Chad Jones on the economic effects of AI. Much of it was sensible. Unlike many economists, he gives careful consideration to AI becoming pretty powerful soon. But his main scenarios predict much slower growth than I expect. His paper Past Automation and Future A.I.: How Weak Links [ ]
Book review: The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, by Robert Wright. Some AI doomers talk about AI becoming god-like. Robert Wright goes further, telling us that the world is about to create God, in a sense that he only half-jokingly compares to the Christian version of God. Wright argues that AI [ ]
We have seen signs that employees of AI companies can have significant influence on management (e.g. OpenAI November 2023). As AIs achieve comparable importance as workers for those companies, how much will they influence the leadership of the company? Even when AIs are as important as human workers, it s harder for them to develop leverage. [ ]
I ve analyzed the near-term economic effects of an AI pause, out of concern for my investments, and a desire to predict how strong political opposition to a pause is likely to be. My median estimates: The S P 500 will drop 27.8%. AI subsectors will drop 34-69%. Interest rates will rise at a much slower rate [ ]
The tone of AI stock behavior has changed in important ways this spring. Until March, they were clearly undervalued, and were quietly and somewhat patiently being accumulated by the minority of investors who realized the significance of AI. Recent buying has been less patient, occasionally mildly panicky, and indicates that awareness of AI is steadily [ ]
Book review: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, by Sebastian Mallaby. This book is a very good history of DeepMind. Ender versus the pure scientist An important theme of the book is that Hassabis identifies as pure scientist, valuing knowledge for its own sake. He wants to surpass Newton and [ ]
I participated, as a superforecaster, in the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI survey. They ve published their results in this 224 page paper. My prior experience in the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament led me to expect that the average participant would predict less AI impact than I predicted, but I was [ ]
What a weekend. Two new wars in Asia don t qualify as top news. My first reaction to Hegseth s conflict with Anthropic was along the lines of: I expected an attempt at quasi-nationalization of AI, but not this soon. And I expected it to look like it was managed by national security professionals. Hegseth doesn t look [ ]