Weekend Reading & Selected Links

Happy weekend! Here are some links to things I've been reading that you might also enjoy:

1. I want to learn more about my audience. Please complete this short survey to help me learn more about you. (It will help me with sponsorships.)
2. My new podcast conversation, with Larry Summers. At the bottom of this email, I've reprinted two excerpts from the conversation.
3. Scott Alexander's write-up of the Progress Studies conference (which I attended last weekend).
4. Tamay Besiroglu's take on Dario Amodei's recent essay.
5. Keith Rabois on hiring.
6. Tyler Cowen guides Rick Rubin through Russian classical music. One of the most enjoyable podcast episodes I've listened to this year.

Have a great weekend,‌
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Joe

Excerpts from my podcast with Larry Summers

1. Summers is broadly "AI-pilled"

WALKER: If we take the long view and look at gross world product over many thousands of years, growth rates have been increasing over time. How likely is it that AI initiates a new growth regime with average growth that’s, say, ten times faster than today?

SUMMERS: I think the kind of growth that followed the Industrial Revolution was probably unimaginable to people before the industrial revolution. And I think even the kind of growth that followed the Renaissance, that can perhaps be dated to the 1500s, probably seemed implausible to people beforehand.

So I hesitate to make definitive statements. My instinct is that substantial acceleration is possible. I find 10x (to be growth at a level where productivity doubles every four years) to be hard to imagine. 

There are certain things that seem to me to have some limits on how much they can be accelerated. It takes so long to build a building, it takes so long to make a plan. But the idea of a qualitative acceleration in the rate of progress has to be regarded, it seems to me, as something that's very possible.

2. How much will AGI help with macroeconomic forecasting?

WALKER: Moving to the US, take the Fed, for example. How much better could monetary policy be if the Fed had AGI? Could we massively reduce the incidence of financial and macroeconomic instability? Or are those things subject to chaotic tipping points that just aren't really amenable to intelligence?

SUMMERS: I think it's a very important question. The weather and the equations that govern weather are susceptible to chaotic dynamics, and that places sort of inherent limits on weather forecasting. Nonetheless, we're able each decade to go one day longer and have the same quality forecast that we had in the previous decade. So the five-day forecast in this decade is like the four-day forecast was a decade ago, or the three-day forecast was two decades ago. 

So I suspect we are far short of some inherent limit with respect to economic forecasting. 

I'm not certain, because there's a fundamental difference between economic forecasting and weather forecasting, which is the weather forecast doesn't affect the weather, but the economic forecast does affect the economy.

But my guess is that we will be able to forecast with more accuracy, which means we will be able to stabilise with more accuracy, and that should lead to better policies. And it may be that we will find that, to take a different sort of natural world problem, AI will improve the field of seismology, earthquake prediction, which involves predicting rare convulsive events. And it may be that it will aid in predicting financial crashes and evaluating bubbles. And all of that would obviously also contribute to stabilisation policy. So I would expect meaningful progress to come over time.