Engaging Seriously with Short Timelines

You have detailed perhaps the more productive side of the advice—what to do—and I have consequently thought of some quick bullets on what not to do.

1. Getting into a career likely to be made obsolete is bad. This will either be most of them—in which case it is prudent to distill productive activities to a very small list not unlike the one you write above—or it will be a more workable subset. Either way, much of copywriting, rudimentary coding activities for basic websites, etc. are likely to disappear, and one should either become an expert in a very specific type of these things, or avoid them; there won't be much economic advantage for someone whose body of work is the corpus for GPT-4, etc.!

2. Paralyzing pessimism or indifference. Even if we are racing toward a singularity, inaction is worse than action, and for mental health it is very important to stay active. Not everyone should take this as "go get a job in AI research" but it might be a good time to read over 80,000 Hours to make sure your direction in life is deliberate and robust enough to fulfill you into an uncertain future.

AI-related investment thoughts:

I have stock in Google and Intel, mainly because of their Waymo and Mobileye subsidiaries, and to a lesser extent due to DeepMind.

NVIDIA was my favorite AI bet in 2017-8, but it currently looks too expensive for me.

One Stop Systems Inc is an obscure company in which I've invested, because its business involves AI. It's hardly a leader in AI, but should benefit by enabling ordinary businesses to use AI.

I doubt that Apple, Microsoft, or Salesforce will be good ways to benefit from AI, and their prices are looking somewhat bubble-like (as do most of the big tech companies).

I expect that semiconductor equipment companies will be somewhat more appropriate, and they currently seem less likely to be overpriced. I've currently got investments in these small semiconductor equipment companies:

• Amtech Systems
• Trio-Tech International
• SCI Engineered Materials, Inc.

The biggest semiconductor equipment companies (symbols BRKS, LRCX, KLAC, and AMAT) look like decent investments, but not quite cheap enough that I'm willing to buy them.

There are some datacenter-focused companies that are potentially good investments, but none of the ones I've looked at appear reasonably priced.

Transformative AI might speed up the creation of an Age of Em scenario, so it might be good to invest in regions which that book suggests might have em cities (places with stable governance, and enough cold water for cooling purposes). Countries that best fit this description include: Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Canada, and Japan.

I currently have investments in New Zealand and Sweden etfs (symbols ENZL, EWD). I'm avoiding Norway for now, and not investing much in Canada, due to their dependence on oil (I expect oil prices to decline this decade).

Here are some ideas for investing in companies that own land (listed by symbol; not AI-focused, but recommended for general diversification of bets): WPS (etf, non-US real estate), CTT (timber lands), TPL, and TRC. I'm currently invested in WPS and a bunch of real-estate-related companies in the US and Hong Kong, but I haven't yet focused on land (I've been betting mainly on buildings).

Some career ideas for non-math and non-finance people:

Pursue a more primitive lifestyle: live off the land and farm. You can make it escapist (trying to ignore what's going on in the world) or a strategic fortress (if everything crumbles, I will not starve in the city). Everyone will always need food, so for as long as there are humans, there will be need for those who grow it. Also a good option because you can dial the primitive part up or down: you can either be a secluded monk or a farmer feeding the region.

Pursue a trade or human contact job: no GPT will replace a nurse, a physical therapist, a plumber, an electrician. For as long as people need things, they will need someone to do these things for them.

Get capital while you can - Money is broadly useful and can be quickly converted into other resources in a critical moment. At the very least money can be converted into time. Be frugal, you might need your resources soon.

Besides, the value of human capital might fall. If you have a lucrative position (ex: finance or tech) now is a good time to focus on making money.  The value of human capital might fall. Investing in your human capital by going back to school is a bad idea.

I find this advice puzzling.

Firstly, I suspect that when things get sufficiently crazy, money will become increasingly worthless.

Secondly, the general paradigm of automation often involves replacing many low skill workers with a few high skill engineers. By the point that an AI can do everything that a highly skilled AI expert human can do, most human jobs are automated, and recursive self improvement is picking up.

Suppose that an AI system can do work similar to a human AI expert, at a compute cost of $10,000. (Ie less than an AI expert salary, but not orders of magnitude less).

This is the lest extreme tech you need to put an AI expert out of a good job, and even then, I suspect some people will want a human. At this stage, the improvement work on AI is being done by AI. If we haven't already developed some friendliness theory, we will have unfriendly AI's producing more powerful unfriendly AI's. Most of the alignment work that you can do on an AI that's as smart as you and twice as fast can be done on an AI far smarter than you, like post Foom ones.

In this scenario, the AI's will probably be smart enough to consider the end they are working towards. If that is profit, we are pretty much doomed. If that is being nice, we won't really need money.

Any ideas for accruing money quickly outside of a job? I don't have much capital to invest currently.

if things get crazy you want your capital to grow rapidly.

Why (if by "crazy" you mean "world output increasing rapidly")? Isn't investing to try to have much more money in case world output is very high somewhat like buying insurance to pay the cost of a taxi to the lottery office in case you win the lottery? Your net worth is positively correlated with world GDP, so worlds in which world GDP is higher are worlds in which you have more money, and thus worlds in which money has a lower marginal utility to you. People do tend to value being richer than others in addition to merely being rich, but perhaps not enough to generate the numbers you need to make those investments be the obviously best choice.

(h/t to Avraham Eisenberg for this point)

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But getting the timing [on buying options] right seems tricky to me.

Decide on how much to spend per month and just buy longest available options. (I think the payout for this gets progressively better the closer you think we are to singularity.)

Moving to the US, as they are the most likely to win the AI race.