[shaldengeki]

No, you're wrong. They wrote the story before coming up with the model!

In fact the model and technical work has basically nothing to do with the short story, aka the part that everyone read. This is pointed out in the critique, where titotal notes that a graph widely disseminated by the authors appears to be generated by a completely different and unpublished model.

[old_man_cato]

https://ai-2027.com/research says that:

AI 2027 relies on several key forecasts that couldn't be fully justified in the main text. Below we present the detailed research supporting these predictions.

You're saying the story was written, then the models were created and the two have nothing to do with one another? Then why does the research section say "Below we present the detailed research supporting these predictions"?

[shaldengeki]

Yes, that's correct. The authors themselves are being extremely careful (and, I'd argue, misleading) in their wording. The right way to interpret those words is "this is literally a model that supports our predictions".

Here is the primary author of the timelines forecast:

> In our website frontpage, I think we were pretty careful not to overclaim. We say that the forecast is our "best guess", "informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, ..." Then in the "How did we write it?" box we basically just say it was written iteratively and informed by wargames and feedback. [...] I don't think we said anywhere that it was backed up by straightforward, strongly empirically validated extrapolations.

> In our initial tweet, Daniel said it was a "deeply researched" scenario forecast. This still seems accurate to me, we spent quite a lot of time on it (both the scenario and supplements) and I still think our supplementary research is mostly state of the art, though I can see how people could take it too strongly.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-cri...

Here is one staff member at Lightcone, the folks credited with the design work on the website:

> I think the actual epistemic process that happened here is something like:

> * The AI 2027 authors had some high-level arguments that AI might be a very big deal soon

> * They wrote down a bunch of concrete scenarios that seemed like they would follow from those arguments and checked if they sounded coherent and plausible and consistent with lots of other things they thought about the world

> * As part of that checking, one thing they checked was whether these scenarios would be some kind of huge break from existing trends, which I do think is a hard thing to do, but is an important thing to pay attention to

> The right way to interpret the "timeline forecast" sections is not as "here is a simple extrapolation methodology that generated our whole worldview" but instead as a "here is some methodology that sanity-checked that our worldview is not in obvious contradiction to reasonable assumptions about economic growth"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-cri...

[recursivecaveat]

This quote is kindof a killer for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44065615 I mean if your prediction disagrees with your short-story, and you decide to just keep the story because changing the dates is too annoying, how seriously should anyone take you?

[old_man_cato]

Ok, yeah, I take the point that one illustration did not obviously precede the other but are likely the coincident result of a worldview.

I don't think it changes anything but thanks for the correction.