A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.
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Notes -
I think Point 1 really obscures a lot of bad AI outcomes by cloaking them in the most dramatic one. It is much, much more likely that AI does (or is used to do) something "mundane" like a superengineered virus or destroying the internet. (The latter may already be happening - it won't be a one-time event, just a slow but steady string of incidents that make the internet as we know it insecure and see the migration of core functions away from it.)
Lumping all other bad AI outcomes under "AI destroys the world" is a terrible idea, particularly when considering investing. Destroying the world is very hard to do, it's much more likely that any damage done by AI is far short of "destroying the world" and there is a considerable overlap between "world not destroyed" and "very bad outcomes for human flourishing, civilization and society." If you accept what should be very obvious - that it's much more likely that AI ends up creating the conditions for a catastrophic scenario that does not instantly kill you than one that destroys the world or at least you personally - then there are pretty decent investment strategies at your fingertips.
Interesting. I think AI makes a lot of ‘traditional’ prepper collapse scenarios much less likely in an all-or-nothing way. The prepper fantasy of the rural homestead where you’ve packed enough food to be self sufficient after the apocalypse in some isolated corner of Montana or Wyoming isn’t going to be much use against truly hostile AI. It’s a 20th century vision of the apocalypse.
You have to measure against the base rate for a traditional prepper collapse scenario. I think AI makes precisely the prepper collapse scenario more likely because it may increase the power and competency of evil actors to generate a temporary period of unrest or insecurity, precisely the sort of scenario the rural homestead best insulates against (as opposed to things like "global warming," "nuclear winter," "systematic famine," "bad political developments," all of which a rural homestead is better-than-nothing for, but ultimately still potentially insufficient.) The actual best prepping plan is probably not the rural homestead so much as it is the small community (rural homestead being not incompatible with this).
Confusing this scenario (plausible using existing AI demonstrated capabilities) with Terminator is exactly the sort of unhelpful conflation that I am talking about - the more I learn about AI and its capabilities, the less confident I am that a Terminator scenario is in the cards, and the more likely I think a human-directed threat or limited malfunction is.
But of course in this scenario your investment strategies can go beyond prepping - for instance if you think that AI is going to tank tech stocks, you can invest in real estate; if you think AI is going to make hostile foreign actors more effective you can invest in defense stocks, etc. etc.
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