This resolves yes if Google Trends shows that the daily search volume about the "AI Alignment" topic was higher than that about the "Light Pollution" topic, for any day before the end of 2024.
Go here to see how they compared over the last 30 days:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=%2Fg%2F11bzrg63f7,%2Fm%2F04mw9
Edit: this is about global search volume
Try swapping in “Biosecurity” or “nuclear proliferation” as established important-but-wonky topics. We’re in a bubble for thinking about AI stuff regularly and I think it’s easy to overestimate how much other people are going to search for these relatively abstract phrases, even as they worry about jobs and other more concrete things
Out of 4 times that "AI Alignment" has exceeded the global minimum of "Light Pollution", three have happened since mid-March. Plenty of time for stars to align either in 2023 or 2024 IMO.
Biggest worry: What's up with the seemingly relatively consistent rise of Light Pollution in 2023? If this is the new baseline then it'll be much harder to beat than the old "global minimum" of Light Pollution.
@Lily So everybody who bet yes needs to create a global meme connecting Christmas day to “AI alignment”, to get a timely spike. If you can pull that off, I won’t even be mad to lose
if public interest in this spikes, I think "AI safety" is much more likely to catch on as the mainstream term than "AI alignment"
@Lily "AI alignment" is a search 'topic' on Google Trends. It's a collection of search terms related to the same thing. Trends doesn't say what search terms are included in a topic, but it does kind of look like "AI safety" is not included, from this
@HarlanStewart interesting, wonder what (if any) category "AI safety" would fall under, if not alignment - doesn't look like the more left-coded "AI ethics" is a topic either
Google Trends only aggregates on a weekly basis, not daily?
My p(daily) is significantly higher than p(weekly).
@TobiasHaeberli there's an option for the past hour, past 4 hours, past day, past week, past month, etc etc. So each day's results will be a part of tomorrow's aggregate
@TobiasHaeberli also if you want, you can just download the data... as a csv, and it will allow you to see each individual day's data
@firstuserhere huh, weird. I don't have this option and the .csv was aggregated on a weekly basis.
