Follow-up poll on AGI + savings rates.
1,000I picked "Worried about AGI / Adjusted your savings rate" because I think there's a significant probability that, if an AGI revolution happens, the only thing that ends up mattering long-term for me is how many GPUs I am able to rent from NvidiGoogZon to run Milford-CEV using the capital I've saved up already.
As someone who answered "Worried about AGI / Have not changed your savings rate" (which I take to be the surprising option), I'll weigh in with my reasoning.
I have pretty high credence that AI will have a transformative impact on society, for better or for worse. If this occurs, I don't think having a sizable nest egg will be very important (either because having subsidized retirement will be all but guaranteed or because most people will be dead and never need to worry about retirement).
So why don't I adjust my savings rate? For the same reason that I don't dump all (or a majority) of my investments into AI: if I'm right that AI is the future, then I will care much less about money in the future, but if I'm wrong about AI being the future, then I should continue on as normal. As I view it, there are three general classes of outcomes:
1) My beliefs about AI are wrong, and AI is not going to have a transformative effect on society (at least in the ways that I expect it to).
2) My beliefs about AI are right, and things will go well.
3) My beliefs about AI are right, and things will go badly.
If 1) is true, I would be very regretful if I found out late in life and had not saved up for retirement. I am very scared of that outcome (more than almost anything else, to be honest), and even though I regard it as unlikely, I allot a non-trivial probability that I might be very confused in my current beliefs, e.g. if futurism is largely a sham and I have been roped into religious thinking about AI.
If 2) is true and it turns out that AI ushers in a scientific and technological utopia, I will likely not be upset about having laboured away to cover my counterfactual bases, given that I will probably have a much longer health span than one would expect under the current paradigm, and lots of other benefits to experience.
If 3) is true and AI causes the collapse of civilization or kills everyone, I will be somewhat upset about having worked to save up for retirement, but a key consideration in my personal case is that I'm not currently rushing towards retirement. I don't work the longest days and I still put a healthy amount of time and attention into my relationships and hobbies. So if we all die in a robot uprising or an AI-enabled bioterrorist attack, I will regret having saved up for nothing, but I won't feel like I wasted my entire life working.
If I had a worse work-life balance, then my current beliefs about AI probably would lead me to adjust my savings rate, but I suspect my savings rate is already lower than most other respondents. If someone were to share my exact beliefs but were currently grinding as hard as possible to retire in 15 years, I too would regard that as inconsistent.