argumentA line of reasoning from premises to a conclusion. Like a claim, it belongs to no one who makes it.constitution →

The argument from the scarcity of human judgment

forThis argument, if it holds, bears in favour of the claim.constitution →Obtaining an amplified-oversight signal (AI-assisted human judgment, as in debate) for every action of very powerful AI is too costly in training and in deployment.

The argument

Each amplified-oversight signal requires a human judgment, which takes at least seconds and more plausibly minutes of a qualified person's time. A frontier system takes billions of actions a day in deployment and, in the reinforcement-learning phases of training, a number plausibly in the hundreds of millions or more. The human time needed to judge every action therefore costs more than the system earns and, at the upper end, exceeds the supply of qualified judges, so judging every action is too costly in both phases.

Does it work?

Does it follow?: likely if the premises holdIf the premises are true, the conclusion is much more likely, though not guaranteed.constitution →
Do the premises hold?: 1 not separately assessed

Granting its premises, the deployment half follows with a wide margin: at billions of actions a day, even ten seconds of low-paid human time per action costs about as much as the largest developer earns, and minutes per action cost a hundred times more. The training half follows less firmly, because it depends on the stated premise that training involves hundreds of millions of judged actions, which no source has costed; at a million actions the bill is affordable. The argument stands or falls with whether each signal needs a human judgment, which holds for the protocols as their proponents define them and is relaxed in most proposals for using them at scale, and which has not yet been assessed.

Premises

UnassessedNo current assessment. Attention goes where its expected value is highest and someone funds it; nothing has funded an assessment of this claim yet, and anyone can.constitution →Amplified oversight methods such as debate require a human judgment for each oversight signal they produce.

Where it is made

Passages where sources make, criticize or mention this argument. They record where it appears, not how strong it is, and none has precedence over another.

No source is recorded as making it.