if you think timelines are short for reasons unrelated to biological anchors, I don't think Bio Anchors provides an affirmative argument that you should change your mind.
...Eliezer: I wish I could say that it probably beats showing a single estimate, in terms of its impact on the reader. But in fact, writing a huge careful Very Serious Report like that and snowing the reader under with Alternative Calculations is probably going to cause them to give more authority to the whole thing. It's all very well to note the Ways I Could Be Wrong
The Bio Anchors report is intended as a tool for making debates about AI timelines more concrete, for those who find some bio-anchor-related bound helpful (e.g., some think we should lower bound P(AGI) at some reasonably high number for any year in which we expect to hit a particular kind of "biological anchor"). Ajeya's work lengthened my own timelines, because it helped me understand that some bio-anchor-inspired arguments for shorter timelines didn't have as much going for them as I'd thought; but I think it may have shortened some other folks'.
(The pre...
Could you expand on what you mean by 'less automation'? I'm taking it to mean some combination of 'bounding the space of controller actions more', 'automating fewer levels of optimisation', 'more of the work done by humans' and maybe 'only automating easier tasks' but I can't quite tell which of these you're intending or how they fit together.
(Also, am I correctly reading an implicit assumption here that any attempts to do automated research would be classed as 'automated ai safety'?)