We weren’t intending to use the contest to do any direct outreach to anyone (not sure how one would do direct outreach with one liners in any case) and we didn’t use it for that. I think it was less useful than I would have hoped (nearly all submissions were not very good), but ideas/anecdotes surfaced have been used in various places and as inspiration.
It is also interesting to note that the contest was very controversial on LW, essentially due to it being too political/advocacy flavored (though it wasn’t intended for “political” outreach per se). I think it’s fair for research that LW has had those kinds of norms, but it did have a chilling effect on people who wanted to do the kind of advocacy that many people on LW now deem useful/necessary.
(not sure how one would do direct outreach with one liners in any case)
Generally, it’s pretty reasonable to think that there’s an optimal combination of words that can prepare people to handle the reality of the situation. But that contest was the first try at crowdsourcing it, and there were invisible helicopter blades e.g. the ideal of “one-liners” steering people in bad directions, anti-outreach norms causing controversy that repelled talented writers, and possibly intervention from bots/hackers, since contests like these might have already been widely recognized as persuasion generators that crowd out the established elites in a very visible way, and the AI alignment community could not reasonably have been expected to anticipate that.
When it comes to outputting optimal combinations of words, I think Critch’s recent twitter post went much further (but it’s very humanly possible to make an even more optimal combination than this).
Without internationally enforced speed limits on AI, humanity is very unlikely to survive. From AI’s perspective in 2-3 years from now, we look more like plants than animals: big slow chunks of biofuel showing weak signs of intelligence when undisturbed for ages (seconds) on end.
Over the next decade, expect AI with more like a 100x − 1,000,000x speed advantage over us. Why?
Neurons fire at ~1000 times/second at most, while computer chips “fire” a million times faster than that. Current AI has not been distilled to run maximally efficiently, but will almost certainly run 100x faster than humans, and 1,000,000x is conceivable given the hardware speed difference.
“But plants are still around!”, you say. “Maybe AI will keep humans around as nature reserves.” Possible, but unlikely if it’s not speed-limited. Remember, ~99.9% of all species on Earth have gone extinct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction
When people demand “extraordinary” evidence for the “extraordinary” claim that humanity will perish when faced with intelligent systems 100 to 1,000,000 times faster than us, remember that the “ordinary” thing to happen to a species is extinction, not survival. As many now argue, “I can’t predict how a world-class chess AI will checkmate you, but I can predict who will win the game.”
And for all the conversations we’re having about “alignment” and how AI will serve humans as peers or assistants, please try to remember the video above. To future AI, we’re not chimps; we’re plants.
We weren’t intending to use the contest to do any direct outreach to anyone (not sure how one would do direct outreach with one liners in any case) and we didn’t use it for that. I think it was less useful than I would have hoped (nearly all submissions were not very good), but ideas/anecdotes surfaced have been used in various places and as inspiration.
It is also interesting to note that the contest was very controversial on LW, essentially due to it being too political/advocacy flavored (though it wasn’t intended for “political” outreach per se). I think it’s fair for research that LW has had those kinds of norms, but it did have a chilling effect on people who wanted to do the kind of advocacy that many people on LW now deem useful/necessary.
Generally, it’s pretty reasonable to think that there’s an optimal combination of words that can prepare people to handle the reality of the situation. But that contest was the first try at crowdsourcing it, and there were invisible helicopter blades e.g. the ideal of “one-liners” steering people in bad directions, anti-outreach norms causing controversy that repelled talented writers, and possibly intervention from bots/hackers, since contests like these might have already been widely recognized as persuasion generators that crowd out the established elites in a very visible way, and the AI alignment community could not reasonably have been expected to anticipate that.
When it comes to outputting optimal combinations of words, I think Critch’s recent twitter post went much further (but it’s very humanly possible to make an even more optimal combination than this).
Note that I think the “2-3 years” thing really undermines the entire rest of it.
Full agree on all of this.