I mostly found myself more agreeing with Robin, in that e.g. I believe previous technical change is mostly a good reference class, that Eliezer’s AI-specific arguments are mostly kind of weak. (I liked the image, I think from that debate, of a blacksmith emerging into the townsquare with his mighty industry and making all bow before them.)
That said, I think Robin’s quantitative estimates/forecasts are pretty off and usually not very justified, and I think he puts too much stock on an outside view extrapolation from past transitions rather than looking at the inside view for existing technologies (the extrapolation seems helpful in the absence of anything else, but it’s just not that much evidence given the shortness and noisiness of the time series and the shakiness of the underlying regularities). I don’t remember exactly what kinds of estimates he gives in that debate.
(This is more obvious for his timeline estimates, which I think have an almost comically flimsy justification given how seriously he takes them.)
Overall I think that it would be more interesting to have a Carl vs Robin FOOM debate; I expect the outcome would be Robin saying “do you really call that a FOOM?” and Carl saying “well it is pretty fast and would have crazy disruptive geopolitical consequences and generally doesn’t fit that well with your implied forecasts about the world even if not contradicting that many of the things you actually commit to” and we could all kind of agree and leave it at that modulo a smaller amount of quantitative uncertainty.
(If both parties are interested in that debate I’m more than happy to organize it in whatever medium and do any work like record+transcripts or book an in-person event space.)
Who is right between Eliezer and Robin in the AI FOOM debate?
I mostly found myself more agreeing with Robin, in that e.g. I believe previous technical change is mostly a good reference class, that Eliezer’s AI-specific arguments are mostly kind of weak. (I liked the image, I think from that debate, of a blacksmith emerging into the townsquare with his mighty industry and making all bow before them.)
That said, I think Robin’s quantitative estimates/forecasts are pretty off and usually not very justified, and I think he puts too much stock on an outside view extrapolation from past transitions rather than looking at the inside view for existing technologies (the extrapolation seems helpful in the absence of anything else, but it’s just not that much evidence given the shortness and noisiness of the time series and the shakiness of the underlying regularities). I don’t remember exactly what kinds of estimates he gives in that debate.
(This is more obvious for his timeline estimates, which I think have an almost comically flimsy justification given how seriously he takes them.)
Overall I think that it would be more interesting to have a Carl vs Robin FOOM debate; I expect the outcome would be Robin saying “do you really call that a FOOM?” and Carl saying “well it is pretty fast and would have crazy disruptive geopolitical consequences and generally doesn’t fit that well with your implied forecasts about the world even if not contradicting that many of the things you actually commit to” and we could all kind of agree and leave it at that modulo a smaller amount of quantitative uncertainty.
Noted.
(If both parties are interested in that debate I’m more than happy to organize it in whatever medium and do any work like record+transcripts or book an in-person event space.)
Source for the blacksmith analogy: I Still Don’t Get Foom