Do you think a car engine is in the same reference class as a car? Do you think “a car engine cannot move under its own power, so it cannot possibly hurt people outside the garage!” is a valid or a meaningful statement to make? Do you think that figuring out how to manufacture amazing car engines is entirely irrelevant to building a full car, such that you can’t go from an engine to a car with relatively little additional engineering effort (putting it in a “wrapper”, as it happens)?
As all analogies, this one is necessarily flawed, but I hope it gets the point across.
(Except in this case, it’s not even that we’ve figured out how to build engines. It’s more like, we have these wild teams of engineers we can capture, and we’ve figured out which project specifications we need to feed them in order to cause them to design and build us car engines. And we’re wondering how far we are from figuring out which project specifications would cause them to build a car.)
I dislike the overuse of analogies in the AI space, but to use your analogy, I guess it’s like you keep assigning a team of engineers to build a car, and two possible things happen. Possibility One: the engineers are actually building car engines, which gives us a lot of relevant information for how to build safe cars (toque, acceleration, speed, other car things), even if we don’t know all the details for how to build a car yet. Possibility Two: they are actually just building soapbox racers, which doesn’t give us much information for building safe cars, but also means that just tweaking how the engineers work won’t suddenly give us real race cars.
Do you think a car engine is in the same reference class as a car? Do you think “a car engine cannot move under its own power, so it cannot possibly hurt people outside the garage!” is a valid or a meaningful statement to make? Do you think that figuring out how to manufacture amazing car engines is entirely irrelevant to building a full car, such that you can’t go from an engine to a car with relatively little additional engineering effort (putting it in a “wrapper”, as it happens)?
As all analogies, this one is necessarily flawed, but I hope it gets the point across.
(Except in this case, it’s not even that we’ve figured out how to build engines. It’s more like, we have these wild teams of engineers we can capture, and we’ve figured out which project specifications we need to feed them in order to cause them to design and build us car engines. And we’re wondering how far we are from figuring out which project specifications would cause them to build a car.)
I dislike the overuse of analogies in the AI space, but to use your analogy, I guess it’s like you keep assigning a team of engineers to build a car, and two possible things happen. Possibility One: the engineers are actually building car engines, which gives us a lot of relevant information for how to build safe cars (toque, acceleration, speed, other car things), even if we don’t know all the details for how to build a car yet. Possibility Two: they are actually just building soapbox racers, which doesn’t give us much information for building safe cars, but also means that just tweaking how the engineers work won’t suddenly give us real race cars.