Why so little AI risk on rationalist-adjacent blogs?

Grant Demaree13 Jun 2022 6:31 UTC
46 points
23 comments8 min readLW link

I read a lot of rationalist-adjacents. Outside of LessWrong and ACX, I hardly ever see posts on AI risk. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution writes that, “it makes my head hurt” but hasn’t engaged with the issue. Even Zvi spends very few posts on AI risk.

This is surprising, and I wonder what to make of it. Why do the folks most exposed to MIRI-style arguments have so little to say about them?

Here’s a few possibilities

  1. Some of the writers disagree that AGI is a major near-term threat

  2. It’s unusually hard to think and write about AI risk

  3. The best rationalist-adjacent writers don’t feel like they have a deep enough understanding to write about AI risk

  4. There’s not much demand for these posts, and LessWrong/​Alignment Forum/​ACX are already filling it. Even a great essay wouldn’t be that popular

  5. Folks engaged in AI risk are a challenging audience. Eliezer might get mad at you

  6. When you write about AGI for a mainstream audience, you look weird. I don’t think this is as true it used to be, since Ezra Klein did it in the New York Times and Kelsey Piper in Vox

  7. Some of these writers are heavily specialized. The mathematicians want to write about pure math. The pharmacologists want to write about drug development. The historians want to argue that WWII strategic bombing was based on a false theory of popular support for the enemy regime, and present-day sanctions are making the same mistake

  8. Some of the writers are worried that they’ll present the arguments badly, inoculating their readers against a better future argument

What they wrote

I’ll treat Scott Alexander’s blogroll as the canonical list of rationalist-adjacent writers. I’ve grouped them by their stance on the following statement:

Misaligned AGI is among the most important existential risks to humanity[1]

Explicitly agrees and provides original gears-level analysis (2)

Zvi Mowshowitz

“The default outcome, if we do not work hard and carefully now on AGI safety, is for AGI to wipe out all value in the universe.” (Dec 2017)

Zvi gives a detailed analysis here followed by his own model in response to the 2021 MIRI conversations.

Holden Karnofsky of OpenPhil and GiveWell

In his Most Important Century series (Jul 2021 to present), Holden explains AGI risk to mainstream audiences. Ezra Klein featured Holden’s work in the New York Times.

This series had a high impact on me, because Holden used to have specific and detailed objections to MIRI’s arguments (2012). Ten years later, he’s changed his mind.

Explicitly agrees (4)

Jacob Falkovich of Putanumonit

“Misaligned AI is an existential threat to humanity, and I will match $5,000 of your donations to prevent it.” (Dec 2017)

Jacob doesn’t make the case himself, but he links to external sources.

Kelsey Piper of Vox

“the big overarching challenge is making sure that as our systems get more powerful, we design them so their goals are aligned with those of humans — that is, humanity doesn’t construct scaled-up superintelligent AI that overwhelms human intentions and leads to catastrophe.” (Apr 2021)

Steve Hsu of Information Processing

“I do think that the top 3 risks to humanity, in my view, are AI, bio, and unknown unknowns.” (Apr 2020)

Applied Divinity Studies

“AI risk seems to be about half of all possible existential risk.”

The above quote is from a May 2021 PDF, rather than a direct post. I can’t find a frontpage post that makes the AI risk case directly

EDIT: Previous version gave an incorrect name for the author of Applied Divinity Studies. The author also clarified their position in the comments:

In the piece you link I’m just taking Toby Ord’s estimates at face value to use them as a parameter, I haven’t given this a ton of thought.

But basically I do think AI Risk is important. I don’t write about it because I don’t have anything particularly smart to say. As you note, it’s a complex topic, and I don’t really feel like there’s any value in me contributing unless I were to really invest in learning much more.

Explicitly ambivalent (2)

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution

“As for Rogue AI… For now I will just say that it makes my head hurt. It makes my head hurt because the topic is so complicated… I see nuclear war as the much greater large-scale risk, by far” (Feb 2022).

Julia Galef of Rationally Speaking

Julia interviews Toby Ord at FHI and Kelsey Piper at Vox (AI risk discussions start on pages 9 and 6, respectively). These aren’t dated, but they appear to be 2021-2022.

“a sticking point for me, the whole time that I’ve been engaging with the AI risk argument and community—is just feeling caught between, well, the abstract argument is too abstract for me to really feel like I can get a handle on, or know how to take seriously. And any specific scenario feels too implausible. And so I don’t really know how to engage with this.”

No opinion stated, and I was surprised (3)

Good Optics writes mainly about history and philosophy. They take existential risks seriously, quote Nick Bostrom, and one of their blog topics is “avant-garde effective altruism.” So they’re definitely exposed to the idea.

Rohit Krishnan is a venture capitalist who writes on rationalist-adjacent topics. He mentions AGI risk in passing as a place to allocate grant money (Apr 2022). It’s not an endorsement or a criticism – it’s a discussion of how hard it is to evaluate grant effectiveness.

Razib Khan writes about history, genetics, IQ, and general science. He never mentions AGI risk.

No opinion stated, and AGI risk is off-topic (5)

Zeynep of The Insight, Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline, and Slime Mold Time Mold write about biology. They don’t mention AGI risk, but you wouldn’t expect them to.

Freddie deBoer is a self-described old-school Marxist, who writes about US politics. He mentions that AI will disrupt the economy, but I can’t find any discussion of x-risks.

Greg Cochran of West Hunter writes about anthropology, biology, history, and evolution. He doesn’t mention AGI risk, but you wouldn’t expect him to.

Partially disagrees (3)

Scott Aaronson (Mathematician)

“my views on AI risk have evolved… when I talk to the AI researchers whose expertise I trust the most, many, though not all, have updated in the direction of “maybe we should start worrying” (Dec 2017).

A few paragraphs later Scott says:

“But one more point: given the way civilization seems to be headed, I’m actually mildly in favor of superintelligences coming into being sooner rather than later. Like, given the choice between a hypothetical paperclip maximizer destroying the galaxy, versus a delusional autocrat burning civilization to the ground while his supporters cheer him on and his opponents fight amongst themselves, I’m just about ready to take my chances with the AI.”

Peter of Bayesian Investor

He takes AI risk seriously but suggests the problems could be fairly easy to solve:

“I’m around 50% confident that CAIS plus a normal degree of vigilance by AI developers will be sufficient to avoid global catastrophe from AI” (Jul 2017).

Dynomight

In the context of a Universal Basic Income argument, Dynomight suggests creating new jobs as deliberate gaps in a future AI’s workflow. My best guess is that they take AI risk seriously but would not endorse Eliezer’s view. I could be wrong, though.

“How to create jobs that look useful? In a future where AI is so powerful that normal human jobs are gone, shouldn’t we be worried about AI risk? Can we create bottlenecks in processes that have to be filled by humans? How to do this in a way that actually reduces AI risk is a hard problem, but surely we can at least make it look plausible” (Nov 2021)?

Explicitly disagrees (2)

Nintil

Ninil is the only writer on Scott’s blogroll to disagree recently and state a specific reason. He links to Curtis Yarvin’s argument.

My interpretation of his view: Diminishing returns to intelligence mean superintelligent AI won’t be powerful enough to destroy the world. Likewise, the world is so unpredictable that superintelligent strategies don’t have a decisive advantage over human ones.

“Curtis Yarvin on AI risk skepticism (Coincidentally, also my argument: diminishing returns to intelligence + inherent unpredictability of the world; though afaik I’ve never written about this.)” (June 2021)

Update: Nintil no longer endorses this. His new view:

I think some overall points in Yarvin’s essay are valid (the world is indeed uncertain and there are diminishing returns to intelligence), but AGIs would still have the advantage of speed and parallelism (Imagine the entirety of Google but no need for meetings, and where workweeks are ran at 100x speed). Even in the absence of superior intelligence, that alone leads to capacities beyond what a human or group thereof can accomplish. I don’t know exactly what I was endorsing, but definitely as of today _I do not think Curtis Yarvin’s post shows there is no reason to worry about AI risk_. I might write about AI risk at some point. After all I recently compiled [a reading list](https://​​nintil.com/​​links-57) on the topic!

And answering the question, why haven’t I written about it, other topics come to mind where I have something that I think is worth saying, I think AGI is still somewhat into the future. I am somewhat specialized these days. Usually when I write I like to read all that has been said about the topic, or at least enough to see if something new deserves to be said and then I say it. I don’t like being repetitive. I like writing summaries and critical summaries, but even for that there seems to be decent sources around in the internet. If I spent more time reading about it I still think I could write the best primer to the subject :-) .There’s still an argument for why someone like me should write one post on this, which is to add my endorsement to the “this is a serious problem”, which marginally could increase the odds of someone doing something about it.

The Scholar’s Stage

Their history writing is excellent, but I was disappointed with their take on AGI risk. They ridiculed the idea without making a specific objection. Context is a Feb 2021 essay criticizing the NYT article on Scott Alexander. In their defense, it’s from a footnote, not the main essay.

“were I the one trying to be “critical” of the rationalists, I would write much less about how their comment threads are hostile to feminism–which isn’t true in any case, there were plenty of feminists in those threads, more of those commenting than there ever were neoreactionaries–and more about how they continually agitate for people to give part of their income to stopping Skynet. I kid you not. If this is not a grift, what is? How did that not make it into the article while all this nonsense about the Silicon Valley psyche did?

Well, we know the answer to that. The absurdity of the AI risk project is so far outside of the NYT‘s existing narrative frame that this detail did not even register.”

Not included (1)

I didn’t include Eli Dourado, because his last AGI-related post is from 2011. For the last few years, he’s only posted a few times per year and never on AGI. I don’t know his current views.

My explanation

First, Holden Karnofsky is an exception to the pattern. 28 of his 88 posts on Cold Takes are mainly about AI risk. That’s more than 10x the rate of anyone else. Even those who mentioned AI risk did so in 1-2 out of hundreds of posts.

Theory 1 (Some of the writers disagree that AGI is a major near-term threat) explains at least 5 (and up to 9) of the 20 blogs. 5 writers explicitly disagreed that that AGI is a threat or took positions that imply deprioritizing it.

I bet it’s at least part of the reason for Tyler Cowen’s relative silence. He made clear that it’s a lower priority than nuclear safety, and that reduces the amount of effort we should expect him to dedicate to the issue.

Good Optics, Rohit, and Razib didn’t write anything, so it’s hard to know why. But I bet they’ve been exposed to MIRI style arguments and, if they found them true and important, would have written about them.

Theory 7 (Some of the writers are heavily specialized) explains another 5.

Julia Galef and Tyler Cowen endorsed Theory 2, that it’s unusually hard to think about AI risk.

That leaves the 5 who explicitly agree yet don’t write about it very often. Zvi, Kelsey Piper, Jacob Falkovich, Steve Hsu, Alexey Guzey. That could be any number of theories, but I think it’s a combination of 2 (unusually hard to think and write about AI risk), 3 (not enough expertise), 5 (challenging audience), and 8 (presenting the arguments badly does harm).

Recommendation

I think it’s a good idea for popular rationalist-adjacents to write about AI risk more often, especially high-quality essays for mainstream readers who don’t visit LessWrong.

Rationalist-adjacent writers are a major path for LessWrong ideas to influence elite and mainstream opinion. This can lead to good policies, like avoiding a race with China and discouraging certain types of capabilities research.

Finally, I read quite a few of the folks named above. I pay for several of their Substacks, think you should too, and feel like I’m getting a good deal. I’ll continue to be a happy reader whether or not they write about AI risk.

  1. ^

    I wanted to include a stronger statement that specified short or medium timelines (5 to 40 years), defined existential risk as “at least as bad as 7 billion deaths”, and identified AGI as the single most important risk. But almost none of the writers specified their position in that much detail.

Grant Demaree13 Jun 2022 6:31 UTC
46 points
23 comments8 min readLW link