It seems to me like AGI risk needs a “zeitgeist addendum” / “venus project” style movie for the masses. Open up the overton window and touch on things like mesa optimization without boring the average person to death.
The /r/controlproblem faq is the most succinct summary i’ve seen but I couldn’t get the majority of average folks to read that if I tried and it would still go over their heads.
I love robert miles but he suffers from the same problem as elizer or say connor leahy. Not a radio voice. Not a movie face. Also his existing videos are “deep dive” style.
You need to be able to introduce the overall problem, the reasons / deductions on why and how its problematic. Address the obvious pushback (which the reddit control problem faq does well) and then introduce the more “intelligentsia” concepts like “mesa optimization” in an easily digestible manner for a population with an average reading comprehension of a 6th grade level and a 20 second attention span.
So you could work off of Robert miles videos but they need to fit into a narrative / storytelling format. Beggining, middle and end. The end should be basically where were all at “we’re probably all screwed but it doesn’t mean we can’t try” and then actionable advise (which should be sprinkled throughout the film, that’s foreshadowing)
Regarding that documentary , I see a major flaw as drifting off into specifics like killer drones. The media has already primed peoples imaginations for lots of the specific ways x risk or s risk might plan out (matrix trilogy , black mirror etc). You could go down an entire rabbot hole on just nano tech or bioweapons. IMO you sprinkle those about to keep the audience engaged (and so that the takeaway isn’t just “something something paperclips”) but driving into them too much grts you lost in the weeds.
For example , I foresaw the societal problems of deepfakes but the way its actually played out (mass distributed powerful llm’s people can diy with) coupled with the immediacy of the employment problem introeuces entire new vectors in social cohesion as problems I hadn’t thought through at all. So , better to broadly introduce individual danger scenarios while keeping the narrative focused on the value alignment / control problems themselves.
Thanks, I’ve read that FAQ but I’ll check it out again.
A good documentary might very well be an important step. I’m not familiar with your example films. I don’t really like the idea of fictionalizing the arguments since that’s an obviously sketchy way of making your points. However, if one was done in detail with really realistic portrayals of the problems and a very plausible path to AGI ruin, it might be really useful… unfortunately, Hollywood does not traffic in detail and realism by default, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that.
Right right. It doesn’t need to be finctionalized , just a kind of fun documentary. The key is , this stuff is not interesting for most folks. Mesa optimization sounds like a snore.
You have to be able to walk the audience through it in ane engaging way.
You should pull them up on youtube or whatever and then just jump around (sound off is fine) , the film maker is independent. I’m not saying that particular producer / film maker is the go to but the “style” and “tone” and overall storytelling fits the theme.
“Serious documentary about the interesting thing you never heard about” , also this was really popular with young adults when it came out, it caught the flame of a group of young Americans who came of age during 9/11 and the middle east invasions and sort of shaped up what became the occupy wall street movement. Now, that’s probably not exactly the demographic you want to target, most of them are tech savvy enough that they’ll stumble upon this on their own (although they do need something digestible) but broadly speaking it seems to me like having a cultural “phenomenon” that brings this more into the mainstream and introduces the main takeaways or concepts is a must have project for our efforts.
Ok well. Lets forget that exact example (which I now admit having not seen in almost twenty years)
I think we need a narrarive style film / docudrama. Beggining , middle , end. Story driven.
1.) Introduces the topic.
2.) Expands on it and touches on concepts
3.) Explains them in an ELI5 manner.
And that it should include all the relevant things like value alignment , control , inner and outer alignment etc without “losing” the audience.
Similarly if its going to touch on niche examples of x-risk or s-risk it should just “wet the imagination” without pulling down the entire edifice and losing the forest for the trees.
I think this is a format that is more likely to be engaged by a wider swathe of persons , I think (as I stated elsewhere in this thread) that rob miles , yudkowski and a large number of other AI experts can be quoted or summarized but do not offer the tonality / charisma to keep an audience engaged.
Think “attenborough” and the planet earth series.
It also seems sensible to me to kind of meld socratic questioning / rationality to bring the audience into the fold in terms of the deductive reasoning leading to the conclusions vs just outright feeding it to them upfront. Its going to be very hard to make a popular movie thst essentially promises catastophe. However if the narrator is asking the audience as it goes along “now , given the alien nature of the intelligence, why would it share human values? , imagine for a moment what it wpuld be like to be a bat...” then when you get to thr summary points any audience member with an iq above 80 is already halfway or more to the point independantly.
Thats what I like about the reddit controlproblem faq , it touches on all the basic superficial / kneejerk questions anyone who hasnt read like all of “superintelligence” would have when casually introduced to this.
It seems to me like AGI risk needs a “zeitgeist addendum” / “venus project” style movie for the masses. Open up the overton window and touch on things like mesa optimization without boring the average person to death.
The /r/controlproblem faq is the most succinct summary i’ve seen but I couldn’t get the majority of average folks to read that if I tried and it would still go over their heads.
There is this documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Trust_This_Computer%3F Probably not quite what you want. Maybe the existing videos of Robert Miles (on Mesa-Optimization and other things) would be better than a full documentary.
I love robert miles but he suffers from the same problem as elizer or say connor leahy. Not a radio voice. Not a movie face. Also his existing videos are “deep dive” style.
You need to be able to introduce the overall problem, the reasons / deductions on why and how its problematic. Address the obvious pushback (which the reddit control problem faq does well) and then introduce the more “intelligentsia” concepts like “mesa optimization” in an easily digestible manner for a population with an average reading comprehension of a 6th grade level and a 20 second attention span.
So you could work off of Robert miles videos but they need to fit into a narrative / storytelling format. Beggining, middle and end. The end should be basically where were all at “we’re probably all screwed but it doesn’t mean we can’t try” and then actionable advise (which should be sprinkled throughout the film, that’s foreshadowing)
Regarding that documentary , I see a major flaw as drifting off into specifics like killer drones. The media has already primed peoples imaginations for lots of the specific ways x risk or s risk might plan out (matrix trilogy , black mirror etc). You could go down an entire rabbot hole on just nano tech or bioweapons. IMO you sprinkle those about to keep the audience engaged (and so that the takeaway isn’t just “something something paperclips”) but driving into them too much grts you lost in the weeds.
For example , I foresaw the societal problems of deepfakes but the way its actually played out (mass distributed powerful llm’s people can diy with) coupled with the immediacy of the employment problem introeuces entire new vectors in social cohesion as problems I hadn’t thought through at all. So , better to broadly introduce individual danger scenarios while keeping the narrative focused on the value alignment / control problems themselves.
Thanks, I’ve read that FAQ but I’ll check it out again.
A good documentary might very well be an important step. I’m not familiar with your example films. I don’t really like the idea of fictionalizing the arguments since that’s an obviously sketchy way of making your points. However, if one was done in detail with really realistic portrayals of the problems and a very plausible path to AGI ruin, it might be really useful… unfortunately, Hollywood does not traffic in detail and realism by default, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that.
Right right. It doesn’t need to be finctionalized , just a kind of fun documentary. The key is , this stuff is not interesting for most folks. Mesa optimization sounds like a snore.
You have to be able to walk the audience through it in ane engaging way.
I’d go with “a bunch of weird stuff might happen. That might kill us all, because of instrumental convergence...
You should pull them up on youtube or whatever and then just jump around (sound off is fine) , the film maker is independent. I’m not saying that particular producer / film maker is the go to but the “style” and “tone” and overall storytelling fits the theme.
“Serious documentary about the interesting thing you never heard about” , also this was really popular with young adults when it came out, it caught the flame of a group of young Americans who came of age during 9/11 and the middle east invasions and sort of shaped up what became the occupy wall street movement. Now, that’s probably not exactly the demographic you want to target, most of them are tech savvy enough that they’ll stumble upon this on their own (although they do need something digestible) but broadly speaking it seems to me like having a cultural “phenomenon” that brings this more into the mainstream and introduces the main takeaways or concepts is a must have project for our efforts.
I googled “Zeitgeist Addendum” and it does not seem to be a thing that would be useful for AGI risk.
is a followup movie of a 9/11 conspiracy movie
has some naive economic ideas (like abolishing money would fix a lot of issues)
the venus project appears to not be very successful
Do you claim the movie had any great positive impact or presented any new, true, and important ideas?
Ok well. Lets forget that exact example (which I now admit having not seen in almost twenty years)
I think we need a narrarive style film / docudrama. Beggining , middle , end. Story driven.
1.) Introduces the topic.
2.) Expands on it and touches on concepts
3.) Explains them in an ELI5 manner.
And that it should include all the relevant things like value alignment , control , inner and outer alignment etc without “losing” the audience.
Similarly if its going to touch on niche examples of x-risk or s-risk it should just “wet the imagination” without pulling down the entire edifice and losing the forest for the trees.
I think this is a format that is more likely to be engaged by a wider swathe of persons , I think (as I stated elsewhere in this thread) that rob miles , yudkowski and a large number of other AI experts can be quoted or summarized but do not offer the tonality / charisma to keep an audience engaged.
Think “attenborough” and the planet earth series.
It also seems sensible to me to kind of meld socratic questioning / rationality to bring the audience into the fold in terms of the deductive reasoning leading to the conclusions vs just outright feeding it to them upfront. Its going to be very hard to make a popular movie thst essentially promises catastophe. However if the narrator is asking the audience as it goes along “now , given the alien nature of the intelligence, why would it share human values? , imagine for a moment what it wpuld be like to be a bat...” then when you get to thr summary points any audience member with an iq above 80 is already halfway or more to the point independantly.
Thats what I like about the reddit controlproblem faq , it touches on all the basic superficial / kneejerk questions anyone who hasnt read like all of “superintelligence” would have when casually introduced to this.