I’m most optimistic about “feel the ASI” interventions to improve this. I think once people understand the scale and gravity of ASI, they will behave much more sensibly here. The thing I intuitively feel most optimistic (whithout really analyzing it) is movies or generally very high quality mass appeal art.
I think better AGI-depiction in movies and novels also seems to me like a pretty good intervention. I do think these kinds of things are very hard to steer on-purpose (I remember some Gwern analysis somewhere on the difficulty of getting someone to create any kind of high-profile media on a topic you care about, maybe in the context of hollywood).
Whenever this comes up I offer the cautionary tale of the movie Transcendence, which… sure looks like it was trying hard to make a fairly serious AI movie that dealt with issues I cared about (I’m at least 25% that some kind of LW-reader was involved somehow).
It… was a pretty mediocre movie that faded into obscurity, despite a lot of star power and effort.
It was mediocre in kind of subtle ways, where, like, I dunno the characters just weren’t that compelling, and the second half is a little slow and boring. The plot also ends up not quite making sense at first glance (although Critch argues if you actually just assume some stuff is happening offscreen that the movie doesn’t specify it checks out)
Basically: if you try this, don’t forget to make an actual good movie.
Also: the movie M3gan is pretty good, although hasn’t gained Terminator level awareness. (“Her” and “Ex Machina” seem to have done a bit better on this axis)
I’m surprised I don’t see Silicon Valley come up in conversations like this. I hadn’t seen anyone talk about it on LW before watching it, and well (spoilers for season 6):
The show literally ends with them accidentally creating self-improving AI that the characters get very scared by when it becomes competent enough to break encryptions, and deciding not only to shut it down and let their dreams die forever, but to pretend their company went bust for entirely different reasons and throw everyone else off the path of doing something similar for a few years at least, solely to forestall the danger.
I’m probably more than 25% that some kind of LW-reader was involved somehow, given how much they talk about misaligned AI in the last season, and the final episode (at one point they even talk about Roko’s Basilisk in a not-entirely-dismissive way, though that could be from a number of other sources given its popularity).
It helps that the show is actually pretty good, and fairly popular as well. It’s probably slight evidence against this strategy that that didn’t somehow make a lot of people more aware about AI risk (though maybe it did and I’m just missing a lot of social context). But then again, I also didn’t see people talk about it here so perhaps the final season was simply much less popular.
I will continue to pitch on the idea that Person of Interest is a TV show chock full of extremely popular TV people, including one lead beloved by Republicans, and we inexplicably fail to push people towards its Actually Did The Research presentation of loss-of-control stuff.
We should do that. You all should, unironically, recommend it, streaming now on Amazon Prime for free, to your normie parents and aunts and uncles if they’re curious about what you do at work.
I’ve tried to watch it based on this recommendation and struggled a bit with “how long do I have to watch this random crime procedural before it turns into an AI show?”
That’s a fair criticism! Season 1 is definitely slower on that front compared to the others. I think season 1 is the most normal “crime of the week” season by far, which is why I view it as a good on-ramp for folks less familiar. Arguably, for someone situated as you are, you should just watch the pilot, read a quick wiki summary of every other episode in season 1 except for the last 2, watch those last 2, and move into season 2 when things get moving a little faster. (Finch needs a character that doesn’t appear until season 2 to do a lot of useful exposition on how he thinks about the Machine’s alignment).
Well, it’s quite good random crime procedural with very likable main characters, but yes, in the first season AI plotline is very slow until last 2 episodes. And then it’s slow again for the most part.
yeah, i agree the movie has to be very high quality to work. This is a long shot, although the best rationalist novels are actually high quality which gives me some hope that someone could write a great novel/movie outline that’s more targeted at plausible ASI scenarios
I haven’t seen Transcendence. I liked Her and Ex Machina a lot. I didn’t think M3gan was particularly good, but had potential that it failed to capitalize on.
M3gan felt to me like it really fell down by
emphasizing the embodiedness of the AI. The movie would have been a lot scarier and more effective if the AI had copied itself onto the internet rather than staying stuck in a single robot body (with no justification). This could be inserted just as a dramatic end scene reveal, leaving the rest of the movie unaffected. [Edit: apparently this sorta happened but I forgot? h/t Neel Nanda]
Something I’ve been wondering about is how hard it would be to revamp existing movies into much better ones by editing them to change the plot. Cut some parts, rearrange some parts, and insert some ElevenLabs narration, some AI-generated scenes. I feel like there are a lot of movies out there that are almost good, but fail through broken plots, and could be fairly easily fixed through such manipulations.
Even pretty good movies could be substantially improved through a few small changes.
For example, Ex Machina could be improved by
adding a scene at the ending which indicated that the AI had copied itself onto the internet, and was beginning to acquire significant resources. Additionally, if it showed the humans from the AI’s point of view, and the humans were all moving in super slow motion.
Ok, but like… in a very weak way. Like, oh no, the creepy doll might still be alive. Not in a like ‘and now this AI has made millions of copies of itself in a day, and gained awesome powers through self-improvement, and is endangering all of humanity’ kind of way.
yeah. One trajectory could be someone in-community-ish writes an extremely good novel about a very realistic ASI scenario with the intention to be adaptable into a movie, it becomes moderately popular, and it’s accessible and pointed enough to do most of the guidence for the movie. I don’t know exactly who could write this book, there are a few possibilities.
Great post!
I’m most optimistic about “feel the ASI” interventions to improve this. I think once people understand the scale and gravity of ASI, they will behave much more sensibly here. The thing I intuitively feel most optimistic (whithout really analyzing it) is movies or generally very high quality mass appeal art.
I think better AGI-depiction in movies and novels also seems to me like a pretty good intervention. I do think these kinds of things are very hard to steer on-purpose (I remember some Gwern analysis somewhere on the difficulty of getting someone to create any kind of high-profile media on a topic you care about, maybe in the context of hollywood).
Whenever this comes up I offer the cautionary tale of the movie Transcendence, which… sure looks like it was trying hard to make a fairly serious AI movie that dealt with issues I cared about (I’m at least 25% that some kind of LW-reader was involved somehow).
It… was a pretty mediocre movie that faded into obscurity, despite a lot of star power and effort.
It was mediocre in kind of subtle ways, where, like, I dunno the characters just weren’t that compelling, and the second half is a little slow and boring. The plot also ends up not quite making sense at first glance (although Critch argues if you actually just assume some stuff is happening offscreen that the movie doesn’t specify it checks out)
Basically: if you try this, don’t forget to make an actual good movie.
Also: the movie M3gan is pretty good, although hasn’t gained Terminator level awareness. (“Her” and “Ex Machina” seem to have done a bit better on this axis)
I’m surprised I don’t see Silicon Valley come up in conversations like this. I hadn’t seen anyone talk about it on LW before watching it, and well (spoilers for season 6):
The show literally ends with them accidentally creating self-improving AI that the characters get very scared by when it becomes competent enough to break encryptions, and deciding not only to shut it down and let their dreams die forever, but to pretend their company went bust for entirely different reasons and throw everyone else off the path of doing something similar for a few years at least, solely to forestall the danger.
I’m probably more than 25% that some kind of LW-reader was involved somehow, given how much they talk about misaligned AI in the last season, and the final episode (at one point they even talk about Roko’s Basilisk in a not-entirely-dismissive way, though that could be from a number of other sources given its popularity).
It helps that the show is actually pretty good, and fairly popular as well. It’s probably slight evidence against this strategy that that didn’t somehow make a lot of people more aware about AI risk (though maybe it did and I’m just missing a lot of social context). But then again, I also didn’t see people talk about it here so perhaps the final season was simply much less popular.
I will continue to pitch on the idea that Person of Interest is a TV show chock full of extremely popular TV people, including one lead beloved by Republicans, and we inexplicably fail to push people towards its Actually Did The Research presentation of loss-of-control stuff.
We should do that. You all should, unironically, recommend it, streaming now on Amazon Prime for free, to your normie parents and aunts and uncles if they’re curious about what you do at work.
I’ve tried to watch it based on this recommendation and struggled a bit with “how long do I have to watch this random crime procedural before it turns into an AI show?”
That’s a fair criticism! Season 1 is definitely slower on that front compared to the others. I think season 1 is the most normal “crime of the week” season by far, which is why I view it as a good on-ramp for folks less familiar. Arguably, for someone situated as you are, you should just watch the pilot, read a quick wiki summary of every other episode in season 1 except for the last 2, watch those last 2, and move into season 2 when things get moving a little faster. (Finch needs a character that doesn’t appear until season 2 to do a lot of useful exposition on how he thinks about the Machine’s alignment).
Well, it’s quite good random crime procedural with very likable main characters, but yes, in the first season AI plotline is very slow until last 2 episodes. And then it’s slow again for the most part.
yeah, i agree the movie has to be very high quality to work. This is a long shot, although the best rationalist novels are actually high quality which gives me some hope that someone could write a great novel/movie outline that’s more targeted at plausible ASI scenarios
I haven’t seen Transcendence. I liked Her and Ex Machina a lot. I didn’t think M3gan was particularly good, but had potential that it failed to capitalize on.
M3gan felt to me like it really fell down by
emphasizing the embodiedness of the AI. The movie would have been a lot scarier and more effective if the AI had copied itself onto the internet rather than staying stuck in a single robot body (with no justification). This could be inserted just as a dramatic end scene reveal, leaving the rest of the movie unaffected. [Edit: apparently this sorta happened but I forgot? h/t Neel Nanda]
Something I’ve been wondering about is how hard it would be to revamp existing movies into much better ones by editing them to change the plot. Cut some parts, rearrange some parts, and insert some ElevenLabs narration, some AI-generated scenes. I feel like there are a lot of movies out there that are almost good, but fail through broken plots, and could be fairly easily fixed through such manipulations.
Even pretty good movies could be substantially improved through a few small changes.
For example, Ex Machina could be improved by
adding a scene at the ending which indicated that the AI had copied itself onto the internet, and was beginning to acquire significant resources. Additionally, if it showed the humans from the AI’s point of view, and the humans were all moving in super slow motion.
Note that this was, in fact, a dramatic end scene reveal in M3GAN
Ok, but like… in a very weak way. Like, oh no, the creepy doll might still be alive. Not in a like ‘and now this AI has made millions of copies of itself in a day, and gained awesome powers through self-improvement, and is endangering all of humanity’ kind of way.
yeah. One trajectory could be someone in-community-ish writes an extremely good novel about a very realistic ASI scenario with the intention to be adaptable into a movie, it becomes moderately popular, and it’s accessible and pointed enough to do most of the guidence for the movie. I don’t know exactly who could write this book, there are a few possibilities.