Thanks. We are actually more modest. We would like to see a sound argument for XRisk from AI and we investigate what we call ‘the standard argument’; we find it wanting and try to strengthen it, but we fail. So there is something amiss. In the conclusion we admit “we could well be wrong somewhere and the classical argument for existential risk from AI is actually sound, or there is another argument that we have not considered.”
I would say the challenge is to present a sound argument (valid + true premises) or at least a valid argument with decent inductive support for the premises. Oddly, we do not seem to have that.
Laying my cards on the table, I think that there do exist valid arguments with plausible premises for x-risk from AI, and insofar as you haven’t found them yet then you haven’t been looking hard enough or charitably enough. The stuff I was saying above is a suggestion for how you could proceed: If you can’t prove X, try to prove not-X for a bit, often you learn something that helps you prove X. So, I suggest you try to argue that there is no x-risk from AI (excluding the kinds you acknowledge, such as AI misused by humans) and see where that leads you. It sounds like you have the seeds of such an argument in your paper; I was trying to pull them together and flesh them out in the comment above.
Thanks. We are actually more modest. We would like to see a sound argument for XRisk from AI and we investigate what we call ‘the standard argument’; we find it wanting and try to strengthen it, but we fail. So there is something amiss. In the conclusion we admit “we could well be wrong somewhere and the classical argument for existential risk from AI is actually sound, or there is another argument that we have not considered.”
I would say the challenge is to present a sound argument (valid + true premises) or at least a valid argument with decent inductive support for the premises. Oddly, we do not seem to have that.
Laying my cards on the table, I think that there do exist valid arguments with plausible premises for x-risk from AI, and insofar as you haven’t found them yet then you haven’t been looking hard enough or charitably enough. The stuff I was saying above is a suggestion for how you could proceed: If you can’t prove X, try to prove not-X for a bit, often you learn something that helps you prove X. So, I suggest you try to argue that there is no x-risk from AI (excluding the kinds you acknowledge, such as AI misused by humans) and see where that leads you. It sounds like you have the seeds of such an argument in your paper; I was trying to pull them together and flesh them out in the comment above.