While it’s true, there’s something about making this argument that don’t like. It’s like it’s setting you up for moving goalposts if you succeed with it? It makes it sound like the core issue is people giving AIs power, with the solution to that issue — and, implicitly, to the whole AGI Ruin thing — being to ban that.
Which is not going to help, since the sort of AGI we’re worried about isn’t going to need people to naively hand it power. I suppose “not proactively handing power out” somewhat raises the bar for the level of superintelligence necessary, but is that going to matter much in practice?
I expect not. Which means the natural way to assuage this fresh concern would do ~nothing to reduce the actual risk. Which means if we make this argument a lot, and get people to listen to it, and they act in response… We’re then going to have to say that no, actually that’s not enough, actually the real threat is AIs plotting to take control even if we’re not willing to give it.
And I’m not clear on whether using the “let’s at least not actively hand over power to AIs, m’kay?” argument is going to act as a foot in the door and make imposing more security easier, or whether it’ll just burn whatever political capital we have on fixing a ~nonissue.
I’m sympathetic. I think that I should have said “instrumental convergence seems like a moot point when deciding whether to be worried about AI disempowerment scenarios)”; instrumental convergence isn’t a moot point for alignment discussion and within lab strategy, of course.
But I do consider the “give AIs power” to be a substantial part of the risk we face, such that not doing that would be quite helpful. I think it’s quite possible that GPT 6 isn’t autonomously power-seeking, but I feel pretty confused about the issue.
While it’s true, there’s something about making this argument that don’t like. It’s like it’s setting you up for moving goalposts if you succeed with it? It makes it sound like the core issue is people giving AIs power, with the solution to that issue — and, implicitly, to the whole AGI Ruin thing — being to ban that.
Which is not going to help, since the sort of AGI we’re worried about isn’t going to need people to naively hand it power. I suppose “not proactively handing power out” somewhat raises the bar for the level of superintelligence necessary, but is that going to matter much in practice?
I expect not. Which means the natural way to assuage this fresh concern would do ~nothing to reduce the actual risk. Which means if we make this argument a lot, and get people to listen to it, and they act in response… We’re then going to have to say that no, actually that’s not enough, actually the real threat is AIs plotting to take control even if we’re not willing to give it.
And I’m not clear on whether using the “let’s at least not actively hand over power to AIs, m’kay?” argument is going to act as a foot in the door and make imposing more security easier, or whether it’ll just burn whatever political capital we have on fixing a ~nonissue.
I’m sympathetic. I think that I should have said “instrumental convergence seems like a moot point when deciding whether to be worried about AI disempowerment scenarios)”; instrumental convergence isn’t a moot point for alignment discussion and within lab strategy, of course.
But I do consider the “give AIs power” to be a substantial part of the risk we face, such that not doing that would be quite helpful. I think it’s quite possible that GPT 6 isn’t autonomously power-seeking, but I feel pretty confused about the issue.