As it happens, I’ve been chatting with Scott about this issue recently, due to some comments he made in his recent quantum Turing machine paper:
the uncomfortable truth is that it’s the Singularitarians who are the scientific conservatives, while those who reject their vision as fantasy are scientific radicals. For at some level, all the Singularitarians are doing is taking conventional thinking about physics and the brain to its logical conclusion. If the brain is a “meat computer,” then given the right technology, why shouldn’t we be able to copy its program from one physical substrate to another? And why couldn’t we then run multiple copies of the program in parallel...?
...Certainly, one could argue that the Singularitarians’ timescales might be wildly off… [Also,] suppose we conclude — as many Singularitarians have — that the greatest problem facing humanity today is how to ensure that, when superhuman AIs are finally built, those AIs will be “friendly” to human concerns. The difficulty is: given our current ignorance about AI, how on earth should we act on that conclusion? Indeed, how could we have any confidence that whatever steps we did take wouldn’t backfire, and increase the probability of an unfriendly AI?
I thought his second objection (“how could we know what to do about it?”) was independent of his first objection (“AI seems farther away than the singularitarians tend to think”), but when I asked him about it, he said his second objection just followed from the first. So given his view that AI is probably centuries away, it seems really hard to know what could possibly help w.r.t. FAI. And if I thought AI was several centuries away, I’d probably have mostly the same view.
I asked Scott: “Do you think you’d hold roughly the same view if you had roughly the probability distribution over year of AI creation as I gave in When Will AI Be Created? Or is this part of your view contingent on AI almost certainly being several centuries away?”
He replied: “No, if my distribution assigned any significant weight to AI in (say) a few decades, then my views about the most pressing tasks today would almost certainly be different.” But I haven’t followed up to get more specifics about how his views would change.
And yes, Scott said he was fine with quoting this conversation in public.
I think I’d be happy with a summary of persistent disagreement where Jonah or Scott said, “I don’t think MIRI’s efforts are valuable because we think that AI in general has made no progress on AGI for the last 60 years / I don’t think MIRI’s efforts are priorities because we don’t think we’ll get AGI for another 2-3 centuries, but aside from that MIRI isn’t doing anything wrong in particular, and it would be an admittedly different story if I thought that AI in general was making progress on AGI / AGI was due in the next 50 years”.
I don’t think MIRI’s efforts are valuable because I think that AI in general has made no progress on AGI for the last 60 years, but aside from that MIRI isn’t doing anything wrong in particular, and it would be an admittedly different story if I thought that AI in general was making progress on AGI.
is pretty close to my position.
I would qualify it by saying:
I’d replace “no progress” with “not enough progress for there to be a known research program with a reasonable chance of success.”
I have high confidence that some of the recent advances in narrow AI will contribute (whether directly or indirectly) to the eventual creation of AGI (contingent on this event occurring), just not necessarily in a foreseeable way.
If I discover that there’s been significantly more progress on AGI than I had thought, then I’ll have to reevaluate my position entirely. I could imagine updating in the directly of MIRI’s FAI work being very high value, or I could imagine continuing to believe that MIRI’s FAI research isn’t a priority, for reasons different from my current ones.
As it happens, I’ve been chatting with Scott about this issue recently, due to some comments he made in his recent quantum Turing machine paper:
I thought his second objection (“how could we know what to do about it?”) was independent of his first objection (“AI seems farther away than the singularitarians tend to think”), but when I asked him about it, he said his second objection just followed from the first. So given his view that AI is probably centuries away, it seems really hard to know what could possibly help w.r.t. FAI. And if I thought AI was several centuries away, I’d probably have mostly the same view.
I asked Scott: “Do you think you’d hold roughly the same view if you had roughly the probability distribution over year of AI creation as I gave in When Will AI Be Created? Or is this part of your view contingent on AI almost certainly being several centuries away?”
He replied: “No, if my distribution assigned any significant weight to AI in (say) a few decades, then my views about the most pressing tasks today would almost certainly be different.” But I haven’t followed up to get more specifics about how his views would change.
And yes, Scott said he was fine with quoting this conversation in public.
I think I’d be happy with a summary of persistent disagreement where Jonah or Scott said, “I don’t think MIRI’s efforts are valuable because we think that AI in general has made no progress on AGI for the last 60 years / I don’t think MIRI’s efforts are priorities because we don’t think we’ll get AGI for another 2-3 centuries, but aside from that MIRI isn’t doing anything wrong in particular, and it would be an admittedly different story if I thought that AI in general was making progress on AGI / AGI was due in the next 50 years”.
I think that your paraphrasing
is pretty close to my position.
I would qualify it by saying:
I’d replace “no progress” with “not enough progress for there to be a known research program with a reasonable chance of success.”
I have high confidence that some of the recent advances in narrow AI will contribute (whether directly or indirectly) to the eventual creation of AGI (contingent on this event occurring), just not necessarily in a foreseeable way.
If I discover that there’s been significantly more progress on AGI than I had thought, then I’ll have to reevaluate my position entirely. I could imagine updating in the directly of MIRI’s FAI work being very high value, or I could imagine continuing to believe that MIRI’s FAI research isn’t a priority, for reasons different from my current ones.
Agreed-on summaries of persistent disagreement aren’t ideal, but they’re more conversational progress than usually happens, so… thanks!