I feel pretty frustrated at how rarely people actually bet or make quantitative predictions about existential risk from AI. EG my recent attempt to operationalize a bet with Nate went nowhere. Paul trying to get Eliezer to bet during the MIRI dialogues also went nowhere, or barely anywhere—I think they ended up making some random bet about how long an IMO challenge would take to be solved by AI. (feels pretty weak and unrelated to me. lame. but huge props to Paul for being so ready to bet, that made me take him a lot more seriously.)
This paragraph doesn’t seem like an honest summary to me. Eliezer’s position in the dialogue, as I understood it, was:
The journey is a lot harder to predict than the destination. Cf. “it’s easier to use physics arguments to predict that humans will one day send a probe to the Moon, than it is to predict when this will happen or what the specific capabilities of rockets five years from now will be”. Eliezer isn’t claiming to have secret insights about the detailed year-to-year or month-to-month changes in the field; if he thought that, he’d have been making those near-term tech predictions already back in 2010, 2015, or 2020 to show that he has this skill.
From Eliezer’s perspective, Paul is claiming to know a lot about the future trajectory of AI, and not just about the endpoints: Paul thinks progress will be relatively smooth and continuous, and thinks it will get increasingly smooth and continuous as time passes and more resources flow into the field. Eliezer, by contrast, expects the field to get choppier as time passes and we get closer to ASI.
A way to bet on this, which Eliezer repeatedly proposed but wasn’t able to get Paul to do very much, would be for Paul to list out a bunch of concrete predictions that Paul sees as “yep, this is what smooth and continuous progress looks like”. Then, even though Eliezer doesn’t necessarily have a concrete “nope, the future will go like X instead of Y” prediction, he’d be willing to bet against a portfolio of Paul-predictions: when you expect the future to be more unpredictable, you’re willing to at least weakly bet against any sufficiently ambitious pool of concrete predictions.
(Also, if Paul generated a ton of predictions like that, an occasional prediction might indeed make Eliezer go “oh wait, I do have a strong prediction on that question in particular; I didn’t realize this was one of our points of disagreement”. I don’t think this is where most of the action is, but it’s at least a nice side-effect of the person-who-thinks-this-tech-is-way-more-predictable spelling out predictions.)
Eliezer was also more interested in trying to reach mutual understanding of the views on offer, as opposed to bet let’s bet on things immediately never mind the world-views. But insofar as Paul really wanted to have the bets conversation instead, Eliezer sunk an awful lot of time into trying to find operationalizations Paul and he could bet on, over many hours of conversation.
If your end-point take-away from that (even after actual bets were in fact made, and tons of different high-level predictions were sketched out) is “wow how dare Eliezer be so unwilling to make bets on anything”, then I feel a lot less hope that world-models like Eliezer’s (“long-term outcome is more predictable than the detailed year-by-year tech pathway”) are going to be given a remotely fair hearing.
(Also, in fairness to Paul, I’d say that he spent a bunch of time working with Eliezer to try to understand the basic methodologies and foundations for their perspectives on the world. I think both Eliezer and Paul did an admirable job going back and forth between the thing Paul wanted to focus on and the thing Eliezer wanted to focus on, letting us look at a bunch of different parts of the elephant. And I don’t think it was unhelpful for Paul to try to identify operationalizations and bets, as part of the larger discussion; I just disagree with TurnTrout’s summary of what happened.)
This paragraph doesn’t seem like an honest summary to me. Eliezer’s position in the dialogue, as I understood it, was:
The journey is a lot harder to predict than the destination. Cf. “it’s easier to use physics arguments to predict that humans will one day send a probe to the Moon, than it is to predict when this will happen or what the specific capabilities of rockets five years from now will be”. Eliezer isn’t claiming to have secret insights about the detailed year-to-year or month-to-month changes in the field; if he thought that, he’d have been making those near-term tech predictions already back in 2010, 2015, or 2020 to show that he has this skill.
From Eliezer’s perspective, Paul is claiming to know a lot about the future trajectory of AI, and not just about the endpoints: Paul thinks progress will be relatively smooth and continuous, and thinks it will get increasingly smooth and continuous as time passes and more resources flow into the field. Eliezer, by contrast, expects the field to get choppier as time passes and we get closer to ASI.
A way to bet on this, which Eliezer repeatedly proposed but wasn’t able to get Paul to do very much, would be for Paul to list out a bunch of concrete predictions that Paul sees as “yep, this is what smooth and continuous progress looks like”. Then, even though Eliezer doesn’t necessarily have a concrete “nope, the future will go like X instead of Y” prediction, he’d be willing to bet against a portfolio of Paul-predictions: when you expect the future to be more unpredictable, you’re willing to at least weakly bet against any sufficiently ambitious pool of concrete predictions.
(Also, if Paul generated a ton of predictions like that, an occasional prediction might indeed make Eliezer go “oh wait, I do have a strong prediction on that question in particular; I didn’t realize this was one of our points of disagreement”. I don’t think this is where most of the action is, but it’s at least a nice side-effect of the person-who-thinks-this-tech-is-way-more-predictable spelling out predictions.)
Eliezer was also more interested in trying to reach mutual understanding of the views on offer, as opposed to bet let’s bet on things immediately never mind the world-views. But insofar as Paul really wanted to have the bets conversation instead, Eliezer sunk an awful lot of time into trying to find operationalizations Paul and he could bet on, over many hours of conversation.
If your end-point take-away from that (even after actual bets were in fact made, and tons of different high-level predictions were sketched out) is “wow how dare Eliezer be so unwilling to make bets on anything”, then I feel a lot less hope that world-models like Eliezer’s (“long-term outcome is more predictable than the detailed year-by-year tech pathway”) are going to be given a remotely fair hearing.
(Also, in fairness to Paul, I’d say that he spent a bunch of time working with Eliezer to try to understand the basic methodologies and foundations for their perspectives on the world. I think both Eliezer and Paul did an admirable job going back and forth between the thing Paul wanted to focus on and the thing Eliezer wanted to focus on, letting us look at a bunch of different parts of the elephant. And I don’t think it was unhelpful for Paul to try to identify operationalizations and bets, as part of the larger discussion; I just disagree with TurnTrout’s summary of what happened.)