You (as a group) need “street cred” to be persuasive. To a typical person you look like a modern day version of a doomsday cult. Publishing recognized AI work would be a good place to start.
Publishing AI work would help increase credibility, but it’s a costly way of doing so since it directly promotes AI progress. At least some mainstream AI researchers already take SIAI seriously. (Evidence: 12) So I suggest bringing better arguments to them and convincing them to lend further credibility.
By the way, what counts as “AI progress?” Do you consider statistics and machine learning a part of “AI progress”? Is theoretical work okay? What about building self-driving cars or speech recognition software? Where is, as someone here would call it, the Shelling point?
Do you consider stopping “AI progress” important enough to put something on the line besides talking about it?
You raise a very good question. There doesn’t seem to be a natural Schelling point, and actually the argument can be generalized to cover other areas of technological development that wouldn’t ordinarily be considered to fall under AI at all, for example computer hardware. So somebody can always say “Hey, all those other areas are just as dangerous. Why are you picking on me?” I’m not sure what to do about this.
Do you consider stopping “AI progress” important enough to put something on the line besides talking about it?
I’m not totally sure what you mean by “put something on the line” but for example I’ve turned down offers to co-author academic papers on UDT and argued against such papers being written/published, even though I’d like to see my name and ideas in print as much as anybody. BTW, realistically I don’t expect to stop AI progress, but just hope to slow it down some.
My understanding of Shelling points is there are, by definition, no natural Shelling points. You pick an arbitrary point to defend as a strategy vs slippery slopes. In Yvain’s post he picked an arbitrary %, I think 95.
There is a slippery slope here. Where will you defend?
The issue is that it is a doomsday cult if one is to expect extreme outlier (on doom belief) who had never done anything notable beyond being a popular blogger, to be the best person to listen to. That is incredibly unlikely situation for a genuine risk. Bonus cultism points for knowing Bayesian inference but not applying it here. Regardless of how real is the AI risk. Regardless of how truly qualified that one outlier may be. It is an incredibly unlikely world-state where the AI risk would be best coming from someone like that. No matter how fucked up is the scientific review process, it is incredibly unlikely that world’s best AI talk is someone’s first notable contribution.
You (as a group) need “street cred” to be persuasive. To a typical person you look like a modern day version of a doomsday cult. Publishing recognized AI work would be a good place to start.
Publishing AI work would help increase credibility, but it’s a costly way of doing so since it directly promotes AI progress. At least some mainstream AI researchers already take SIAI seriously. (Evidence: 1 2) So I suggest bringing better arguments to them and convincing them to lend further credibility.
By the way, what counts as “AI progress?” Do you consider statistics and machine learning a part of “AI progress”? Is theoretical work okay? What about building self-driving cars or speech recognition software? Where is, as someone here would call it, the Shelling point?
Do you consider stopping “AI progress” important enough to put something on the line besides talking about it?
You raise a very good question. There doesn’t seem to be a natural Schelling point, and actually the argument can be generalized to cover other areas of technological development that wouldn’t ordinarily be considered to fall under AI at all, for example computer hardware. So somebody can always say “Hey, all those other areas are just as dangerous. Why are you picking on me?” I’m not sure what to do about this.
I’m not totally sure what you mean by “put something on the line” but for example I’ve turned down offers to co-author academic papers on UDT and argued against such papers being written/published, even though I’d like to see my name and ideas in print as much as anybody. BTW, realistically I don’t expect to stop AI progress, but just hope to slow it down some.
My understanding of Shelling points is there are, by definition, no natural Shelling points. You pick an arbitrary point to defend as a strategy vs slippery slopes. In Yvain’s post he picked an arbitrary %, I think 95.
There is a slippery slope here. Where will you defend?
The issue is that it is a doomsday cult if one is to expect extreme outlier (on doom belief) who had never done anything notable beyond being a popular blogger, to be the best person to listen to. That is incredibly unlikely situation for a genuine risk. Bonus cultism points for knowing Bayesian inference but not applying it here. Regardless of how real is the AI risk. Regardless of how truly qualified that one outlier may be. It is an incredibly unlikely world-state where the AI risk would be best coming from someone like that. No matter how fucked up is the scientific review process, it is incredibly unlikely that world’s best AI talk is someone’s first notable contribution.