(Self-review.) I’m as proud of this post as I am disappointed that it was necessary. As I explained to my prereaders on 19 October 2023:
My intent is to raise the level of the discourse by presenting an engagement between the standard MIRI view and a view that’s relatively optimistic about prosaic alignment. The bet is that my simulated dialogue (with me writing both parts) can do a better job than the arguments being had by separate people in the wild; I think Simplicia understands things that e.g. Matthew Barnett doesn’t. (The karma system lovedmy dialogue comment on Barnett’s post; this draft is trying to scale that up.)
I’m annoyed at the discourse situation where MIRI thinks we’re dead for the same fundamental reasons as in 2016, but meanwhile, there are a lot of people who are looking at GPT-4, and thinking, “Hey, this thing seems pretty smart and general and good at Doing What I Mean, in contrast to how 2016-era MIRI said that we didn’t know how to get an agent to fill a cauldron; maybe alignment is easy??”—to which MIRI’s response has been (my uncharitable paraphrase), “You people are idiots who didn’t understand the core arguments; the cauldron thing was a toy illustration of a deep math thing; we never said Midjourney can’t exist”.
And just, I agree that Midjourney doesn’t refute the deep math thing and the people who don’t realize that are idiots, but I think the idiots deserve a better response!—particularly insofar as we’re worried about transformative AI looking a lot like the systems we see now, rather than taking a “LLMs are nothing like AGI” stance.
Simplicia isn’t supposed to pass the ITT of anyone in particular, but if the other character [...] doesn’t match the MIRI party line, that’s definitely a serious flaw that needs to be fixed!
I think the dialogue format works particularly well in cases like this where the author or the audience is supposed to find both viewpoints broadly credible, rather than an author avatar beating up on a strawman. (I did have some fun with Doomimir’s characterization, but that shouldn’t affect the arguments.)
This is a complicated topic. To the extent that I was having my own doubts about the “orthodox” pessimist story in the GPT-4 era, it was liberating to be able to explore those doubts in public by putting them in the mouth of a character with the designated idiot character name without staking my reputation on Simplicia’s counterarguments necessarily being correct.
Giving both characters perjorative names makes it fair. In an earlier draft, Doomimir was “Doomer”, but I was already using the “Optimistovna” and “Doomovitch” patronymics (I had been consuming fictionabout the Soviet Union recently) and decided it should sound more Slavic. (Plus, “-mir” (мир) can mean “world”.)
(Self-review.) I’m as proud of this post as I am disappointed that it was necessary. As I explained to my prereaders on 19 October 2023:
I think the dialogue format works particularly well in cases like this where the author or the audience is supposed to find both viewpoints broadly credible, rather than an author avatar beating up on a strawman. (I did have some fun with Doomimir’s characterization, but that shouldn’t affect the arguments.)
This is a complicated topic. To the extent that I was having my own doubts about the “orthodox” pessimist story in the GPT-4 era, it was liberating to be able to explore those doubts in public by putting them in the mouth of a character with the designated idiot character name without staking my reputation on Simplicia’s counterarguments necessarily being correct.
Giving both characters perjorative names makes it fair. In an earlier draft, Doomimir was “Doomer”, but I was already using the “Optimistovna” and “Doomovitch” patronymics (I had been consuming fiction about the Soviet Union recently) and decided it should sound more Slavic. (Plus, “-mir” (мир) can mean “world”.)