Not knowing anything about LeCun other than this twitter conversation, I’ve formed a tentative hypothesis: LeCun is not putting a lot of effort into the debate: if you resort to accusing your opponent of scaring teenagers, it is usually because you feel you do not need to try very hard and you feel that almost any argument would do the job. Not trying very hard and not putting much thought behind one’s words is in my experience common behavior when one perceives oneself as being higher in status than one’s debate opponents. If a total ban on training any AI larger than GPT-4 starts getting more political traction, I expect that LeCun would increase his estimate of the status of his debating opponents and would increase the amount of mental effort he puts into arguing his position, which would in turn make it more likely that he would come around to the realization that AI research is dangerous.
I’ve seen people here express the intuition that it is important for us not to alienate people like LeCun by contradicting them too strongly and that it is important not to alienate them by calling on governments to impose a ban (rather than restricting our efforts to persuading them to stop voluntarily). Well, I weakly hold the opposite intuition for the reasons I just gave.
You’re thinking that LeCun would be more likely to believe AI x-risk arguments if he put more mental effort into this debate. Based on the cognitive biases literature, motivated reasoning and confirmation bias in particular, I think it’s more likely that he’d just find more clever ways to not believe x-risk arguments if he put more effort in.
I don’t know what that means for strategy, but I think it’s important to figure that out.
Not knowing anything about LeCun other than this twitter conversation, I’ve formed a tentative hypothesis: LeCun is not putting a lot of effort into the debate: if you resort to accusing your opponent of scaring teenagers, it is usually because you feel you do not need to try very hard and you feel that almost any argument would do the job. Not trying very hard and not putting much thought behind one’s words is in my experience common behavior when one perceives oneself as being higher in status than one’s debate opponents. If a total ban on training any AI larger than GPT-4 starts getting more political traction, I expect that LeCun would increase his estimate of the status of his debating opponents and would increase the amount of mental effort he puts into arguing his position, which would in turn make it more likely that he would come around to the realization that AI research is dangerous.
I’ve seen people here express the intuition that it is important for us not to alienate people like LeCun by contradicting them too strongly and that it is important not to alienate them by calling on governments to impose a ban (rather than restricting our efforts to persuading them to stop voluntarily). Well, I weakly hold the opposite intuition for the reasons I just gave.
You’re thinking that LeCun would be more likely to believe AI x-risk arguments if he put more mental effort into this debate. Based on the cognitive biases literature, motivated reasoning and confirmation bias in particular, I think it’s more likely that he’d just find more clever ways to not believe x-risk arguments if he put more effort in.
I don’t know what that means for strategy, but I think it’s important to figure that out.