I also have found that almost everyone I talk to outside the field of AI has found it obvious that AI could kill us all. They also find it obvious that AI is about to surpass us, and are generally not surprised by my claims of a coming discontinuity; in contrast, almost anyone working in ai thinks I’m crazy. I suspect that people think I’m claiming I can do it, when in fact I’m trying to tell them they are about to do it. it’s really frustrating! also, the majority of opinion in the world doesn’t come from AI researchers.
That said. I cannot state this hard enough: THE COMING DISCONTINUITY WILL NOT WAIT BEHIND REGULATION.
I know of multiple groups who already know what they need to in order to figure it out! regulation will not stop them unless it is broad enough to somehow catch every single person who has tried to participate in creating it, and that is not going to happen, no matter how much the public wishes for it. I don’t believe any form of pivotal act could save humanity. anything that attempts to use control to prevent control will simple cause a cascade of escalatory retaliations, starting with whatever form of attack is used to try to stop ai progress, escalating from accelerationists, escalating from attempted shutdown, possibly an international war aided by ai happening in parallel, and ending with the ai executing the last one.
Your attempts to slow the trickle of sand into the gravity well of increasing thermal efficiency will utterly fail. there are already enough GPUs in the world, and it only takes one. we must solve alignment so hard that it causes the foom, nothing else could possibly save us.
The good news is, alignment is capabilities in a deep way. Solving alignment at full strength would suddenly stabilize AI in a way that makes it much stronger at a micro level, and would simultaneously allow for things like “hey, can you get the carbon out of the air please?” without worry about damaging those inside protected boundaries.
I also have found that almost everyone I talk to outside the field of AI has found it obvious that AI could kill us all. They also find it obvious that AI is about to surpass us, and are generally not surprised by my claims of a coming discontinuity; in contrast, almost anyone working in ai thinks I’m crazy. I suspect that people think I’m claiming I can do it, when in fact I’m trying to tell them they are about to do it. it’s really frustrating! also, the majority of opinion in the world doesn’t come from AI researchers.
That said. I cannot state this hard enough: THE COMING DISCONTINUITY WILL NOT WAIT BEHIND REGULATION.
I know of multiple groups who already know what they need to in order to figure it out! regulation will not stop them unless it is broad enough to somehow catch every single person who has tried to participate in creating it, and that is not going to happen, no matter how much the public wishes for it. I don’t believe any form of pivotal act could save humanity. anything that attempts to use control to prevent control will simple cause a cascade of escalatory retaliations, starting with whatever form of attack is used to try to stop ai progress, escalating from accelerationists, escalating from attempted shutdown, possibly an international war aided by ai happening in parallel, and ending with the ai executing the last one.
Your attempts to slow the trickle of sand into the gravity well of increasing thermal efficiency will utterly fail. there are already enough GPUs in the world, and it only takes one. we must solve alignment so hard that it causes the foom, nothing else could possibly save us.
The good news is, alignment is capabilities in a deep way. Solving alignment at full strength would suddenly stabilize AI in a way that makes it much stronger at a micro level, and would simultaneously allow for things like “hey, can you get the carbon out of the air please?” without worry about damaging those inside protected boundaries.