The conversation near me over the years has felt a bit like this:
Some people: AI might kill everyone. We should design a godlike super-AI of perfect goodness to prevent that.
Others: wow that sounds extremely ambitious
Some people: yeah but it’s very important and also we are extremely smart so idk it could work
[Work on it for a decade and a half]
Some people: ok that’s pretty hard, we give up
Others: oh huh shouldn’t we maybe try to stop the building of this dangerous AI?
Some people: hmm, that would involve coordinating numerous people—we may be arrogant enough to think that we might build a god-machine that can take over the world and remake it as a paradise, but we aren’t delusional
There’s a sleight of hand going on with the “we” here. “We” as in LessWrong are not building the godlike AI, the trillion dollar technocapitalist machine is doing that. “We” are a bunch of nerds off to the side, some of whom are researching ways to point said AIs at specific targets. If “we” tried to start an AGI company we’d indeed end up in fifth place and speed up timelines by six weeks (generously).
That’s the case now, but note the “work on it for a decade and a half”. 15 years ago, MIRI was working on building the godlike AI directly and was one of the only actors doing so, as there wasn’t a trillion dollar technocapitalist machine pouring money into machine learning yet.
There’s a sleight of hand going on with the “we” here. “We” as in LessWrong are not building the godlike AI, the trillion dollar technocapitalist machine is doing that. “We” are a bunch of nerds off to the side, some of whom are researching ways to point said AIs at specific targets. If “we” tried to start an AGI company we’d indeed end up in fifth place and speed up timelines by six weeks (generously).
That’s the case now, but note the “work on it for a decade and a half”. 15 years ago, MIRI was working on building the godlike AI directly and was one of the only actors doing so, as there wasn’t a trillion dollar technocapitalist machine pouring money into machine learning yet.