I think the general impression of people on LW is that multipolar scenarios and concerns over “which monkey finds the radioactive banana and drags it home” are in large part a driver of AI racing instead of being a potential impediment/solution to it. Individuals, companies, and nation-states justifiably believe that whichever one of them accesses potentially superhuman AGI first will have the capacity to flip the gameboard at-will, obtain power over the entire rest of the Earth, and destabilize the currently-existing system. Standard game theory explains the final inferential step for how this leads to full-on racing (see the recent U.S.-China Commission’s report for a representative example of how this plays out in practice).
At the risk of being overly spicy/unnuanced/uncharitable: I think quite a few MIRI [agent foundations] memes (“which monkey finds the radioactive banana and drags it home”, ″automating safety is like having the AI do your homework″, etc.) seem very lazy/un-truth-tracking and probably net-negative at this point, and I kind of wish they’d just stop propagating them (Eliezer being probably the main culprit here).
Perhaps even more spicily, I similarly think that the old MIRI threat model of Consequentialism is looking increasingly ‘tired’/un-truth-tracking, and there should be more updating away from it (and more so with every single increase in capabilities without ‘proportional’ increases in ‘Consequentialism’/egregious misalignment).
(Especially) In a world where the first AGIs are not egregiously misaligned, it very likely matters enormously who builds the first AGIs and what they decide to do with them. While this probably creates incentives towards racing in some actors (probably especially the ones with the best chances to lead the race), I suspect better informing more actors (especially more of the non-leading ones, who might especially see themselves as more on the losing side in the case of AGI and potential destabilization) should also create incentives for (attempts at) more caution and coordination, which the leading actors might at least somewhat take into consideration, e.g. for reasons along the lines of https://aiprospects.substack.com/p/paretotopian-goal-alignment.
I get that we’d like to all recognize this problem and coordinate globally on finding solutions, by “mak[ing] coordinated steps away from Nash equilibria in lockstep”. But I would first need to see an example, a prototype, of how this can play out in practice on an important and highly salient issue. Stuff like the Montreal Protocol banning CFCs doesn’t count because the ban only happened once comparably profitable/efficient alternatives had already been designed; totally disanalogous to the spot we are in right now, where AGI will likely be incredibly economically profitable, perhaps orders of magnitude more so than the second-best alternative.
I’m not particularly optimistic about coordination, especially the more ambitious kinds of plans (e.g. ‘shut it all down’, long pauses like in ‘A narrow path...’, etc.), and that’s to a large degree (combined with short timelines and personal fit) why I’m focused on automated safety reseach. I’m just saying: ‘if you feel like coordination is the best plan you can come up with/you’re most optimistic about, there are probably more legible and likely also more truth-tracking arguments than superintelligence misalignment and loss of control’.
This is in large part why Eliezer often used to challenge readers and community members to ban gain-of-function research, as a trial run of sorts for how global coordination on pausing/slowing AI might go.
This seems quite reasonable; might be too late as a ‘trial run’ at this point though, if taken literally.
At the risk of being overly spicy/unnuanced/uncharitable: I think quite a few MIRI [agent foundations] memes (“which monkey finds the radioactive banana and drags it home”, ″automating safety is like having the AI do your homework″, etc.) seem very lazy/un-truth-tracking and probably net-negative at this point, and I kind of wish they’d just stop propagating them (Eliezer being probably the main culprit here).
Perhaps even more spicily, I similarly think that the old MIRI threat model of Consequentialism is looking increasingly ‘tired’/un-truth-tracking, and there should be more updating away from it (and more so with every single increase in capabilities without ‘proportional’ increases in ‘Consequentialism’/egregious misalignment).
(Especially) In a world where the first AGIs are not egregiously misaligned, it very likely matters enormously who builds the first AGIs and what they decide to do with them. While this probably creates incentives towards racing in some actors (probably especially the ones with the best chances to lead the race), I suspect better informing more actors (especially more of the non-leading ones, who might especially see themselves as more on the losing side in the case of AGI and potential destabilization) should also create incentives for (attempts at) more caution and coordination, which the leading actors might at least somewhat take into consideration, e.g. for reasons along the lines of https://aiprospects.substack.com/p/paretotopian-goal-alignment.
I’m not particularly optimistic about coordination, especially the more ambitious kinds of plans (e.g. ‘shut it all down’, long pauses like in ‘A narrow path...’, etc.), and that’s to a large degree (combined with short timelines and personal fit) why I’m focused on automated safety reseach. I’m just saying: ‘if you feel like coordination is the best plan you can come up with/you’re most optimistic about, there are probably more legible and likely also more truth-tracking arguments than superintelligence misalignment and loss of control’.
This seems quite reasonable; might be too late as a ‘trial run’ at this point though, if taken literally.
(Also, what Thane Ruthenis commented below.)