What is being proposed is a small pause in progress in a particularly dangerous field.
There are no small pauses in progress. Laws, and the movements that drive them, are not lightbulbs to be turned on and off at the flick of a switch. You can stop progress, but then it stays stopped. The Qeng Ho fleets, for example, once discontinued, did not set sail again twenty years later, or two hundred years later.
There also tend not to be narrow halts in progress. In practice, a serious attempt to shut down progress in AI, is going to shut down progress in computers in general, and they’re an important enabling technology for pretty nearly everything else.
I mean we probably won’t. What is actually being proposed is more like a 20 year pause in AI research to let MIRI solve alignment, and we probably won’t get that.
If you think any group of people, no matter how smart and dedicated, can solve alignment in twenty years of armchair thought, that means you think the AI alignment problem is, on the scale of things, ridiculously easy.
I’m asking you to stop and think about that for a moment.
AI alignment is ridiculously easy.
Is that really something you actually believe? Do you actually think the evidence points that way?
Or do you just think your proposed way of doing things sounds more comfortable, and the figure of twenty years sounds comfortably far enough in the future that a deadline that far off does not feel pressing, but still sooner that it would be within your lifetime? These are understandable feelings, but unfortunately they don’t provide any information about the actual difficulty of the problem.
I think we would probably do something else. Modern crops have been selectively bread and genetically engineered to be much more productive. Thus biofuels would be a better option.
Modern crops are productive given massive inputs of high-tech industry and energy in the form of things like artificial fertilizers, pesticides, tractors. Deprived of these inputs, we won’t be able to feed ourselves, let alone have spare food to burn as fuel.
Given even a physics textbook, nuclear could be invented quite a bit earlier.
Actually no, the physics wasn’t the gating factor for nuclear energy. One scientist in the 1930s remarked that sure, nuclear fission would work in principle, but to get the enriched uranium, you would have to turn a whole country into an enrichment facility. He wasn’t that far wrong; the engineering resources and electrical energy the US put into the Manhattan project, were in the ballpark of what many countries could’ve mustered in total.
Maybe trying to build dumb AI doesn’t help, because the behaviour of dumb AI is totally different to the behaviour of superintelligences. And any AI smart enough to give you useful info on superintelligence is smart enough to kill you.
Maybe the Earth is about to be demolished to make room for a hyperspace bypass. Maybe there’s a short sequence of Latin words that summons Azathoth, and no way to know this until it’s too late because no other sequence of Latin words has any magical effect whatsoever. It’s always easy to postulate worlds in which we are dead no matter what we do, but not particularly useful; not only are those worlds unlikely, but by their very nature, planning what to do in those worlds is pointless. All we can usefully do is make plans for those worlds – hopefully a majority – in which there is a way forward.
Are you arguing that evolution and gradient descent are so dumb, and AGI is so hard, that no matter how much brute force you throw at the problem, evolution will never create an AGI. (Despite biological evolution producing humans)
I am arguing that it will never create an AGI with resources available to human civilization. Biological evolution took four billion years with a whole planet’s worth of resources, and that still underestimates the difficulty by an unknown but large factor, because it took many habitable planets to produce intelligence on just one; the lower bound on that factor is given by the absence of any sign of starfaring civilizations in our past light cone; the upper bound could be in millions of orders of magnitude, for all we know.
Suppose every country agreed to total disarmament. The biologists produced one vaccine that stops everything. We build some really good telescopes and several asteroid deflection rockets. Almost all AI research around the globe is shutdown. MIRI is given special permission to carry on, and given the instructions “take your time and do things safe not fast. If it takes a thousand years for you to create aligned AI, that’s fine.” Do you expect this world to have a better chance at a good long term future than the status quo reality. I do.
Well, sure. By the time you’ve got universal consent to peace on Earth, and the existence of a single vaccine that stops all possible diseases, you’ve already established that you’re living in the utopia section of the Matrix, so you can be pretty relaxed about the long-term future. Unfortunately, that doesn’t produce anything much in the way of useful policy guidance for those living in baseline reality.
When producing a really small simple program, I can get it right first try.
Sure. Hopefully we all understand that the operative words in that sentence are small and simple.
There are no small pauses in progress. Laws, and the movements that drive them, are not lightbulbs to be turned on and off at the flick of a switch. You can stop progress, but then it stays stopped. The Qeng Ho fleets, for example, once discontinued, did not set sail again twenty years later, or two hundred years later.
There also tend not to be narrow halts in progress. In practice, a serious attempt to shut down progress in AI, is going to shut down progress in computers in general, and they’re an important enabling technology for pretty nearly everything else.
If you think any group of people, no matter how smart and dedicated, can solve alignment in twenty years of armchair thought, that means you think the AI alignment problem is, on the scale of things, ridiculously easy.
I’m asking you to stop and think about that for a moment.
AI alignment is ridiculously easy.
Is that really something you actually believe? Do you actually think the evidence points that way?
Or do you just think your proposed way of doing things sounds more comfortable, and the figure of twenty years sounds comfortably far enough in the future that a deadline that far off does not feel pressing, but still sooner that it would be within your lifetime? These are understandable feelings, but unfortunately they don’t provide any information about the actual difficulty of the problem.
Modern crops are productive given massive inputs of high-tech industry and energy in the form of things like artificial fertilizers, pesticides, tractors. Deprived of these inputs, we won’t be able to feed ourselves, let alone have spare food to burn as fuel.
Actually no, the physics wasn’t the gating factor for nuclear energy. One scientist in the 1930s remarked that sure, nuclear fission would work in principle, but to get the enriched uranium, you would have to turn a whole country into an enrichment facility. He wasn’t that far wrong; the engineering resources and electrical energy the US put into the Manhattan project, were in the ballpark of what many countries could’ve mustered in total.
Maybe the Earth is about to be demolished to make room for a hyperspace bypass. Maybe there’s a short sequence of Latin words that summons Azathoth, and no way to know this until it’s too late because no other sequence of Latin words has any magical effect whatsoever. It’s always easy to postulate worlds in which we are dead no matter what we do, but not particularly useful; not only are those worlds unlikely, but by their very nature, planning what to do in those worlds is pointless. All we can usefully do is make plans for those worlds – hopefully a majority – in which there is a way forward.
I am arguing that it will never create an AGI with resources available to human civilization. Biological evolution took four billion years with a whole planet’s worth of resources, and that still underestimates the difficulty by an unknown but large factor, because it took many habitable planets to produce intelligence on just one; the lower bound on that factor is given by the absence of any sign of starfaring civilizations in our past light cone; the upper bound could be in millions of orders of magnitude, for all we know.
Well, sure. By the time you’ve got universal consent to peace on Earth, and the existence of a single vaccine that stops all possible diseases, you’ve already established that you’re living in the utopia section of the Matrix, so you can be pretty relaxed about the long-term future. Unfortunately, that doesn’t produce anything much in the way of useful policy guidance for those living in baseline reality.
Sure. Hopefully we all understand that the operative words in that sentence are small and simple.