I’m sorry, but it really looks like you’ve very much misunderstood the technology, the situation, the risks, and the various arguments that have been made, across the board. Sorry that I couldn’t be of help.
Odd anon
Karma: 339
I don’t think this would be a good letter. The military comparison is unhelpful; risk alone isn’t a good way to decide budgets. Yet, half the statement is talking about the military. Additionally, call-to-action statements that involve “Spend money on this! If you don’t, it’ll be catastrophic!” are something that politicians hear on a constant basis, and they ignore most of them out of necessity.
In my opinion, a better statement would be something like: “Apocalyptic AI is being developed. This should be stopped, as soon as possible.”
Get a dozen AI risk skeptics together, and I suspect you’ll get majority support from the group for each and every point that the AI risk case depends on. You, in particular, seem to be extremely aligned with the “doom” arguments.
The “guy-on-the-street” skeptic thinks that AGI is science fiction, and it’s silly to worry about it. Judging by your other answers, it seems like you disagree, and fully believe that AGI is coming. Go deep into the weeds, and you’ll find Sutton and Page and the radical e/accs who believe that AI will wipe out humanity, and that’s a good thing, and that wanting to preserve humanity and human control is just another form of racism. A little further out, plenty of AI engineers believe that AGI would normally wipe out humanity, but they’re going to solve the alignment problem in time so no need to worry. Some contrarians like to argue that intelligence has nothing to do with power, and that superintelligence will permanently live under humanity’s thumb because we have better access to physical force. And then, some optimists believe that AI will inevitably be benevolent, so no need to worry.
If I’m understanding your comments correctly, your position is something like “ASI can and will take over the world, but we’ll be fine”, a position so unusual I didn’t even think to include it detail in my lengthy taxonomy of “everything turns out okay” arguments. I am unable to make even a basic guess as to how you arrived at the position (though I would be interested in learning).
Please notice that your position is extremely non-intuitive to basically everyone. If you start with expert consensus regarding the basis of your own position in particular, you don’t get 87% chance that you’re right, you get a look of incredulity and an arbitrarily small number. If you instead want to examine the broader case for AI risk, most of the “good arguments” are going to look more like “no really, AI keeps getting smarter, look at this graph” and things like Yudkowsky’s “The Power of Intelligence”, both of which (if I understand correctly) you already think are obviously correct.
If you want to find good arguments for “humanity is good, actually”, don’t ask AI risk people, ask random “normal” people.
My apologies if I’ve completely misunderstood your position.
(PS: Extinction markets do not work, since they can’t pay out after extinction.)
“86% of voters believe AI could accidentally cause a catastrophic event, and 70% agree that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other risks like pandemics and nuclear war”
“76% of voters believe artificial intelligence could eventually pose a threat to the existence of the human race, including 75% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans”
Also, this:
“Americans’ top priority is preventing dangerous and catastrophic outcomes from AI”—with relatively few prioritizing things like job loss, bias, etc.
Make that clear. But make it clear is a way that your uncle won’t laugh at over Christmas dinner.
Most people agree with Pause AI. Most people agree that AI might be a threat to humanity. The protests may or may not be effective, but I don’t really think they could be counterproductive. It’s not a “weird” thing to protest.
Meta’s messaging is clearer.
“AI development won’t get us to transformative AI, we don’t think that AI safety will make a difference, we’re just going to optimize for profitability.”
So, Meta’s messaging is actually quite inconsistent. Yann LeCun says (when speaking to certain audiences, at least) that current AI is very dumb, and AGI is so far away it’s not worth worrying about all that much. Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, is quite vocal that their goal is AGI and that they’re making real progress towards it, suggesting 5+ year timelines.
Almost all of these are about “cancellation” by means of transferring money from the government to those in debt. Are there similar arguments against draining some of the ~trillion dollars held by university endowments to return to students who (it could be argued) were implicitly promised an outcome they didn’t get? That seems a lot closer to the plain meaning of “cancelling debt”.
Relevant: My Taxonomy of AI-risk counterarguments, inspired by Zvi Mowshowitz’s The Crux List.
This isn’t that complicated. The halo effect is real and can go to extremes when romantic relationships are involved, and most people take their sense data at face value most of the time. The sentence is meant completely literally.
GPT-5 training is probably starting around now
Sam Altman confirmed (paywalled, sorry) in November that GPT-5 was already under development. (Interestingly, the confirmation was almost exactly six months after Altman told a senate hearing (under oath) that “We are not currently training what will be GPT-5; we don’t have plans to do it in the next 6 months.”)
The United States is an outlier in divorce statistics. In most places, the rate is nowhere near that high.
It is not that uncommon for people to experience severe dementia and become extremely needy and rapidly lose many (or all) of the traits that people liked about them. Usually, people don’t stop being loved just because they spend their days hurling obscenities at people, failing to preserve their own hygiene, and expressing zero affection.
I would guess that most parents do actually love their children unconditionally, and probably the majority of spouses unconditionally love their partners.
(Persistent identity is a central factor in how people relate to each other, so one can’t really say that “it is only conditions that separate me from the worms.”)
Brainware.
Brains seem like the closest metaphor one could have for these. Lizards, insects, goldfish, and humans all have brains. We don’t know how they work. They can be intelligent, but are not necessarily so. They have opaque convoluted processes inside which are not random, but often have unexpected results. They are not built, they are grown.
They’re often quite effective at accomplishing something that would be difficult to do any other way. Their structure is based around neurons of some sort. Input, mystery processes, output. They’re “mushy” and don’t have clear lines, so much of their insides blur together.
AI companies are growing brainware in larger and larger scales, raising more powerful brainware. Want to understand why the chatbot did something? Try some new techniques for probing its brainware.
This term might make the topic feel more mysterious/magical to some than it otherwise would, which is usually something to avoid when developing terminology, but in this case, people have been treating something mysterious as not mysterious.
(The precise text, from “The Andalite Chronicles”, book 3: “I have made right everything that can be made right, I have learned everything that can be learned, I have sworn not to repeat my error, and now I claim forgiveness.”)
Larry Page (according to Elon Musk), want AGI to take the world from humanity
(IIRC, Tegmark, who was present for the relevant event, has confirmed that Page had stated his position as described.)
Ehhh, I get the impression that Schidhuber doesn’t think of human extinction as specifically “part of the plan”, but he also doesn’t appear to consider human survival to be something particularly important relative to his priority of creating ASI. He wants “to build something smarter than myself, which will build something even smarter, et cetera, et cetera, and eventually colonize and transform the universe”, and thinks that “Generally speaking, our best protection will be their lack of interest in us, because most species’ biggest enemy is their own kind. They will pay about as much attention to us as we do to ants.”
I agree that he’s not overtly “pro-extinction” in the way Rich Sutton is, but he does seem fairly dismissive of humanity’s long-term future in general, while also pushing for the creation of an uncaring non-human thing to take over the universe, so...
Hendrycks goes into some detail on the issue of AI being affected by natural selection in this paper.
Please link directly to the paper, rather than requiring readers to click their way through the substack post. Ideally, the link target would be on a more convenient site than academia.edu, which claims to require registration to read the content. (The content is available lower down, but the blocked “Download” buttons are confusing and misleading.)
When this person goes to post the answer to the alignment problem to LessWrong, they will have low enough accumulated karma that the post will be poorly received.
Does the author having lower karma actually cause posts to be received more poorly? The author’s karma isn’t visible anywhere on the post, or even in the hover-tooltip by the author’s name. (One has to click through to the profile to find out.) Even if readers did know the author’s karma, would that really cause people to not just judge it by its content? I would be surprised.
Humanity gets to choose whether or not we’re in a simulation. If we collectively decide to be the kind of species that ever creates or allows the creation of ancestor simulations, we will presumably turn out to be simulations ourselves. If we want to not be simulations, the course is clear. (This is likely a very near-term decision. Population simulations are already happening, and our civilization hasn’t really sorted out how to relate to simulated people.)
Alternatively, maybe reality is just large enough that the simulation/non-simulation distinction isn’t really meaningful. Yudkowsky’s “realityfluid” concept is an interesting take on simulation-identities. He goes into it in some depth both in the Ultimate Mega-Crossover and in Planecrash.