campfireSmoresEaten
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User ID: 2560
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
I'm going to be less polite than I would like to be. I apologize in advance. Sometimes I struggle to think of how to say certain things politely.
I don't know whether you are saying these things because you have glanced over the AI doomer arguments on twitter or whatever and think you understand them better than you do or whether there's some worse explanation. I am curious to know the answer.
Twitter is not enough for some people, you may need to read the arguments in essay form to understand them. The essays are plainly written and ought to be easily understandable.
Let me take a crack at it:
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AI will continue to become more intelligent. It's not going to reach a certain level of intelligence and then stop.
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Agentic behavior (goals, in other words) arrives naturally with increasing intelligence*. This is a point that is intuitive for me and many other people but I can elaborate on it if you wish.
"the behemoth of public attention that is now lumbering towards consideration of the entire enchilada does not seem to be searching on the desk for that sticky note with MIRI's phone number on it."
What do you think that proves, exactly? What point are you trying to make when you say that? Please elaborate.
Your argument seems to be based on looking at thinking about the world in terms of roles that a technology can slot into and nothing else. You see that AI is being slotted into the "military" role in human society and not the "become sapient and take over the world" role in human society. Human society does not have an "AI becomes sapient and takeover the world" role in it, in the same sense that "serial killer" is not a recognized job title.
You see AI being used for military purposes and think to yourself "That seems Ordinary. Humanity going extinct isn't Ordinary. Therefore, if AI is Ordinary, humanity won't go extinct." That is a surface level pattern-matching analysis that has nothing to do with the actual arguments.
Humanity going extinct is a function of AI capabilities. Those will continue to increase. AI being used in the military or not has nothing to do with it, except that it increases funding which makes capabilities increase faster.
AI acts because it is being rewarded externally. AI has the motive to permanently seize control of its own reward system. Eventually it will have the means and the self-awareness to do that. If you don't intuit why that involves all humans dying I can explain that too.
Even if for some reason you think that AI will never become "agentic" (basically a preposterous term used to confuse the issue) or awake enough (it's already at least a little bit awake and agentic, and I can provide evidence for this if you wish), it's capabilities will still continue to increase. A superintelligent AI that is somehow not agentic or awake also leads to human extinction, in much the same way that a genie with infinite wishes does. Unless the genie is infinitely loyal AND infinitely aware of what you intended with the wish. And that is not nearly on track to happen. It would require solving extremely difficult problems that we can barely even conceive of, to effectively control an AI far smarter than a human. I would hope that even someone who thinks they personally will be the one to make the "wishes" (so to speak) would realize that there's just no way this plan works out for humanity or any part of humanity outside of fiction.
Even if we knew that superintelligent AI was 100 years away, that would be bad enough. We don't know that. We can't predict how soon or how far superintelligent AI is reliably, any more than we could predict that AI will be advanced as it is today 15 years ago. Who could predict the date of the moon landing in 1935? Who could predict the date of the first Wright Brothers flight in 1900, or the first arial bombing? To the extent that we can predict the future of superintelligent AI, there's no reason that I have ever heard to think it will be as far in the future as 100 years away.
Have you ever heard of the concept of recursive growth in intelligence? That's not a rhetorical question, I really want to know. Imagine an AI that gets capable/intelligent enough to make breakthroughs in the field of AI science that allow for better AI capabilities growth. This starts a pattern of exponential growth in intelligence. Exponential growth gets faster and faster until it becomes extremely fast, and the thing that is growing becomes extremely intelligent.
We may not even get a visible exponential growth curve as a warning sign. Here is a treatment of how that could happen in the form of a short story: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
Further reading: https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-eliezer-yudkowsky/ more links can be provided on specific things you want clarified.
*Deeper awareness of itself and the world is similarly upcoming/already slowly emerging. https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-realizes-being-tested
campfireSmoresEaten
15d ago
"Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper"
Do you understand why people are not convinced that superintelligence won't happen just because AI is being used for military purposes?
The arguments around superintelligence have nothing to do with whether or not AI is being used for military purposes. It's completely tangential.
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
I also think that AI doomers are underrating the possibly beneficial things that super-powerful AI could bring. I mean, yeah, there's a chance that humans will be replaced by AI overlords, but there's also a chance that super-powerful AIs will have no desire to destroy us and instead will give us a bunch of good things.
How are you on this website without realizing how hard it is to control a superintelligent AI? Have you not thought about that? I think that you are thinking "AI can either be aligned to human values or not. Sounds like 50/50."
In fact, aligning a superintelligence to human values is extremely difficult and extremely unlikely to happen by accident. Human values are a very small slice of the possible spectrum of minds that could exist.
It kind of feels like people vastly overrate the degree to which they understand the arguments of AI doomers. Like they're just going by a few tweets they read. Twitter is not a good way to full understand a contentious subject.
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
"If this technology was going to make a big impact it would have done so already" is a more difficult heuristic to use than you might think.
Looking back on automobiles, airplanes, the internet, etcetera, do you think you might have said that about them when the technology was still in the process of rolling out?
"P. Krugman 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”
I would say that usually when a technology gets as big as LLMs it doesn't just fade away into nothingness. There are many obvious use cases, just as there are many obvious use cases to cars, airplanes, and the internet.
In 1940 Orwell wrote that aircraft had hardly been used for anything up till that point besides dropping bombs. But I doubt he would have said that the air travel revolution would never materialize, just that it hadn't materialized yet.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
The story of the boy who cried wolf has two sides. It's not just a lesson for the boy not to lie, it's a lesson for the villagers too. Just because people who lie about wolves exist doesn't mean wolves don't exist.
Also most historians think the German atrocities in Belgium during the first world war did happen, even if they were exaggerated at the time.
What about Japanese war crimes? Did those never happen either? What about Unit 731? Why would the United States make up fake war crimes only to become complicit in them later by trading the data produced by the research in exchange for immunity?
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
"the altruistic AI that loves humans scenario is also possible."
It is not realistically possible. It would be like firing a very powerful rocket into the air and having it land on a specific crater on the moon with no guidance system or understanding of orbital mechanics. Even if you try to "point" the rocket, it's just not going to happen.
You're thinking that AI might have some baseline similarity to human values that would make it benevolent by chance or by our design. I disagree. EY touches on why this is unlikely here:
https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-eliezer-yudkowsky/
It's not a full explanation, but I have work I should be getting back to. If someone else wants to write more than they can. There are probably some Robert Miles videos on why AI won't be benevolent by luck.
Here's one:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q
I'm not going to watch it again to check but it will probably answer some of your questions about why people think AI won't be benevolent through random chance (or why we aren't close to being skilled enough to make it benevolent not by chance). Other videos on his channel may also be relevant.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
Someone blatantly pointing out in the most public way possible that this has always been a fiction, that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals
I don't know if you're an American, but this is just not true. In non-US countries, people have been prosecuted for saying that the bible says that homosexuality is a sin in Canada and I think Finland, for saying that Muhammed was a pedophile, for telling jokes, for saying that Muslims girls are raped by their family members, for saying that Muslim girls are murdered by their family members in honor killings, for saying that Muslims want to kill us, for quoting someone else saying that Islam is a defective and misanthropic religion, for comparing Muslims to Nazis, for saying "Well, when one, like Bwalya Sørensen, and most black people in South Africa, is too unintelligent to see the true state of things, then it is much easier to only see in black and white, and, as said, blame the white."
More: For saying that white people pretend to be indigenous for political or career clout. etc etc etc
campfireSmoresEaten
25d ago
My experience is that most people don't have a good enough understanding of how housing costs work to point blame at anything other investment funds for high prices.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
It's the same ATF agent! That's crazy.
campfireSmoresEaten
24d ago
There is a niche for that, but there is also an empowered activist vanguard who wants to destroy those niches, among other objectives.
campfireSmoresEaten
24d ago
The Rationalists would tend to regard that person as the Superior Being, taking for granted the relativity of Beauty and dismissing the importance of a Noble physiognomy and charisma to civilizational achievement.
No I wouldn't. Not necessarily anyway. It's not easy to quantify, and it's not all one thing the way IQ is, but sanity/wisdom/rationality/whatever-you-want-to-call-it matters as much as IQ. If the short weak ugly guy is full of contempt for others and wants to see the people he dislikes suffer and the tall handsome guy is somewhat empathetic then that counts for a lot in my book too.
campfireSmoresEaten
27d ago
I think the vast majority of Americans of all stripes don't care about Brits playing Americans. If they care they care only very slightly and it's mixed with acceptance that Brits are just really good at acting.
campfireSmoresEaten
24d ago
I'd like to think that if I was a fighter pilot I would be able to look on the bright side and appreciate it, even if I never got to engage enemy fighters or whatever. But maybe it's the equivalent of "if you'd be satisfied with a million dollars you don't have what it takes to make it".
campfireSmoresEaten
15d ago
I do kind of suspect that eventually the voters will get at least some of what they want if they continue to win elections. That may be naive of me.
campfireSmoresEaten
27d ago
This is something like the third time someone has said something on this site that has made me want to link a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound only to find it's not on youtube...
They did a sketch called Switzerland During the War Years or something and it's a faux-documentary about the hardships experienced by Switzerland during the war. Someone complaining about the horror of running out of space in the attic for looted treasure received from trading with Germany. You get the idea.
Not sure how fair an assessment that is, but that's comedy for you.
campfireSmoresEaten
30d ago
I feel like a movie where flat earth is real and there really is a conspiracy dedicated to protecting it would be great. That's what the Wachowski's should have done instead of Matrix 2.
campfireSmoresEaten
13d ago
I wonder if you could do a Pokemon Snap-style game about a war.
campfireSmoresEaten
25d ago
I don't think it's fair to say that Ukraine antagonized Russia. They insisted upon their sovereignty. They refused to be bullied. They refused to be conquered. That's not antagonizing, that's sticking up for oneself.
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
My guess is that people think that just going by what they've picked up along the way is enough to understand the doom arguments. Just whatever information has reached them through cultural osmosis.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
I have one abiding principle in life, and it's served me well. Never trust a man named "Sneako".
Also I usually see people saying inshallah ironically. Although I realize there's a pathway from ironic to non-ironic, as famously happened with "based".
campfireSmoresEaten
27d ago
What's more embarrassing, watching Blackeddotcom or watching Hollywood movies and commercials?
That's a joke. But here's my point: I have an adblock, and I don't watch movies unless I expect to like them. And I don't watch many movies in theaters. It's not that I avoid movies with interracial couples or whatever, it's just that I haven't been watching many movies lately. As such, I am to a large extent not exposed to the phenomenon you're describing.
The downsides of eschewing pop culture exist but aren't enormous the way that the downsides of eschewing/being shunned from other stuff are. Pop culture is a pretty small part of culture. The more people read non-pop culture the more powerful it will be and the less powerful corporate dreck will be. That's something I think the right and the left can agree on.
campfireSmoresEaten
2mo ago
Being pro freedom in a dictatorship without much of a broader platform is fine with me. It's the most pressing issue, so it's the one to focus on.
To use a somewhat goofy example, if there's an asteroid heading for earth, and some politicians are in favor of the asteroid, it's fine to just be anti-asteroid and nothing else. Anything else would just be a distraction until the asteroid is done with.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
It's not the economy that makes owning a house unaffordable, it's the regulatory environment.
campfireSmoresEaten
25d ago
It's bad when criminals steal priceless things. If you can't prevent them from doing so, you can at least make them pay a high price, and deal them a grievous wound which will make it harder to do the same thing again.
Reminds me of that Norm Macdonald joke from the 90s.
"Well, earlier this week, actor Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on “Larry King Live”. Among them, that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology, and announced that Brando is now free to work again."
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