sohois
48m ago
Are you a time traveller? You're making an awful lot of 'settled' statements about AI safety that seem to have no relation to its current state
sohois
3d ago
Because that is within his potential remit, while the hard maths of alignment is well outside his potential remit
sohois
3d ago
Yudkowsky, MIRI, and related orgs sure, but why would Scott, a psychiatrist who happens to be interested in ratsphere ideas, be responsible? That's like saying a random Trump voter should already have solved the Iran crisis.
But at least on the former, I would agree with post by RandomRanger above that it's not clear what value creating a benchmark 10 years ago would even have in the current environment. I'm pretty sure that MIRI were working on solving alignment itself, rather than working on hypothetical benchmarks for potential future AI technologies. Unless there is a demonstratable link, why would you ask them to do that?
sohois
3d ago
Scattered thoughts on this:
- Marshall's failure to get behind the KMT and defeat the CCP really could be the greatest blunder in American history
- As with AI 2027, this seems like it was written primarily as a PR piece, something to appeal to politicians, decision makers, etc., rather than as a completely serious forecast. And as with AI 2027, I expect there to be a lot of people who either don't understand this or don't agree that this was how it was written, and start nitpicking things obviously intended to appeal to Washington rather be maximally truthful. Case in point: in the comments, Scott says they deliberately didn't use "UBI" as they were advised it would turn off Republicans
- Looking at it as a forecast, I think I'd agree with OP here and give it no real chance of success. Politics is too fractured, China is too untrustworthy, and there are too many dangerously retarded people like Marc Andreesen arguing for the other side. I don't think Trump is necessarily a point against; in fact, I would argue that "only Trump could go to China (to regulate AI)". You have to have a leader with strong control over his own party, who doesn't give a shit about the attacks of his enemies to get this through. But this feels like something Trump 1 could have done, back before he wasn't nearly so senile.
- Although I stressed above that this was written for a political audience, I'm a bit disappointed they weren't more imaginative in their economic predictions. I can't really comprehend their future in which 100% of industries are really quite rapidly fully automated and constantly growing, while at the same time there is still standard capitalism with some redistribution. Who are the buyers in this market? How is cash moving around the system with sufficient velocity, particularly when it comes to more third and second world countries that might have far more difficulty arranging fair redistribution?
The following
Unless AI takeoff has already occurred, I'm not sure why you're declaring them wrong about this.
We appear to be in the foothills of AI safety deployment. Governments are just now starting to act on AI. The big companies have deployed some resources for regulatory capture, but I've yet to see anything come of it, and there are just as many influential figures dedicated to ensuring zero regulation (i.e. Marc Andreesen)
Again, the event which hasn't happened yet. If you're making the argument that early LW stuff influenced people to eventually found OpenAI/Anthropic, then fair enough, but this is also a world away from saying "AI safety has [n]ever achieved anything"
It's a fundamentally different position from Marxism, where we have a whole host of negative examples of communism in action.
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