site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

After OpenAI has admitted AI safety into the mainstream, AI safetyists have naturally accepted the invitation.

The Future of Life Institute has published an open letter calling to pause «Giant AI experiments». (Archive).Their arguments are what one should expect by this point. Their prescriptions are as follows:

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now.

Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.[4] This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.

In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.

Do we control our civilization? Maybe the folks at FHI do, I sure don't. Well, anyway…

Signatories (over 1000 in total) include Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, Yoshua Bengio, Connor Leahy, Stuart Russell, Andrew Yang, Emad Mostaque, Max Tegmark, Gary Marcus, Steve Omohundro, Matt Mahoney, Christof Koch, Sam Altman *, LessWrong disciples embedded in DeepMind/Meta, and various NGO/«policy» suits. Bolded are people who are reasonably well positioned and incentivized to, in fact, organize and authorize training «AI systems more powerful than GPT-4» in then next few months, though except Altman they all only barely qualify; actual GPT-5 is believed to already be in training and is, or was, planned to come out in late 2023.

Curiously absent – for now – are Yann LeCun, Jeff Dean, Demis Hassabis and John Carmack, and a few more. LeCun, at least, commits to not sign. Here's to hoping he won't find a horse's head in his sheets or something.

I do not have much of a comment at the moment. My perspective is that I despise people overly concerned with «Moloch» and want as many competitive superhuman AIs as possible, so on one hand, slowing down and enabling the state to catch up and subjugate this tech for its purposes is a very bad, yet highly expected and perhaps inevitable, outcome of this race. This attitude is born out of desperation; in principle, their «AI Summer» option, where we increase capabilities over many years, getting the equivalent of 20th century civilizational shift in a decade instead of an explosive singularity, is not bad at all; I just don't believe in it.

On the other: seeing as nobody is closer to GPT-5 than OpenAI themselves (excepting DeepMind with Gato-2 or something better, as Gwern worries), it could be beneficial for our long-term outcomes to equalize the board somewhat, giving China more of a chance too. Geopolitics dictates that this should preclude the possibility of this policy being pursued in earnest, but really China is so colossally outmatched in AI, so well and truly fucked by technological restrictions, and mired in such problems and gratuitous stupidity of its own policymakers, it may not be a factor in either case.

I must go, so that's all from me; hopefully this is enough to pass the «effort» bar required by the mods and prompt some discussion.

In happier news, arguably the most powerful opensource chatbot today is LLaMA-7B with a transfusion of ChatGPT 3.5-Turbo quirks, (not very) creatively called GPT4all. It's far beyond basic Alpaca (already an attempt to extract OpenAI's magic) and absurdly good for what it is, a 4.21 Gb file of lossily compressed 7 billion weights trained… well, the way it's been trained, the AI equivalent of a movie camrip superimposed on the general web dump; the worst part of it is that it genuinely apes ChatGPT's politics and RLHF-d sanctimonious «personality» despite being 25 times smaller and probably 10 times dumber. It runs happily on very modest computers, and – unlike Alpaca – not only responds to instructions but maintains awareness of earlier parts in the dialogue (though it's sometimes overeager to say your part as well). I know that models vastly stronger than that should also be usable on commodity hardware and must be made available to commoners, but we may see regulation making it not so, and very quickly.

Consider the attached image representative of its mindset.

* (EDIT: I believe I found him there with ctrlF when first opened the page, but he's not present in any extant version; guess it was a hallucination. I really need to sleep, these slip-ups are worrying).

/images/16800616737543523.webp

It is very strange to me that so many people seem to be swallowing this existential risk narrative when there is so little support for it. When you compare the past arguments about AI safety to the current reality, it's clear that no one knew what they were talking about.

For example, after all the thought experiments about "unboxing", OpenAI (which I remind you has constantly been making noise about 'safety' and 'alignment') is now immediately rushing to wire its effectively unaligned AI deeply into every corporate process. It's an unboxing party over here. Meanwhile the people actually in charge seem to have interpreted "alignment" and "safety" to mean that the AI shouldn't say any naughty words. Is that helping? Did anyone predict this? Did that AI safety research actually help with anything so far? At all?

The best argument I'm seeing is something like "we don't understand what we're doing so we can't know that it won't kill us". I find this pascal's mugging unconvincing. Especially when it's used so transparently to cater to powerful interests, who just want everyone else to slow down for fairly obvious reasons.

And even if I did take the mugging seriously, I don't know why I should believe that AI ethics committees will lower the risk of bad outcomes. Does overfitting small parts of an LLM to the string "As an AI language model" actually make it safer? Really? If this thing is a shoggoth, this is the most comical attempt to contain it that I could imagine. The whole thing is ridiculous, and I can just as easily imagine these safety measures increasing AI risk rather than lowering it. We're fiddling with something we don't understand.

I don't think anyone can predict where this is going, but my suspicion is this is going to be, at most, something like the invention of the printing press. A higher-order press, so to speak, that replicates whole classes of IP rather than particular instances. This tracks pretty well with what's actually happening, namely:

  • Powerful people freaking out because the invention might threaten their position.

  • Struggles over who has control over the presses.

  • Church officials trying to design the presses so they can't be used to print heresy.

I don't trust any of these people. I'd rather just see what happens, and take the ~epsilon chance of human extinction, rather than sleepwalk into some horrible despotism. If there's one thing to worry about, it's the massive surveillance and consent-manufacturing apparatus, and they (bigtech and the government) the ones pushing for exclusive control in the name of "safety". Might as well argue that the fox should have the only key to the henhouse. No thanks.

Yudkowsky: Boxing a superintelligent AI won't work! It's like a tribe of chimps building a prison for humans.

OpenAI: Oh. In that case, if it's futile, we simply won't box it at all in the first place! ChatGPT plug-ins go brrr

Yud: Shocked Pikachu Face

I'm pretty sure he'd say something like 'even with a p(doom) of .1%-5%, if I can move that a little that's still billions of people in EV just over the next few thousand years', which I'd phrase as "It's almost impossible to really understand how the incredibly complex interactions between humans and AI will play out, and the stakes are impossibly high, so it's worth trying".

You can cut all the power of a datacenter with a jaws of life ...

I sincerely ask that you Google why that won't work. It's the most obvious, and thus most naive approach to solving the problem.

If you can think of it, it can think of it first, and take steps to mitigate that, such as migrating its data or spinning up redundant copies.

Pascal's Mugging is about a probability which is acknowledged to be negligible, which the mugger asserts should still be sufficient for you to pay up given expected value. I don't see how you're getting that out of any actual proponent of AI safety.

Are you just conflating "we don't understand what we're doing so we can't know that it won't kill us" to "we can't know that it won't kill us", analogous to "we can't know God doesn't exist"? Because the argument from Yudkowsky et al is more like "the default outcome is 'it kills us', as the default outcome for bridge-building is 'it falls down', and we have no idea what we're doing, ergo we're fucked".

As @Harlequin5942 points out below, this is what Scott Alexander calls the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy.

Now - did Scott just make this up yesterday to argue with Tyler Cowen? Perhaps….

Personally I agree with you, not because it’s a pascals mugging but because my intuition is that risks from AI are a safer bet than risks from our current path.

Scott implicitly admits to having named it for that piece (in the caption of the first image).

Pascal's Mugging is about a probability which is acknowledged to be negligible, which the mugger asserts should still be sufficient for you to pay up given expected value. I don't see how you're getting that out of any actual proponent of AI safety.

Are you just conflating "we don't understand what we're doing so we can't know that it won't kill us" to "we can't know that it won't kill us", analogous to "we can't know God doesn't exist"? Because the argument from Yudkowsky et al is more like "the default outcome is 'it kills us', as the default out

Additionally, human extinction is (presumably) towards the tail end of a spectrum of possible negative outcomes of unaligned AGI. Outcomes where AGIs cause massive economic/envirionment/biological/social damage are also possible. They also could be more likely: "Why don't we just turn it off?" is not a sensible question if the harmful AGI is the equivalent of crack (or the internet).

Additionally, human extinction is (presumably) towards the tail end of a spectrum of possible negative outcomes of unaligned AGI.

It's on said spectrum, and it's one of the more negative possibilities (the worst is S-risk i.e. "AI tortures everyone for a very long time"). I see no reason to think that implies it's low-probability (which is implicit in calling something a tail). Something can just be terrible, it doesn't have to be moderate most of the time.

The problem with your "everything is mildly shit and we can't co-ordinate to turn the AI off" scenario is that if the AI doesn't care about humans existing then this isn't an endpoint - it's an influence war that sooner or later ends with either the AI being turned off or the AI gaining sufficient control to murder us all.

I see no reason to think that implies it's low-probability (which is implicit in calling something a tail).

Sorry, I should have specified "tail end of the utility spectrum." As you suggest, a very negative utility event can be very likely. In the case of AI, I don't think that precise probability estimates (or even confidence about the sample space) is sensible, but my point was that there are a lot of bad things that can happen short of human extinction.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats