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This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment.
He is not impressed with how FTX and its web of companies was run, and he makes no bones about it. The recurring refrain all through is "However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated" for all the balance sheets he's quoting. He was the guy put in to handle Enron when it was wound up, and he says (reading between the lines and you don't need to do much of that) that the FTX mess is even worse than that:
He throws shade everywhere:
(Translation: Bankman-Fried is a lying liar)
Ouch. As if Zuckerberg didn't have enough problems with the Metaverse already. Is this really the kind of PR he wants associated with it? 😁
What really interested me in all this, though, was the interview/transcript of a Twitter conversation with Bankman-Fried that Kelsey Piper published in Vox the other day. I have no idea what Bankman-Fried is trying to achieve here, but it's pretty plain that he is in a state of denial and is not accepting any responsibility for the eventual outcome. He admits he fucked up, but then shifts into blaming others, including his co-founders, and everyone who advised him to file for bankruptcy. Reading Ray's declaration, it sounds less like "I was advised" and more like "I was told do this or else", but whatever; now he is spinning a story (and I don't know if he believes this himself or was just trying it out on Piper) that if he had toughed it out and refused to file for bankruptcy he would have been able to cover most of the debts and settle up within a month or two:
Considering, according to the filing, that amongst the lawyers he consulted about that, one of them was his dad - ouch again. Sorry Dad, Sonny-boy is lumping you in with the bad advisors who led him astray. But he is in a state of delusion that he could have fixed this, or can fix it. He still can't admit he messed up because he was too greedy and not as smart as he thought he was, and all that rationalist woo about risk and utility maximisation was only a cover for bad decisions and fraud.
I would definitely recommend reading this document to get a picture of what was going on. There is no way, unless he's trying to set up for an insanity plea or operating under impairment due to drugs/mental health problems, that Bankman-Fried can deny it was all down to him. He pretty much owned or controlled every entity that was going on, it was him and literally about three others who made all the decisions, and they seem to have treated the interlocking parts as their own private piggy-bank (e.g. "three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million"). Then read the Vox article to see how he is admitting all his EA/altruism talk was basically telling them what they wanted to hear so he'd be popular and well-liked and they'd trust him, because getting people to like you is winning and winning is all that counts.
And this set-up was having billions of dollars in investment funding thrown at it, and it was less well-organised than a school bake sale when it came to handling and keeping track of what money was coming in and where it was going.
I have a question. Why, after this fiasco with FTX, should I have any faith that the Effective Altruism movement has any handle on existential risk or any capability to determine what actions will increase or decrease said risk? My impression is that this management of existential risk is a substantial part of EA's brand. Especially William MaCaskill and longtermism as a movement. Some of the leading lights of the EA movement (like MaCaskill) were apparently unable to manage the well defined risk of "maybe this guy running a cryptocurrency exchange is a scam artist" but I'm supposed to believe they have a handle on the vastly more nebulous and ill defined risk of "maybe an unfriendly artificial intelligence extincts humanity." Why should I believe this?
Existential risk is a hack job for human psychology. Once you can convince someone (especially yourself) that something is an existential risk to all life, why you can do goddamned anything you can convince yourself has even a tiny chance of preventing it. It's "Deus Vult" for atheists. The further into the future this dystopia lies, the less likely you'll ever have to deal with the fallout of your failed predictions. We've been on "ten years to save the world from global warming" for a good forty years now.
My stupid moron religious parents think the world is going to end because people are sinful and God is vengeful. Really smart people believe the world is going to end because.......people are sinful and (AI) gods are vengeful. Environmentalists believe the world is going to end because......people are sinful and mother earth is vengeful.
None of that makes their claims wrong. Is this even a psychology thing? Things like 'existential risks to all life' do exist (for historical examples: atmosphere oxygenation "caused the extinction of many existing anaerobic species on Earth ... constituted a mass extinction", Chicxulub "a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.", ice ages, human population bottleneck), and technology makes it easy for us to do similarly bad things. Preventing such things is important, and it would be stupid to write them off. So this isn't even a psycholoical "hack", it's just ... something important that one can be wrong about. But it's not any more worth ignoring than it is to ignore the doctor saying you need surgery or you'll die, because faith healers say you need to get a protection spell or you'll die. That X-risk leads people to make difficult and complex decisions is good
Yes, all predictions of the apocalypse up until this very second have been wrong.
Yes, the next one might be right.
No, it won't be, but it might.
Sooner or later, it's either the big 'ol HDU or something else.
There is an absolutely unbroken line of apocalyptic dreamers who prefer their fantasy to dealing with the reality of the world. It goes back to the beginning of time when the first dipshit looked up at a shooting star and said "that means the gods are mad at us, we're all gonna die".
I'm doing a rationalist calculation. What are the odds that I meet the first Jeremiah in the history of the world to be right? I mean, a lot of people have lived a lot of lives and most of them thought the world was going to end in their lifetime. I'm pretty hot shit, but I doubt I'm lucky enough to even be alive at the same time as that guy, much less live in the same country, speak the same language, share enough personality quirks with to wind up in the same internet forums etc. What are the odds?
Pretty goddamned good, since I've lived through fourteen to twenty apocalypses (apocalypsi? apocalyps'?) to date. What a life. Fire, flood, the return of Christ, acid rain, Y2K, nuclear war (several times!), the Macarena, Global Warming and now AI? Bring it on, I say.
I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though
Again, it's entirely possible for massive technological change to make apocalypses possible. There clearly is a difference between 'god will fire lighting boom everyone for not being religious enough' and 'the billions of dollars and millions of man hours of the smartest people on the world are being invested in AI, what if it works'.
Given that EA spends more time and money on malaria nets than AI risk, this is clearly not an accurate statement about them. More generally, that doesn't actually make AI risk false.
Even if EA and lesswrong were - entirely - irrational and religious cults around AI risk, that wouldn't make AI risk false. And there are stupid, illogical cults around AI - there was and still is a lot of popular scifi larp about "the singularity", "mind uploading", etc. This doesn't make the AI go away.
Yeah, but those occurred on the rough timescale of once every billion years, and all prior to anything anywhere near humanity existing. The ratios on apocalypse-level events Humans have worried about to things that have actually happened during a timeframe that concerns us is therefore at least that high.
Technology has increased the rate of change of everything, though. a million years of hunter gathering, 100k years of fire, 10k years of agriculture, civilization ... 300 years of industry, 60 years of computers... If AI doesn't happen, what does happen in 10k years, and why hasn't AI taken power from humans yet?
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I got raised on "we must avoid nuclear war, if it ever happens it will doom humanity, never mind the hundreds of millions killed by the bombs, the nuclear winter afterwards will mean we all starve and freeze to death in the dark". Nuclear war was the existential risk of the 60s-80s. This animated film frightened the life out of a generation of kids.
Now I'm reading "eh, nuclear war isn't that bad, sure it will kill a lot of people but not everyone, it will not be the end of civilisation much less humanity, and even nuclear winter was over-exaggerated".
What changed about nuclear bombs in the meantime? Nothing, so far as I can see, but the attitude around that risk has changed. Now it's climate change that is the existential risk of our time. AI can just take its place in the queue of "This time for sure, says Chicken Little" about the sky falling.
Nuclear risk is actually one of the EA Big Four - AI, Bio risk, Climate change, and Nuclear war. I have met far more people in EA that actually care about nuclear war than anywhere else.
The reason AI is getting more salience is because it's perceived as more neglected which is one of the key criteria of an EA cause area. Nuclear war is mainstream and nobody wants it, so it isn't as neglected as the other areas.
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I'd like to note, though, that when I asked this question from the perspective you've mentioned, I got at least one reply to the effect of "you could still be boned." Nuclear war might not end all human civilization immediately, but even post-Cold-War media still tended to portray the post-nuclear world as pretty bleak even if there were still some people alive (after all, in such a world, the living might envy the dead). That is to say, even today, nuclear war could get pretty bad, we just have reasons/copium to believe the possibility space also contains scenarios that aren't "rubble and deserts everywhere."
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Your argument goes like 'society was wrong and people lied about nuclear war, and used that to manipulate people - so that must be what's happening now'. Which ... sure, that can happen - it constantly happens - but the reason people even have a desire to avoid x-risks is because it is important to avoid disasters when disasters exist, and disasters sometimes exist.
This is like saying - "you're worried about high crime? people in the 1900s were worried about racialized crime destroying society, and they were wrong, and racist. Therefore crime doesn't matter". You can't write off the entire idea of 'bad thing happening' because people misuse the idea!
What I'm saying is, this is not my first rodeo. If all the x-risks that were sure-fire guaranteed gonna happen as prognosticated over the course of my life had even one of them happen, we'd be disposed of by now.
So "Oh no AI is gonna doom us unless!" talk is nothing special. "But AI is different" - yeah, well, so were nuclear weapons. It's not AI that is the risk, it's humans. We are the greatest threat to ourselves.
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I did too. They all were considered possible, likely or certain by millions of geniuses in their day (except the silly ones, of course). They all had a reason why this time it was for real. They all happened, for some definition of "happen", and they all did not result in the end of the world, humanity, life or anything else so dire. I'm sure AI is dangerous. I'm sure we'll have some colossal fuckups with it that will probably damage something important. When this happens, the frenzy will begin in earnest. Timelines will be settled on, politics will change, a solution will be found, and we will learn to live with it, as we have with nuclear weapons.
Whichever generation of asshole eschatologists alive at the time will write a million books saying they averted the apocalypse. Ten seconds later, it will be something else, and everyone will forget about it. The End of the World is dead, long live the End of the World.
Maybe I'm wrong. Tell you what, if the world ends due to AI, I'll give you a million dollars.
Have you read any yud or lesswrong writing on AI safety? They put a lot of effort into addressing the exact concerns you've laid out, in a way that you don't seem to acknowledge. But leaving that - why though? Why will the competent people find a solution? It's clear how we are able to find a solution to, e.g. nuclear weapons, religious conflict, etc. But AI will be - it's argued - not a simple mechanism we can intelligence and coordinate around, but smart on its own. As a random example - what is the political solution to "AIs now control the global economy"? The AIs are going to be the one "finding solutions", not "human politicians". You can't psychologize your way around a gun to your head, and no amount of "you're just scared its ok the grownups will handle it" will physically prevent the complexity of AI!
Yes, yes, very smart people disagree with me. Your argument is to handwave me at the vast canon of AI scribbling? I've read the big ones, and they are as unconvincing as they are hysterical. It's a very specific style, one I recognize well from my upbringing in a millennial faith-healing cult. It all sounds very convincing, if you haven't been down this road before.
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