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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.
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.
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.
This doesn't make sense, humans are going to create the AI. If humans create super-smart AI and it kills us all [hyperbole], that's still humans being a threat to ourselves
Again, this is like saying "well, nobody I know has had their building collapse, so what do we need building codes for"? Or, if you insist on things that (at the time) didn't have examples - "meh, nobody's ever nuked another country / had a reactor meltdown before, what do we need nuclear strategy / regulation for"?
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