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Daniel Kokotajlo and the rest of the AI 2027 team are doing an AMA right now on ACX, in case any of you want to ask something. Ends half an hour from now.
NB: If you just want to yell "you're wrong" I'd recommend saying that at another time; the questions are coming in fast so I'm not sure they'll be able to answer everything.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ama-with-ai-futures-project-team
My opinion of Scott Alexander continues to crater. I don’t know how much of this story is his or the collaborators, but there is a shocking level of naïveté about everything other than AI technical progress. Even there, I don’t know enough about AI to comment.
My favorite part is the end where Chinese AI sells out China, assists a grassroots Chinese pro-democracy group affect a coup, democratic elections are carried out and everyone lives happily after.
Yeah it didn't help. I just try to remind myself that it's OK for someone to be great at some things and hilariously, hopelessly naive about others.
It is possible that AGI happens soon, from LLMs? Sure, grudgingly, I guess. Is it likely? No. Science-fiction raving nonsense. (My favorite genre! Of fiction!)
Scott's claim that AGI not happening soon is implausible because too many things would have to go wrong is so epistemically offensive to me. The null hypothesis really can't be "exponential growth continues for another n doubling periods." C'mon.
I genuinely don't understand how you can say it's plausible to happen at all, but sci-fi nonsense to happen likely. By and large probability is in the mind, and "sci-fi" is usually a claim about the reality part of a belief rather than the opinion. It'd be like saying "It's possible that it happens soon, but it's raving sci-fi nonsense for you to be worried about it."
Plausible to happen at all: intelligence can be created - humans exist. It doesn't follow that it can be created from transistors, or LLMs, or soon - but these are all plausible, i.e. p > epsilon. They are all consistent with basic limits on physics and information theory afaik.
Science-fiction raving nonsense: but, there is absolutely insufficient reason to be confident they are going to happen in the next few years, or even the next few decades. Such beliefs are better grounded than religion, but unclear to me if closer to that or to hard science. They most resemble speculative science fiction, which has discussed AI for decades.
Probability is in the mind: I disagree. Probability is a concrete mathematical concept, used in many mundane contexts every day. Even the rat sense of the word ("90% confident that X") is reasonably concrete: a person (or process or LLM) with a well-calibrated (high correlation) relationship between stated probabilities and occurrence frequency should be trusted more on further probabilities.
Out of interest, do you think that a mars base is sci-fi? It's been discussed in science fiction for a long time.
I think any predictions about the future that assume new technology are "science fiction" p much by definition of the genre, and will resemble it for the same reason: it's the same occupation. Sci-fi that isn't just space opera ie. "fantasy in space", is inherently just prognostication with plot. Note stuff like Star Trek predicting mobile phones, or Snowcrash predicting Google Earth: "if you could do it, you would, we just can't yet."
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