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Well, I am rather sure that there is a great rebuttal to these arguments somewhere on Less Wrong, so I remain unconvinced.
Well, the version of Pascal's wager offered by the AI safety people is that (1) the current AI boom might lead to AGI which is much smarter than humans are, and (2) that aligning such AI systems will be hard. You assign a probability to both of these, then multiply this by the QALY cost of killing all humans (or an even higher cost if you care about humanity's far future, which many do), and you get a number how seriously you should take AI x-risk.
Of course, you can simply pick your AGI probability to be 1e-50, but then I might claim that you are overconfident, and ask what other past correct predictions you have made which might make me rely on your predictions instead of everyone else's.
If you pick 1% for both numbers, then a one-in-10k chance to wipe out humanity still seems like a big fucking deal.
In Scott's last 24 non-OT posts on ACX, I have counted four AI stories (2x geoguesser, which is more "AI as a curiosity" and 2x AI 2027, which is more doom and gloom). While I am sure that some of the ACX grants go to AI safety, he is also funding plenty of other projects, which would be totally irresponsible if his p(doom) was 0.9. If this is him showing religious fervor, it is not very convincing.
I will concede that AI alignment is his pet thing much more than it is Scott's, and as of late he has been very bullish on p(doom). Still, I have found him to be a smart, engaging writer. Most of the ideas from the sequences could also be picked up elsewhere, but he did do a great job of communicating all these ideas and putting them in one place. For some light reading of his, see if you like HPMoR.
By and large, the ratsphere does not share his high confidence on p(doom), I think, because they were trained by their prophet to update based on the strength of arguments, not to blindly follow their prophet.
If it's so serious, stop writing puff pieces and start doing something more. You write a poorly written sco fi story that you want others to take seriously if anything there remotely ever comes true but don't want it to be criticised with the same level of rigor. This is assymetric. I recently saw a terrible mission impossible movie that made me scream internally due to its poor handling of basic computer tech and rogue AI. People should talk about doom but at the same time they happily go to meet ups with people in AI who develop these models they warn us about.
If I bring up yuds record, I would be far more correct than he was since I always claimed that language models will be hype puff pieces if you compare them with the attention they get, they're brilliant otherwise but they're not the same level of technology as nuclear weapons.
The meandering posts by all AI safety folks fail to offer concrete plans either, they are not the first ones to suggest having defensive options for rogue technologies. People on this forum commented plenty about this being true a two weeks ago.
This makes me a little melancholic as Scott's writing and opinions post doxxing make me less lose respect for him. Unpersoning people, voting to keep the same order in place that wanted his life wrecked, going on podcasts and making claims about OpenAI being able to buy out all car manufacturers in the US for making killer robots are childish even if these are hypothetical.
The entire subreddit over at /r/slatestarcodex has rosy takes about his Sci fi piece, he got called out upon this clip surfacing, many there seem to be have been traumatized by his fictional story.
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