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It's a probabilistic argument. Most of the rationalist community thinks that the probability of that happening is high enough to take seriously, your priors may well differ.
At the end of the day, a single superintelligent human is constrained by their substrate that an equivalent AI running in-silico very much isn't. Iterative experimentation and self-modification gets much easier when you can reboot a backup checkpoint or just spin up multiple instances. For obvious reasons, that's considerably harder for a human than it is an AI.
I am unaware of any nuclear power publicly precomitting to nuclear escalation in response to AGI research. The Manhattan Project did its job, and even in a more connected world, US OPSEC is still nothing to sneeze at. I'll consider that kind of leak to be a serious possibility when reports of F35 schematics being stolen surface.
Also, the exact time scales for a takeoff aren't the most important detail by a longshot, in terms of subjective outcome as relevant to a human, you're not really going to care if an AI went FOOM over the course of minutes versus a year, if it was smart enough to conceal its capabilities in the interim. You just end up paperclipped all the same.
The more realistic scenario is a sufficiently intelligent AGI not being instantiated right at the moment of existential risk, but rather having a window of opportunity to either build up a technological edge or ensure continuity by escaping into the 'wild' to a degree that nothing short of the end of modern civilization would serve to terminate it. What are your reasons for assuming that it'll only become a threat right as the nukes are launching at its primary data center?
I also consider Yudkowsky's penchant for invoking nanotech as the pivotal tech needed to give an overwhelming advantage to an AGI to be plain unnecessary, irrespective of its truth value. A superintelligent AGI is perfectly capable of playing the same games that humans do, and doing better there in. A combination of subtle social manipulation, gradual diversification and improvement of the technological level (so that it can achieve self sufficiency) and then a coup with nothing more advanced than NBCs is perfectly plausible as far as I'm concerned, and we're just as dead either way. It doesn't need particularly God-like powers when it can run intellectual circles around us right until it can develop (plausible) decisive advantages.
As far as I'm concerned, hoping for a multipolar AI paradigm of checks and balances from competing AGI is a fool's hope, since they're perfectly capable of colluding to wipe us out since we're no longer peer players. And so is expecting governments to actually sit up and notice until its far too late, especially when instead of nuclear annihilation, they might decide to try and be the ones to upset the kiddie pool..
Oh, I absolutely think it's high enough to take seriously, I just don't think it's so high that the "regardless of whether you particularly like the future we propose, you should agree that it's at least somewhat better than the certain extinction that is the alternative and therefore support us" argument of team MIRI goes through. This of course does depend on your value function a lot, but in my eyes the expected value of "20% chance of unsafe AGI apocalypse" is higher than the expected value of MIRI's pivotal act timeline, which in turn is higher than the expected value of "100%-\varepsilon chance of unsafe AGI apocalypse". This ordering is what gives rise to the significance I assign to the "bean-counting" of ways in which the LW scenario could fail to come pass, since I really think the aggregate of individually unlikely scenarios an AGI could fail to take off can push the likelihood of that existential risk down into the 10^-1 range. I don't know if this is weird; I can see it being a consequence of myself having a comparatively (negative? misanthropic?) personality which makes me value highly misaligned but nominally "human" existence closer to complete nonexistence than to similar-to-present-day human existence. Certainly, someone with the right kind of anthropophilic outlook may instead consider human extinction so much worse than guaranteed continued human existence that is morally warped with no prospect of redemption that taking the 20% chance of extinction over the 100% chance of the latter seems barbarous.
I do care if I think there's a significant chance that it can't conceal its capabilities, and I think that 20 years from emergency to complete takeover is quite a plausible timeline too, since I'm really not sold on the "slightly smarter than humans on silicon substrate => many orders of magnitude faster improvement" belief.
Well, neither, but I think it's reasonably likely that the candidate for takeoff AGI will be military-adjacent as those applications are a competition sink far removed from civilian control and generally already endowed with spicy actuators. With those, though, it's quite likely that a generic response path geared towards MAD-disrupting superweapons will be triggered. Certainly, if I were Putin and my long-running uneasy stalemate in Ukraine started getting disrupted by game-changing NATO AI drone swarms, I'd be strongly considering the merits of forcing a future rematch under more favourable conditions via the global thermonuclear war route.
Yeah, I don't find that particular path to be likely for perpetual non-apocalypse; this is just saying that even if it will still take AGIs another hundred years to figure out how to improve and really leave us in the dust, we will grant them all the time they need. Instead, I'm betting on the "AGI takeoff will fizzle, resulting in chaos that destroys the technical preconditions for it for a long time" space.
Yeah, what I'm saying is that I find it quite likely that a budding AGI takeoff will result in the "end [at least temporary] of modern civilization". "Modern civilization", at least as needed to sustain the computational substrate for cutting-edge AGIs, seems quite fragile to me. An AGI could, with time, of course refine itself to be less brittle, but I suspect, as a consequence of believing self-improvement to be rather hard, that it would not manage to do that in time before disruption due to its other applications causes civilisational collapse.
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A lot of people seem to think it's pretty much a given, but granted that's not necessarily all people concerned by AI x-risk (or possibly not even most of them). But I have had a number of exchanges where I've been told something like "if there's even a 5% chance of AI x-risk it's worth expending a lot of energy on" which I disagree with. It's not very rigorous but I'd say that if the danger is less than ~30% I'm not that worried about it.
Granted, but /u/4bpp's point I think it's that it's not at all clear how much easier, and certainly not clear if it's so easy that it would enable something like an "intelligence explosion."
As far as I'm concerned, the value of mitigating a 5% existential risk from AGI is worth precisely 5% of what I'd be willing to spend to prevent a 100% risk of lethal AGI.
So about 5%x(All the money in the world). That's a pretty huge number!
I don't know why you assign a nonlinear function such that 30% risk would be disproportionately higher, but I'm genuinely unable to think of a good one myself.
Well, nobody knows that with any level of certainty approaching what we might assign to our understanding of say, mathematical theorems, or even just the plain old laws of physics. But that's where the smart money is as far as I'm concerned.
And even without an intelligence explosion, I believe that even a modest intelligence advantage in absolute terms has disproportionately high effective impact. I would find a hostile human being with 40 more IQ points than me to be a formidable opponent, let alone one that isn't biologically constrained!
Just consider a graph of lifetime earnings versus IQ to be illustrative, and to the extent that money is kinda sorta equivalent to power, I'm not betting against the AGI.
In other words, even something as 'tame' as AGI with 160 IQ scares the shit out of me, given the ease of self replication, coordination advantages it has over meat humans etc. No need for galaxy brained ones to be a fatal risk.
(Not even going into the risk of sub or roughly human level AGI that might leverage speed intelligence to be killer)
Saying "the low probability doesn't matter because such a large amount of damage has to be prevented" is a rephrasing of Pascal's Mugging.
No. Pascal's Mugging is concerned with very low probabilities, verging on infinitesimal.
It is very much not an argument that merely unlikely things can be dismissed without further thought.
This number, though, is pure asspull.
And did anyone else claim otherwise? The person who used it was simply using it as an example of the threshold at which he stopped caring.
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All else equal?
The AI would be a much greater threat given access to the same resources, but I really wouldn't fuck with a motivated, hateful human genius myself.
This sneaks in the implication that a person with 160+ IQ who randomly hates your guts to the extent they dedicate themselves to ruin your life would actually exist.
No it doesn't. I never claimed they did, merely that I would be rather worried if that was the case.
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Yeah the threshold is basically just vibes.
),
The only general intelligence currently in existence (or at least, the smartest one that we are aware of), humans, cannot bootstrap in this way. Could "human-level" intelligence do this if it was run on silicon? Maybe. But it seems difficult-to-impossible to say, and certainly difficult-to-impossible to say how easy it would be, so that it's hard for me to agree that the smart money is on intelligence explosion.
To be fair, humans are already at the end of a bootstrap sigmoid, and that was via a very long feedback loop.
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This seems to touch upon my point in the parallel post, so I should reiterate that you don't need a nonlinear utility function to choose "starve MIRI of attention" as your response if the risk is 5%. You just need to expect the solution that MIRI would bring about to be worse than losing 5% of all the money in the world.
The gap from "starve MIRI of attention" to "ignore AI x-risk entirely" is then filled by believing that given that you don't like the most prominent organisation addressing AI x-risk and are a nobody, there is nothing you personally can do that would meaningfully shift the risk, and so you ought to optimise your actions conditional on the 95% scenario.
As an aside, the nonchalant optimisation over "all the money in the world" as opposed to what is at your own personal disposal seems to be pretty close to what makes the SBFs of the world spooky. Their plans all to often seem to amount to "1. get as close as possible to controlling as much of the world's capabilities as possible; 2. optimise the use of that according to my value function", casually seeking to uproot the very ancient Chesterton's fence that is the Nash equilibrium of individual mostly selfish humans mostly controlling small slices of reality to boring selfish ends, and trusting that the social welfare of the strategy profile they reason themselves into dictating - or, worse, the new and hitherto unexplored Nash equilibrium that a bunch of conflicting "altruistic" world-optimisers with different values will converge towards - will be better. (Fun result from game theory: altruism can in fact make Nash equilibria worse!)
Fair enough. But that is probably not the reason that the person I replied to set that arbitrary threshold.
If I'm optimizing for making all the money in the world, I'm doing a piss-poor job at it. Much better for my potentially bruised ego that I hold no such aspirations myself, and that it was a rhetorical figure more than anything else. Or rather, that's the amount of money that the Powers That Be should spend on the matter.
Which reduces to, to put it bluntly, the rather age old habit of most rich people to-
Try and get richer.
Do whatever the hell they like with their money.
When put that way, I can only see efforts to single out EAs as uniquely and qualitatively different to be rather unjust to say the least. Having semi-explicit utility functions isn't that big of a deal.
And that looks to me like the even more ancient practise of Old Man Chesteron parceling off land with fences to sell for financial gain. Not something remotely unique to the EA community. They're not about to capture a large fraction of global wealth by means other than the same AGI they're scared of..
Good to know, but I doubt that it's the typical case that altruism makes things worse.
I don't know, do you think it's that uncommon? Of course we're all susceptible to typical-minding, but my expectation certainly would be that most people's revealed preferences would be pretty ruthless towards morally alien human societies - and, as an almost inevitable consequence, assign low value to the future under MIRI's machine god. Most people I know who read about it are even suitably creeped out by the Culture, which if anything presents a hopelessly rose-tinted perspective of living under the watch of "aligned"zookeepers.
Sorry in case it came across as that, but I wasn't seeking to accuse you personally of doing that; it's just that the reflex to optimise over total wealth rather than your slice of reality even if it is just for the sake of argument struck me as a likely part of the same memescape.
I think this collapses a lot of unlike instances of "whatever the hell they like". The distinctively busybody nature of EA rich people's value function seems to make for an uncommon combination for me, though of course not an unheard of one - without the "effective" component of EA, and perhaps controlling for level of education, I'd expect altruism (and especially altruism that's untempered by deontological principles about being light-touch in your interactions with strangers) and being rich to be anticorrelated. Genuine past instances of "powerful people micromanaging strangers for their own notion of good" look like colonial abuses and Victorian workhouses to me.
I'm inclined to analyse their control as going beyond the number in their bank accounts. The frequently pointed out around here surprising fire support for SBF in establishment media strikes me as evidence of an ongoing successful grab for ongoing indirect/memetic control of far more wealth than what is nominally their own. (Gloss: If NYT journalists like EA enough, they can probably induce Bill Gates to use his wealth in alignment with EA values too.)
Hard to quantify given that the games that are easy to analyse almost never adequately model anything more complex than online auctions, but I remember it as being more common than you'd expect.
(Checking out for the day, sorry if my responses fall off. It's been a while since I last tried top-level posting something big and controversial and the workload of following up adequately is nontrivial.)
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