This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Regarding AI alignment -
I'm aware of and share @DaseindustriesLtd's aesthetical objection that the AI safety movement is not terribly aligned with my values itself and the payoff expectation of letting them perform their "pivotal act" that involves deputy godhood for themselves does not look so attractive from the outside, but the overall Pascal's Mugging performed by Yudkowsky, TheZvi etc. as linked downthread really does seem fairly persuasive as long as you accept the assumptions that they make. With all that being said, to me the weakest link of their narrative always actually has been in a different part than either the utility of their proposed eschaton or the probability that an AGI becomes Clippy, and I've seen very little discussion of the part that bothers me though I may not have looked well enough.
Specifically, it seems to me that everyone in the field accepts as gospel the assumption that AGI takeoff would (1) be very fast (minimal time from (1+\varepsilon) human capability to C*human capability for some C on the order of theoretical upper bounds) and (2) irreversible (P(the most intelligent agent on Earth will be an AGI n units of time in the future | the most intelligent agent on Earth is an AGI now) ~= 1). I've never seen the argument for either of these two made in any other way than repetition and a sort of obnoxious insinuation that if you don't see them as self-evident you must be kind of dull. Yet, I remain far from convinced of either (though, to be clear, it's not like I'm not convinced of their negations).
Regarding (1), the first piece of natural counterevidence to me is the existence of natural human variation in intelligence. I'm sure you don't need me to sketch in detail an explanation of why the superintelligent-relative-to-baseline Ashkenazim, or East Asians, or John von Neumann himself didn't undergo a personal intelligence explosion, but whence the certainty that this explanation won't in part or full also be relevant for superintelligent AGIs we construct? Sure, there is a certain argument that computer programs are easier to reproduce, modify and iterate upon than wetware, but this advantage is surely not infinitely large, and we do not even have the understanding to quantify this advantage in natural units. "Improving a silicon-based AI is easier than humans, therefore assume it will self-improve about instantaneously even though humans didn't" is extremely facile. It took humans like 10k years of urbanised society to get to the point where building something superior to humans at general reasoning seems within grasp. Even if that next thing is much better than us, how do we know if moving another step beyond that will take 5k, 1k, 100, 10 or 1 year, or minutes? The superhuman AIs we build may well come with their own set of architectural constraints that force them into a hard-to-leave local minimum, too. If the Infante Eschaton is actually a transformer talking to itself, how do we know it won't be forever tied down by an unfortunately utterly insurmountable tendency to exhibit tics in response to Tumblr memes in its token stream that we accidentally built into it, or a hidden high-order term in the cost/performance function for the entire transformer architecture and anything like it, for a sweet 100 years where we get AI Jeeves but not much more?
Secondly, I'm actually very partial to the interpretation that we have already built "superhuman AGI", in the shape of corporations. I realise this sounds like a trite anticapitalist trope, but being put on a bingo board is not a refutation. It may seem like an edge case given the queer computational substrate, but at the same time I'm struggling to find a good definition of superhuman AGI that naturally does not cover them. They are markedly non-human, have their own value function that their computational substrate is compelled to optimise for (fiduciary duty), and exhibit capacities in excess of any human (which is what makes them so useful). Put differently, if an AI built by Google on GPUs does ascend to Yudkowskian godhood, in the process rebuilding itself on nanomachines and then on computronium, what's the reason for the alien historian looking upon the simulation from the outside to place the starting point of "the singularity" specifically at the moment that Google launched the GPU version of the AI to further Google's goals, as opposed to when the GPU AI launched the nanomachine AI in furtherance of its own goals, or when humans launched the human-workers version of Google to further their human goals? Of all these points, the last one seems to be the most special one to me, because it marks the beginning of the chain where intelligent agents deliberately construct more intelligent agents in furtherance of their goals. However, if the descent towards the singularity has already started, so far it's been taking its sweet time. Why do we expect a crazy acceleration at the next step, apart from the ancient human tendency to believe ourselves to be living in the most special of times?
Regarding (2), even if $sv_business or $three_letter_agency builds a superhuman AI that is rapidly going critical, what's to say this won't be spotted and quickly corroborated by an assortment of Russian and/or Chinese spies, and those governments don't have some protocol in place that will result in them preemptively unloading their nuclear arsenal on every industrial center in the US? If the nukes land, the reversal criterion will probably be satisfied, and it's likely enough that the AI will be large enough and depend on sufficiently special hardware that it can't just quickly evacuate itself to AWS Antarctica. At that point, the AI may already be significantly smarter than humans, without having the capability to resist. Certainly the Yudkowsky scenario of bribing people into synthesising the appropriate nanomachine peptides can't be executed on 30 minutes' notice, and I doubt even a room full of uber-von Neumanns on amphetamines (especially ones bound to the wheelchair of specialty hardware and reliably electricity supply) could contrive a way to save itself from 50 oncoming nukes in that timespan. Of course this particular class of scenario may have very low probability, but I do not think that that probability is 0; and the more slowness and perhaps also fragility of early superhuman AIs we are willing to concede per point (1), the more opportunities for individually low-probability reversals like this arise.
All in all, I'm left with a far lower subjective belief that the LW-canon AGI apocalypse will happen as described than Yudkowsky's near-certainty that seems to be offset only by black swan events before the silicon AGI comes into being. I'm gravitating towards putting something like a 20% probability on it, without being at all confident in my napkinless mental Bayesianism, which is of course still very high for x-risk but makes the proposed "grow the probability of totalitarian EA machine god" countermeasure look much less attractive. It would be interesting to see if something along the lines of my thoughts above has already been argued against in the community, or if there is some qualitative (because I consider the quantitative aspect to be a bit hopeless) flaw in my lines of reasoning that stands out to the Motte.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link