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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..
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)
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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