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To expand on a comment I made in the previous thread, the situation in Minnesota has made me realize that in the impending AI revolution, in the best case scenario (where we don't get slaughtered by Skynet; we have machines to do our labor for us; and there is some sort of social assistance for all the newly unemployed) it's pretty likely there will be a huge amount of social unrest, separate and apart from issues arising from the AI revolution.
I had assumed that in such a scenario, most people would either pursue interesting hobbies or self-destructive hedonism. But the situation in Minnesota makes me realize that a lot of people are going to look for political causes and use those as an excuse to harass others while feeling morally superior in doing so.
Obviously these things are very difficult to predict, but the Summer of Floyd is instructive, I think. A lot of the rioters were people who were furloughed during Covid and collecting unemployment insurance.
You are also not contemplating the most likely middle-ground nightmare scenario: There is no singularity, but AI is good enough that it puts most of the middle class out of work, there is no UBI and now you have a bunch of people who are purposeless, humiliated, have a lot of free time, and are pissed off and have nothing to lose due to their now degraded economic and social state.
Or the converse: AI gets just strong enough to keep the resulting bunch of purposeless, humiliated humans under control.
Yeah. These middle-ground scenarios are so absurdly under-discussed that I can't help but see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow. It doesn't even take a lot of imagination to outline them.
Middle ground plateaus aren't particularly likely and anyone who thinks about the problem for more than it takes to write snarky comment should understand that. In any world where AI is good enough to replace all or most work then it can be put towards the task of improving AI. With an arbitrarily large amount of intelligence deployed to this end then unless there is something spooky going on in the human brain then we should expect rapid and recursive improvement. There just isn't a stable equilibrium there.
Alignment is about existential risk, we don't need a special new branch of philosophy and ethics to discuss labor automation, this is a conversation that has been going on since before Marx and alignment people cannot hope to add anything useful to it. People can, should be, and are starting to have these conversations just fine without them.
Yeah, "make a completely unsubstantiated statement in order to justify a singular focus on fanciful scenarios that you don't know will ever take place" is exactly the sort of thing that prevents me from taking the field seriously.
The issue isn't even labor automation, it's things like "we now have technology that makes the world of 1984 possible", and we're already there without even reaching full labor automation. It's just a question of building out infrastructure, and this isn't even one of the more imaginative scenarios.
Calling it non-existential is cope. As a threat it's far more likely, and we have zero counter-measures for it. Focusing on scenarios that we don't even know are possible over ones we know are possible, and we are visibly heading towards them, is exactly my criticism.
Your complaint appears to be that this group of people concerned specific with a singularity event needs to instead focus their efforts on something you don't even seem to think AI is needed to make happen. And as an aside, all the thinkers I've read that you would consider AI-Safety aligned have in fact voiced concerns about things like turning drones over to AI. Their most famous proponent, big yud wants to nuke the AI datacenters.
You're just describing a subset of unaligned AI where the AI is aligned with a despot rather than totally unaligned. Or, if the general intelligence isn't necessary for this, then it's a bog standard anti-surveillance stance that isn't related to AI-safety. The AI-Safety contingent would absolutely say that this is an unaligned use of AI and would further go on to say that if the AI was sufficiently strong it would be unaligned to its master and turn against their interests too. The goal of AI safety is the impossibly difficult task of either preventing a strong AI future at all or engineering an AI aligned with human interests that would not go along with the whole 1984 plan.
Huh? No, AI is necessary to make it happen, but the current version that we have is sufficient. Like you point out, it would make no sense for me to bring it up in an AI conversation otherwise.
Yes, because he's obsessed with fantasy doomsday scenarios, rather than far more realistic ones. That's my criticism.
Everything I saw from the rat-sphere of the subject, including the concept of "alignment", assumes AI will have agency, and goals that it will be pursuing. None of it is necessary for the dangers that AI will bring.
Again, defining the field in such a way that it ignores the most likely risks, is exactly the issue I have with AI-safety.
How is that useful? I don't care about what they call "aligned" and "not aligned", I care about how a given scenario could come about, and how it could be prevented (and no, "nuke data centers" doesn't count). This would be another part of the criticism I have of the entire field.
The "AI-Safety" people as you call them have a particular interest in alignment as AI hits super intelligence. They don't need to be wearing their "AI-safety" hats to oppose a surveillance state. You don't need any kind of special MIRI knowledge to oppose surveillance states and people have opposed them for a long time. This is the kind of scope creep criticism that leftists do when the accuse climate focused causes of not focusing enough on police injustice against BIPOCs.
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