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There's also a long tradition of smart people "forseeing" weapons that aren't physically possible.
There's also a long tradition of smart people failing to recognize that weapons or other tech can stagnate due to basic physical laws.
"Maybe the AI will figure out how to hack the simulation" or "maybe the AI will kill us all in the same second with hypertech nanobots" are not scenarios that we can plan for in any meaningful way, but much AI safety messaging uses them as examples. They do this because they are worried about out-of-context problems, and want to handle such problems rationally. But the core problem is that out-of-context problems cannot in fact be handled rationally, because our resources are finite and the out-of-context possibility space is infinite.
They argue that Superintelligence will give the AI an unbridgeable strategic advantage, that intelligence allows unlimited Xanatos Gambits, but this doesn't in fact appear to be true. Planning involves handling variables, and it seems obvious to me that variables scale much, much faster that intelligence's capacity to solve for their combinations. And again, we can see this in the real world now, because we have superintelligent agents at home: governments, corporations, markets, large-scale organizations that exist to amplify human capabilities into the superhuman, to gather, digest and coordinate on masses of data far, far beyond what any human can process. And what we see is that complexity swamps these superintelligences on a regular basis.
You frame this as though we are in some sort of stable environment, and AI might move us to an environment of severe risk. But it appears to me that we are already in an environment of severe risk, and AI simply makes things a bit worse. We are already living in the vulnerable world; the vulnerabilities just aren't perfectly-evenly distributed yet.
Meanwhile, "AI Safety" necessarily involves amassing absolute power, and as every human knows, I myself am the only human that can be truly trusted with absolute power, though my tribal champions might be barely acceptable in the final extremity. I am flatly unwilling to allow Yudkowksy to rule me, no matter how much he tries to explain that it's for my own good. I do not believe Coherent Extrapolated Volition is a thing that can possibly exist, and I would rather kill and die than allow him to calculate mine for me.
What are you talking about? Groups of humans such as the united states are able to blow up a target from so high up in the air that you can't see where the bomb was launched from. A medieval king couldn't even fathom defending from this sort of attack. Of course intelligence, attention and knowledge scale to create unforeseeable threats. And the medieval king is a generous case, what hope do bonobos have? The only balance we find is that other organizations of humans scale themselves and counterbalance. And before that counterbalance was formed you had scenarios like an island off the European coast conquering half the world because they got industrialization and the ability to combine intelligences in the form of a joint stock company first.
Yudkowsky does not want to rule you, he just wants to keep you, or anyone including himself, from massing billions of dollars worth of compute and using it to end humanity.
And yet, humans have figured out how to defend against this sort of attack, to the point that we decisively lost the war in Afghanistan.
If you'll allow me to quote myself:
"AI Safety" operates off a fundamentally Enlightened axiom that chaos and entropy can, with sufficient intelligence, be controlled. I think they are wrong, for roughly the same reasons that all previous attempts to create perfect order have been wrong: reality is too complicated.
I am not arguing that AI can't kill us all. I'm pretty sure we can kill us all, and I think the likelihood of us doing so is considerable.
He wants to invent a new category of crime with global jurisdiction and ironclad, merciless enforcement. I am 100% on board, provided that it is me and mine given exclusive control of the surveillance and strike capabilities needed to enforce this regime. Don't worry, we'll be extremely diligent in ensuring that dangerous AI is suppressed.
If there were a certain kind of rock that washed up on the shores of the Ganges from time to time that granted whoever first rubbed it a wish that in the monkey's paw tradition always caused calamity for the person who used it, and we knew that calamity could include the destruction of the earth and the death of everyone on it, would you or would you not want the effected zone closed off? Or would you just trust your fate to whoever in cashmere(realistically the billionaires that each just bought a third of the shoreline) next finds a rock?
My determination to close off the effect zone would depend on my assessment of the probabilities firstly that such a lockdown could be effected, and secondly the probabilities of apocalyptic destruction from other sources. If lockdown seems unlikely to work, and also there are numerous other, similar threats, then it seems to me I might better spend my time using the time I have well.
Then crawl under a rock and die, let the rest of us who want to live discuss the live matters.
Neither Yudkowski nor yourself are the first humans to discover that "living" requires amassing unaccountable power. Time is not used well under a rock.
In any case, I hear Pascal also has a pretty good wager.
Everyone so far has died, pascal's wager might as well apply to them all, it doesn't really matter to the living. But you gamble with the still in play lives of me and my descendants.
edit: and for what? What the fuck do you need $500 billion data centers for exactly? This isn't like, "why do you need that handgun" territory. It's "why do you need 90% of all the plutonium in the world" territory.
All available evidence indicates that you and all your descendents will someday die no matter what anyone does. All available evidence indicates that humanity will go extinct, and that extinction being soon is a distinct possibility, again no matter what anyone does.
I am not building AI. I am pointing out that Yudkowsky's proposed solution seems both very unlikely to work and also very likely unnecessary for a whole host of reasons, and that there appears to me approximately zero reason to play along with his schemes. I am not gambling with your life, or that of your descendants. You do not get to stack theories a hundred layers high and then declare that therefore, everyone has to do what you say or be branded a villain.
I say Yudkowsky demands unaccountable power, because it is obvious that this is, in fact, exactly what he's demanding. Neither he nor you get to beg out of the entire concept of politics because you've invented a very, very scary ghost story.
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