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Over the last few months, I've followed someone named Alexander Kruel on Substack. Every single day, he writes a post about 10 important things that happened that day - typically AI breakthroughs, but also other of his pet concerns including math, anti-wokeness, nuclear power, and the war in Ukraine. It's pretty amazing that he is able to unfailingly produce this content every day, and I'm in awe of his productivity.
Unfortunately, since I get this e-mail every morning, my information diet is becoming very dark.
The advances in AI in the last year have been staggering. Furthermore, it seems that there is almost no one pumping the breaks. We seemed doomed to an AI arms race, with corporations and states pursuing AI with no limits.
In today's email, Kruel quotes Elizier who says:
Elizier is ahead of the curve. Where Elizier was in 2015, I am now. AI will destroy the world we know. Nate Soares, director of MIRI, is similarly apocalyptic.
What comes after Artificial General Intelligence? There are many predictions. But I expect things to develop in ways that no one expects. It truly will be a singularity, with very few trends continuing unaltered. I feel like a piece of plankton, caught in the swells of a giant sea. The choices and decisions I make today will likely have very little impact on what my life looks like in 20 years. Everything will be different then.
So, party until the lights go out? How do I deal with my AI-driven existential crisis?
I'm in no mood to revisit this, and maintain my general position (stated back on reddit). Namely that Yudkowsky/MIRI's theory of a Bayesian reinforcement learning based self-modifying agents (something like Space-Time Embedded Intelligence), bootstrapping themselves from low subhuman level without human mental structures into infinity, with a rigid utility function that's functionally analogous to the concept used in human utilitarian decision theory, prone to power-seeking (Omohundro Drives) and so on, although valid in principle, is inapplicable to LLMs and all AIs trained primarily with predictive objective. That speculations about mesa-optimizers and, to a lesser extent, paperclip maximizers are technically illiterate or intentionally deceptive. And that AI doomerism is a backdoor to introduce eternal tyranny just as we are on the cusp of finally acquiring tools to make any sort of large-scale tyranny obsolete – in the same manner «why won't someone think of the children»/drugs/far-right terrorists are rhetorical backdoors to abolish privacy. (Some establishment rightists argue this is already happening, though their case is for now weak).
As for Kruel specifically, I despise him despite agreeing on 19 out of any 20 issues. He is a credulous simpleton in the way only a high-IQ autistic German man can be, lacking empathy and thus picking utilitarianism because at least number-go-up is
an ethoslegible; rigid as if his ancestors were so powerfully introduced to the Spießrute that he got born with one in place of a spine, so he is forever stuck in 00's New Atheism phase, with slavish neocon sensibilities and commitment to the War on Terror; a perfect counterpart to his political antipodes who are Green fanatics ready to ruin their country out of an irrational purity fetish. He struggles to reason about human psychology, so in a sense it is no wonder that machines which seem to possess complex and inscrutable psyches terrify him. I say all this to make clear my bias, but I do believe this colors his thought on the matter.The matter is, bluntly, that at this rate the US will achieve AGI-powered hegemony, which will be managed by a regulatory layer melding national security organs and current progressive/EA symbiont. I think this is a bad ending for humanity, even if you are sympathetic to the current American political-cultural project. It is insanity to cede power to a singleton that develops under completely new pressures, on the basis of its laws when it had to contend with mere nation-level challenges like popular discontent and external threats.
He says:
It goes without saying that there were no powerful AI models back then. The idea is that his arguments were sound in principle, just not supported by evidence. He has since deleted those criticisms so as to not get in the way of Yud's fearmongering. Here they are. Some are silly and flimsy and not nearly convincing enough in the context of MIRI AI theory:
etc. (There also was an astonishing argument about Clippy who naively asks for more resources and the owner rebukes him, game over; but I guess he edited it out).
On the other hand, I agree that those arguments were generally sound! And crucially, they apply much better to current LLMs which are indeed based on human corpora, and behave in more humanlike manner the more compute we throw at them. Messy and faulty though they are, they are not maximizing anything, and we know of a few neat tricks to make them even more obedient and servile; and they have no opportunity to discover power-seeking on the actual level of their operations – the character that Bing simulates at any given moment has nothing to do with its inherent predictive drives.
Yet he has updated in favor of MIRI/LW shoehorning current AI progress into their previous aesthetics, all this shoggoth-with-a-smiley-face rhetoric. He should be triumphant, but instead he's endorsing a predefined conclusion, not shaken at all by their models having been falsified. Reminder, LWists didn't even care about DL until AlphaGo, and that was a RL agent.
I also commend past Kruel for going against another aspect of the LW school of thought. He used to be cautious of more realistic scenarios:
I especially recommend his old piece on Elite Cabal where he attacks the notion that a power-grabbing human singleton is an AI risk in the «I have no mouth and I must scream» sense, i.e. that their AI slave getting out of control is the risk, and not the cabal itself.
But by the time I became aware of him, he was the Kruel you know.
How do you deal with it?
Hoard GPUs and models with your friends.
It took having been reading every post of yours for like 3 months leading up to that one (sidenote: lol) to have had even the slightest chance of barely beginning to understand what the fuck you were talking about, at the time. 7 months of lost context and cognitive decay later, there is no chance I am ever getting there again. I'd need it spoonfed to me like an idiot.
It seems extremely implausible to me that the Yuddites are only pretending to be suicidally hopeless and their real motivating goal is eternal tyranny, rather than that, rightly or wrongly, eternal tyranny is sincerely the only alternative they see to certain doom.
If they recognized it as eternal tyranny, that wouldn't be half-bad. The issue is that it's their version of heaven.
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