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Notes -
AI 2040: Plan A
The AI 2027 authors published a follow-up. Scott Alexander also wrote a separate blogpost and although not in the author list contributed.
It's a very speculative and optimistic timeline of AI's future evolution. It presents five ways or "plans" the US government will intervene. Unsurprisingly, the ASI-pilled authors favor strong, global regulation to ensure alignment. Summaries:
Plan A (recommended): the US makes an international treaty with China, pauses AI training (not inference, i.e. no new models but we keep using existing ones), enforces full transparency of future research, then when alignment research advances enough carefully resumes
Plan S: the US makes an international treaty with China and pauses AI training for as long as possible
Plan B: the US regulates AI at home and demands China also regulate, but doesn't negotiate with them, probably leading to a war
Plan C: the US regulates AI and ignores China, so they overtake it and reach ASI first
Plan D: the US doesn't regulate AI, we get ASI in early 2031 and it probably kills everyone
Personally, I just don't share the optimism of these guys in either direction.
I think politicians will prioritize culture war and the failing economy over AI regulation, and at most pass some executive orders suggesting companies be more careful. But I also doubt we'll have ASI that can solve the abstract problems "take over the world" or even "keep existing world leaders in power" (they're getting old and increasingly unpopular, their parties may remain in power but only if their policies significantly shift).
What I expect from AI:
Basically solve legacy code by rewriting entire codebases, applying very niche domain knowledge, and actually finding and handling edge-cases better than humans
Greatly speedup research, leading to new discoveries and inventions. Important but background things like food preservation and medicine will improve from AI-assisted discoveries. Major advancements in math and theoretical physics
Much better and cheaper education, therapy, initial medical/legal appointments, personal repairs...maybe reducing but not eliminating human jobs, because human experts will offer these services "premium"
Won't replace human artists. Some advertisements and infographics will be AI but even some will still be human. At best it will assist them in a way where the human still fully controls the output, e.g. by generating code leading to new and improved software tools to learn, practice, and create art
Used by the vast majority as a personal assistant, but doesn't replace human relations
Setting aside the plausibility and timelines of this scenario, I've become more and more convinced that the entire concept of AI safety is just incoherent; it's simply impossible that there can ever be safety if we live in a world where AGI can be created via human hands.
Fundamentally, human power structures that broadly benefit everyone exist because one human can only do so much. No government can kill all of their own citizens, because if they kill too many people they will lose their monopoly on violence, and no government can seize all of the wealth of their own citizens, because in the world as it is right now, you need human labor for wealth to have any meaning.
Of course, once transformative AI exists, neither of these conditions remain true; realpolitik demands that humans are made irrelevant once they are rendered uncompetitive, whether wealthy or not, whether powerful or not. I thought this was a good post - No-one escapes the permanent underclass.
The alternative proposals where Yudkowsky suggests to bomb the data centres, and even this maximally optimistic proposal where everyone gets in a circle and sings kumbaya, still both effectively boil down to either "the global totalitarian world government will have absolute power and promise an utopia once you are useless" or "the superintelligence will have absolute power and promise an utopia once you are useless".
Even if alignment is absolutely perfect, the very best outcome possible is having the values of a select few satisfied by an inscrutable god through friendship and ponies or via the Matrix.
Maybe some people think this is the good ending for humanity. I find myself not so sure.
AI Safety is what you do when you come to this as the plain conclusion under normal circumstances and then start thinking about how you might engineer extraordinary circumstances because the alternative is resignation to oblivion.
I agree. I think most people who believe in AI safety are true altruists who believe that as well.
And yet the greatest accomplishment of the AI safety movement is Yudkowsky influencing Altman and Musk to found OpenAI, and indirectly Amodei et al to found Anthropic. AI safety as it exists now is pretty much either working directly at frontier labs to push capabilities or working at external think tanks that are treated as propaganda arms of the frontier labs (e.g METR eval chart and Epoch AI eval charts played a non-negligible part in keeping AI investment going).
The goals of the AI safety movement would frankly have been better achieved if it had never existed in the first place. That's why I think it's a self-defeating movement; if relief comes it will be from the laws of physics or from Moloch acting via capital markets, not any achievement of AI safety.
It's amusing that Yud's most notable accomplishment will have been advancing the end of the world by a couple years.
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