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Notes -
Maybe someone here can help me with this.
What is the bull case, beyond drawing lines on a graph, for AI achieving superhuman, or even human, performance on tasks that are not quickly verifiable?
AI is quite clearly superhuman at self-contained programming problems. I haven't tried Fable, but I suspect that superhuman open ended software engineering is not far away, though I suspect that humans will have a role in architecture and problem setting as opposed to problem solving for some time more. I expect hardware work will also quickly go down this path, at least to some extent, and really anything that can be RLVR'd. That's enough to account for a huge portion of white collar work and carries serious cyber security risks. Both of those will have serious consequences, politically and militarily.
I am not convinced that AI is improving at anything like this rate for things that can't be RLVR'd, I.e. stuff where you can't generate enormous amounts of useful training data with an answer key. Radiologists continue to do just fine for themselves despite repeated promises of doom. I'm sure someone will chime in to say that the radiologists are there for liability reasons, but it's not as if they are now just hitting thumbs up/thumbs down on AI decisions all day.
Partly this is a sample efficiency question - there simply might not be enough data for them to learn this stuff to human level, and architectural advances that improve sample efficiency may lead to huge gains in quality. But it's not clear to me why people expect this to happen.
Humans existing and being good at these problems shows that it is possible to create an intelligence that can solve these problems to at least the skill level of a highly intelligent and competent human, without needing impossibly huge training sets to do so. The question is if we can replicate this on a computer. The bull case is that this is just a question of finding the right algorithm, and once we do, we will achieve AGI.
Since current AI can clearly help researchers write code faster, it stands to reason that the better AI we have access to, the faster we can improve the algorithm, which leads to a loop where better models are developed faster and faster. Once the models start approaching human-level intelligence they will be able to iteratively improve themselves without researcher oversight. And like that, we have justified drawing lines on the graph.
I think your points are good, and I am myself a bit of an AI sceptic. But I do see where the AI safety crowd is coming from. It may not be particularly likely that we get AGI in the near future. But the fact is that the possibility is there, and is significant enough that it currently cannot be dismissed out of hand. Thus it makes sense to halt development until we are certain that this research won't doom us all.
I find it ironic that this is the logic used by a group that pretty much universally rejects Pascal's Wager. Also, it wouldn't be the first time humanity has made this particular calculation- when the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity, Oppenheimer was "pretty sure" it wouldn't cause a neutron chain reaction and ignite the atmosphere in a nuclear hellstorm, but he couldn't guarantee it. Infinite stakes do not necessarily require infinite caution.
Even if you take Pascal's wager seriously, it is not actually very useful. There are multiple religions that each claim their god created the world, with most of them being mutually exclusive. Thus Pascal's wager works about as well as an argument for believing in the Christian God as it does for believing in Allah.
Regarding the atomic bomb, they did the math which showed that a chain reaction was impossible prior to the test. We have no such proof against the dangers of AI. The equivalent would be a paper that shows the theoretical limits of how intelligent LLM's can get, and thus prove that the line will stop going up before we reach the point of AGI.
Pascal's wager is nearly the earliest example of decision theory, and it hardly makes sense to say that the many religions concern simply breaks decision theory. One can do a variety of things to analyze the probability space as well as the payoff space. For an example simplification, suppose there are two possible mutually exclusive levers you could pull, each with some chance of giving you massively large/infinite utility, and P(A pays out)=0.999 while P(B pays out)=0.001. (This is obviously an extreme case, but that's just to build intuition.) Alternatively, one can adjust probabilities such that maybe there's a third mutually exclusive lever that you can pull which has a guaranteed payoff of 1 or whatever. One can make further refinements.
The issue with mutually exclusive religions is that if you pull P(A) and it doesn't pay out, actually it was another faith all along, then you face infinite suffering for being an infidel who foolishly worshipped Jesus as God. You are incentivized to believe in whatever religion has the greatest punishment for nonbelievers to minimize your downside. But then that incentivizes others to make up religions with increasingly worse punishments in the afterlife in order to force you to adhere to the demands of their faith.
It is just not sustainable as there is no way to distinguish between a religion that is made up by humans and one that is actually correct. Playing that game is hopeless from the start.
My understanding is that Islam does not guarantee salvation, even to Muslims, and that similarly non-Muslims do not necessarily go to eternal torment – which makes the game theory slightly more complex than this. I'd need to do more research into Islam to say this for sure, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
From what I understand most religions say that even people who do not believe in them will be treated differently in the afterlife based on whether or not they are virtuous, and most religions have a fairly similar idea of virtuous behavior. Based on that, I think the game theory suggests that living virtuously as a hedge is a good idea, but I am not sure I've ever seen anyone go down this rabbit hole (either in their personal life or from an abstract game theory perspective).
Surely it's actually fairly easy to determine that some religions are made up by humans...
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