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With the recent discussion on AI 2040, I have been thinking about how the modern AI safety movement of the early 21st century almost entirely pattern matches against the Marxist movements of the early 20th century.
They were both largely wrong about what begat capitalism / AI; Marxism was very insistent on labor value theory, and LW used to be very focused on symbolic AI/GOFAI/FOOM. Despite this, both were extremely prescient about the eventual end states of capitalism and AI well before the general public were aware of such concepts; capitalism leading to involution, monopolism, inequality, alienation, overproduction vs AI leading to AGI/ASI/singularity/the end of humanity.
Both movements have a history of having rock-solid beliefs, perhaps somewhat overconfidently, that current developments will lead to an imminent, eschatological Event; the 1848 revolutions, WW1 revolutions, and the Great Depression leading to the imminent collapse of capitalism, vs Deep Blue, AlphaGo and LLM's leading to the imminent creation of AGI.
Many genuinely altruistic, intelligent people find themselves drawn to both movements as they become convinced by the prescience of the movement's thinkers and start believing in the imminence of the Event - Scott himself has talked about such sympathies before.
Such people (the vanguard party / AI safetyists) are convinced that they are the ones that know best, that they are the only people who are clearly forecasting the imminent Event, and that it's their role to save the lumpenproles / permanent underclass who don't understand class consciousness / the exponential from the Event.
They both believe if the Event goes poorly it will end the world, and if it goes well it will lead to utopic abundance; hence assigning infinite stakes to the actions of the vanguard party / AI safety movement.
They both (correctly) identify that Molochian co-ordination problems make regular action incapable of affecting enough change to make the Event go well; hence the only way out is absolute control over the world by those ideologically and culturally aligned, in order to bring about utopia (communist revolution to seize the means of production vs bombing the data centres and seizing the means of compute).
Inevitably, all such movements end up being co-opted by those very same Molochian dynamics, while never having actually done anything to prevent the Event or improve the chances of the Event leading to abundance (Mao, Stalin vs frontier lab regulatory capture and degrowth ideological capture).
Frankly I also hold similar sympathies myself, with regards to both ideologies. It really is true that capitalism, despite being the best known economic system out of a lot of worse economic systems, has been the genesis of enormous amounts of externalities and suffering, and it really is true that if/when AGI is ever eventuated, at very best it is still going to be the end of the world as we know it, and at worst if anyone builds it everyone dies.
And yet neither Marxism nor AI safety has ever achieved anything that might facilitate a more favorable outcome for the Event, whether it truly is imminent or not, and mostly have just made everything worse. One can only hope that AI safety doesn't rack up Marxism's mountain of bodies along the way.
This is not a fully developed thought, but I'll throw it out there as well - another similarity I see is a combination of what I see as deep conceptual confusion alongside a baffled failure to understand that anybody thinks differently to them.
In this context I doubt it will be necessary to explain where I see the Marxist confusions. What is value? What constitutes exploitation? Why is incremental reform insufficient? Perhaps more controversial would be the idea that the AI people are similarly confused.
Let me take a simple example. What's alignment? There is a great deal of talk about it and I'm not sure it's a coherent category. Structuring AI to prioritise 'human values'? Great. What are those? What on Earth are those? Channelling Alisdair MacIntyre for a moment - Whose Alignment? Which Human Values? Presumably they would reply to me that they don't think they need to have a complete, comprehensive moral theory (after all, that has been baffling philosophers for millennia), but just need some broad strokes like "humans being alive is good" or "material prosperity is good", but I am unsatisfied that this is enough, especially considering the, well, crazy moonbat stuff that so many of these thinkers end up committing themselves to.
Moreover, just on the practical level, I can hardly resist pointing out that we can't align dumb technology, much less any hypothetical future AI. Phones are mis-aligned. Television is mis-aligned. There's a small cottage industry arguing that agriculture is mis-aligned. We have rarely aligned anything before now. It is a good idea in principle to design our tools to accomplish the tasks we intend them for, but every transformative technology before now has had unexpected, unintended, and frequently undesirable effects, alongside the intended effects.
Marxism describes a system that it calls 'capitalism', postulates a set of problems with that system which are both moral/ideological (exploitation, theft of surplus value, etc.) and empirical (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc.), and then points the way to an imagined solution. I feel like 'AI safety' does something similar. Unfortunately I don't think either group is particularly tethered to reality. They both start from a series of reasonable observations about something happening in the world, but then go on to confidently build towers in the sky.
Your second point seems like the more fundamental critique. But I don't get it: "we fail at aligning other technologies, so it seems likely we'll inevitably fail at aligning AI" might have some bite at safety folks at frontier labs who are trying to build an aligned AI. But there's also plenty of people who see the task of aligning AI as about the same as the task of building and aligning COVID-49 i.e. something that just shouldn't be done.
Maybe there's a capability critique in there i.e. AI will never have the capabilities to pose an existential risk. But that is a separate question from the alignment/safety critique of AI (if that is your argument, of course alignment questions drop a lot in importance).
I suppose I do need to be careful here. I think of LLMs as just like any other technology, rather than a paradigm shift, and that means that while I think they will inevitably have effects that we can't predict, some of which will be undesirable, 'standard' safety precautions are sensible. No technology has wholly predictable efforts, but we don't abandon the entire idea of safety. So trying to make bots as safe as possible is a good idea.
What I think of when I hear people talk about 'alignment' or 'AI safety' feels different to that, though. The framing is generally not "let's try to make this tool as practical and safe as possible", just like every other tool we make, but rather "we are on the cusp of making robot gods who will radically change everything about what it is to be human, and we have to make sure that they turn out to be benevolent toward us".
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I think this would be an interesting essay for someone already steeped in that subculture, but as someone who lacks context, I have some questions. The chief among them is: who is exactly is this criticism levied against? Who is the poster child of this AI safetyism, advocating for bombing data centers, seizing the means of compute, and already made everything worse (how??)? Are they even the same group of people? e.g. Sam Altman may want to use AI safety as an excuse to eliminate his AGI competitors via regulatory capture but he surely isn't advocating for bombing data centers?
If you believe this then it's not the AI safetyists you should be most worried about, but AI research firms in general? Especially firms that explicitly don't care about safety at all? Aren't the guys bombing data centers aligned with your beliefs?
The two most prominent representatives of AI Safety are
Eliezer Yudkowsky, who as below commentators have noted, has advocated in Time for a world government to seize power and prevent the development of AI via violence, even to the point of bombing data centres and triggering nuclear war. He was one of the primary inspirations for Altman and Musk to found OpenAI, and indirectly Amodei et al to found Anthropic; organizations dedicated to pushing forth AI capabilities, directly against AI safety's original goal.
Scott Alexander, who has recently put his support towards AI 2040, a policy proposal that advocates for the creation of an (effective) global world government to nationalize the means of compute throughout the world, in order to prevent un-authorized AI development.
I would say it is a matter of epistemological confidence; I agree, in the abstract, that the hypothetical Event where AGI is created is likely to have poor outcomes, and that if possible, averting the Event would be a good idea.
The problem is with people who believe that AGI is likely to be created imminently soon and in the near-certainty of existentially dangerous outcomes; this line of thinking means you can justify advocating for low-probability policies such as seizing world compute and triggering global war, with a certainty of having dangerous outcomes, because the stakes otherwise are so imminent and so immense.
Even though I directionally align with the belief that AGI is Bad, I think it is far more likely that such proposals are much more likely to cause "mundane" harms like increased governmental repression and/or reduced technological innovation, without having a particularly high likelihood of averting the Event, and quite possibly making it more imminent and/or much worse.
I mentioned something like this in last week's thread, but Eliezer has ironically been one of the most counter-productive people in history at achieving their goals. In a Nick Landian sense, he helped create (unveil?) a hyperstition: the idea of some imagined future being so powerful that it acts as a retrocausal attractor to bring itself into existence. Popularize the idea that we are on the brink of creating a machine god with the power to destroy us all, and inevitably someone's going to go "huh, so I could have a machine god? I should get on that, if only to prevent all the irresponsible people from doing it before me."
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That would be Eliezer "melt the GPUs" Yudkowsky. Including bombing
ChineseRussian data centers if they won't cooperate. He founded MIRI in order to work on and spread his ideology. He is a crank in my opinion. He has some influence on some people. But clearly not enough to start WW3 withthe ChineseRussia or whomever to stop them from training more LLMs.Attacking Chinese datacenters wouldn't make sense because bombing GPU clusters only helps if there is already an international treaty to limit AI research, and such a deal would need to include both America and China at a minimum to be effective. The example given was that if the US, the UK, and China had signed a pact to stop AI development and later it was discovered that Russia was training frontier AI, then the anti-AI alliance had to be willing to airstrike Russian server farms (with conventional bombs) even if doing so inherently carried some risk of starting WWIII.
Huh. So it is. I must have misremembered.
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I think you're making an extremely basic mistake here by treating GOFAI as a foundational premise of AI safety in the same way that LTV was a foundational premise of Marxism. In fact, it was an optimistic premise - AI safetyists hoped beyond hope that GOFAI was the path to AI, because the way things have actually gone made the problems they described far less tractable.
I would say GOFAI was a foundational premise of the initial LW view of AI safety; there used to be a lot of concern about such things as basement AGI and FOOM that now seem a bit silly if compute scaling is what leads to AGI, in the same way that modern Marxists need to contort themselves around LTV, or drop it altogether and re-invent Marxism from first principles.
I agree with ThenElection that under the LLM/scaling paradigm, the orthogonality thesis is probably the better structural parallel to LTV as it was understood in the 19th century, in terms of a open conjecture that leads to inevitable collapse if it is true. Perhaps LLM's will disprove the orthogonality thesis in the same way that marginalism disproved LTV, and in a hundred years we'll be viewing orthogonality the same way we now do LTV.
Are you aware of any serious attempts to do this? Seems an interesting project.
It depends what you count as first principles and Marxism; by the nature of such a project, it's debatable that whatever comes out the other end can really be called "Marxism".
The two closest, depending on how you view it, would probably be one of
Analytical Marxism, which attempted to drop the LTV and the Hegelian dialectic influences, among other things, in order to explain exploitation and class relations via analytic philosophy and the social sciences. Arguably some of Analytic Marxism made it into modern social democratic thought, although realistically it wasn't particuarly influential in and of itself.
Socialism with chinese characteristics, which took the opposite approach of nominally retaining the LTV, but in practice adding exceptions wide enough to drive a bus through, and considering the remaining contradictions as just another part of the dialectical process, dropping LTV for all practical purposes.
For example, SCC uses the idea that as value and material wealth are distinct concepts in Marxist thought, acknowledgement that capital and market signals are necessary for the creation of material wealth is not a strict violation of the LTV, while Three Represents attempted to broadly redefine "labor" as including "everything that capitalists do" in order to allow capitalists into the CCP.
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If I had to name a foundational premise of safety, it'd be something like the orthogonality thesis and maybe RSI. You won't find any safety advocates today making a valiant last stand for GOFAI; you would find many who very strongly believe in orthogonality. And it better maps to the LTV structurally: an almost mathematical definition that predicts a significant future rupture. Believing in GOFAI as a research program is closer to believing in government by labor syndicates.
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Marx identified a number of very real problems with the capitalism of his day, and a lot of his work was about explaining why they would be politically impossible to fix within a broadly capitalist framework. The classical economists identified a number of the same problems a century earlier, but was optimistic that they could be fixed eventually. (The most obvious case is that Smith thought that an competent government would be able to enforce antitrust laws, whereas Marx thought that a coalition of business-owners would be able to cartelize politics as well as the economy).
The problems were, in fact, solved within a broadly capitalist framework. The system of capitalism we actually have, and which works wonderfully, includes things like antitrust, macroeconomic stabilisation, social insurance, subsidised homeownership, and health and safety regulation. (Also environmental regulation, which is a problem Marx and Smith missed). There is some question about which of these things are net-beneficial, and whether we can get by with less of them, but the suggestion that we should adopt devil-take-the-hindmost greedhead libertarianism in full is outside the Overton window for good reasons.
The spectre of communism that Marx warned the ruling class about was very real, and it was defeated by actually-existing liberal democracy.
The reason I'm decidedly centrist is because the extremists on both sides keep identifying valid problems in society and then trying to destroy everything and cause ten more problems just to fix that one. And then utterly denying that the problems the other side identifies even exist or are worth worrying about. If we're clever and we tweak the incentives properly so that people can't enrich themselves by exploiting loopholes in the system, the system can function better and solve these problems. We should accurately assess problems. We should fix problems. We should not destroy society in the hopes that maybe it might fix one particular problem to the exclusion of all others.
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Are you a time traveller? You're making an awful lot of 'settled' statements about AI safety that seem to have no relation to its current state
What specific statements do you disagree with?
Of course I can't prove Russell's teapot non-existent, that some genius MIRI researcher won't end up discovering the ten lines of Python needed to achieve alignment, or that some firebrand communist leader won't be the one that finally unites all the workers of the world. That's what makes these ideologies so seductive; the idea that the potential payoffs to the Event are so great, anything is permitted for a chance to eventuate the good outcomes.
Empirically the two camps of "AI safety" most likely to achieve anything in the foreseeable future are the frontier-lab aligned teams that want regulatory capture on models in order to secure their own positions, and the NIMBY anti data-centre anti-AI never build anything populists; neither of these camps are particularly aligned with the original mission of AI safety, and either of these outcomes succeeding would be very poor outcomes in my view.
The first of these camps is literally the original mission of AI safety. AI "alignment" has always been nothing but regulatory capture to secure the power of AI for those who see themselves as benevolent dictators.
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The following
Unless AI takeoff has already occurred, I'm not sure why you're declaring them wrong about this.
We appear to be in the foothills of AI safety deployment. Governments are just now starting to act on AI. The big companies have deployed some resources for regulatory capture, but I've yet to see anything come of it, and there are just as many influential figures dedicated to ensuring zero regulation (i.e. Marc Andreesen)
Again, the event which hasn't happened yet. If you're making the argument that early LW stuff influenced people to eventually found OpenAI/Anthropic, then fair enough, but this is also a world away from saying "AI safety has [n]ever achieved anything"
It's a fundamentally different position from Marxism, where we have a whole host of negative examples of communism in action.
I suppose you're correct, although it is my impression that ~everyone who believes in short AI timelines / AI safety regulation now believes in scaling compute being the way to AGI. Even non-LLM believers are primarily looking for new ways to apply the bitter lesson, and the focus of AI safety regulation is on trying to control world compute, which would be completely pointless if Gary Marcus got the final laugh vis a vis symbolic AI.
Yeah, this is my point. Empirical evidence is that the sum total of AI safety's achievements is, against their own goals, to accelerate the founding of OpenAI/Anthropic and the AI race dynamic, while having made no progress on their actual goals (not even the authors expect Plan A to realistically happen).
Of course, it's possible they could turn it around and heroically pull humanity into post-scarcity abundance, the same way that Marxism still has time to eventuate the communist revolution (arguably it's kind of sort of happening with the DSA); but if the stakes are infinite, then there's nothing to do but keep going, even if you're going in the wrong direction, which is why getting Pascal's Mugged is so dangerous.
This is the point I'm trying to make though; perhaps it was poorly communicated. At the turn of the 20th century, Marxism was in vogue amongst many Western intellectuals, because we had not yet seen what would happen with communism in action.
Right now, we are at the equivalent stage of AI safety, where it is in vogue in certain intellectual circles; we have not yet seen what will happen with AI safety, but it shares many structural similarities to the Marxist movements a hundred years ago.
After the transformers paper came out it was only a matter of time, this way at least the labs are full of safety people who might be able to prioritize alignment work. The alternative was optimistically we get a year or so more time but no influence.
This prove too much. early liberal, proto-capitalist, thought also shared these structural elements.
"Might" is a weak word. Historically, "join your enemies to reform them from within" has pretty much never achieved the desired aims; it seems straightforwardly true that Moloch has won in terms of incentives to push capabilities and accelerate.
I think if you accept the premise that the world is truly doomed on such a short timescale, then having a few more years is better, actually, than trading billions of QALY's for some nebulous idea of influence that has had no empirical benefit.
Perhaps. It would be easier to engage with this if you elaborated on why you think this is the case.
Framing this as a simple enemies or allies distinction is sanding away anything useful. Like if the "enemy" was "war" then one might naively believe that creating an army is joining the "enemy". But if what is bad about war is the killing and oppression then you don't prevent that by disarming, only ensure that the people who win are less noble and less capably opposed.
It's already the case thst people accuse those like yud of being an uninvolved crank who doesn't understand the problem because he doesn't have experience building the models. Ai safety people would have less, not more influence if they abstained.
Given the infinity of total annihilation any qaly calculation is swamped by even a tiny amount of leverage on probability of averting disaster. You'd need to set the capabilities frontier back some appreciable fraction of the sun's remaining lifespan for this to be a meaningful calculation. Fortunately I think having people in leadership positions of the labs gives us more than a tiny amount of leverage.
This is of course vague because you didn't yourself outline what these structural elements are. Seems like some vague notion of the necessity of action to avoid catastrophe. If "we'll be out competed by peer nations who liberalize" is too much of a stretch then we can point to calls to shut down the border lest the nation be dissolved or any number of other calls to action. The calling up of a militia to defend from Indian attacks. The point is that it's silly to compare any movement that wants to act for any reason to communism in order to rub its nose in that feces. You'd leave yourself completely paralyzed.
The difference is that "war" is a concept and "AGI" is, at least theoretically, being physically manifested. If the enemy is "the army about to invade" then you probably don't want to join the enemy army to convince them to turn around.
This is the exact logic that I am saying leads to very bad outcomes. If you believe that the stakes are the infinity of total annihilation, that total annihilation is imminent, and that any leverage thus has infinite value, then you can justify doing anything to gain even miniscule leverage, on nothing but the strength of your own belief. The anime character draining the lives of everyone across the world because they believe that only they can bring the world to salvation is not the protagonist of the story.
I think I have outlined my case well enough.
Adherents of both ideologies believe in an imminent Event, with infinitely high stakes attached to the Event, that they are the only ones capable of making sure the Event leads to utopia, and that at least in the case of Marxism, this set of beliefs lead to the justification of many horrible acts that did not, in fact, meaningfully facilitate a better outcome of the Event. As far as I know, this description does not apply to liberal or capitalistic thought.
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