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Notes -
Despite being a doomer, I beg to differ. I think if Eliezer claims that ASI alignment-by-default is ruled out, he is overconfident.
The truth is that we honestly have no clue if alignment will be humanly impossible, solvable with more time or trivial. I find it intellectually dishonest to pretend that the probability of Altman becoming God-Emperor of mankind is zero for instrumental reasons. Nor do I find it even instrumentally coherent -- it is not like Altman will decide to take Eliezer's word for the banana being poisoned.
If your utility function covers humanity as a whole, or even just a particular normal human, then given this epistemic uncertainty Altman trying to create ASI would be net-negative. But I think that from the perspective of an egoistical Altman, the situation is quite different.
Say you believe that ASI will be unaligned with p=0.8, creator-aligned with p=0.1 and humanity-aligned with p=0.1. You are currently running to foremost AI lab and can try to find out which it is, or you forsake your chance and end up with a p=0.3 chance of humanity coordinating successfully (which will likely involve not developing ASI before you die), and p=0.7 that your selfless sacrifice will simply mean that another lab will open Pandora's box three months later.
You value your remaining natural lifespan at 50 QALYs, being one of eight billion humans to benefit from humanity-aligned ASI by 100 QALYs, someone else becoming God-Emperor by 50 QALYs and winning God-Emperorhood for yourself by 1000 QALYs. (Yes, these numbers are debatable, and probably not very realistic. Actually, for the humans currently alive (and thus doomed to die by default), it might make sense to throw the dice even if the odds are against them, and building ASI only becomes monstrous when one considers also the utility of future humans who will never get born due to an AI takeover.)
If you refrain from trying to build ASI, your expected utility is 25.5 QALYs -- much less than your expected natural lifespan because you can not coordinate effectively. If you try to build it, the main difference of the likeliest outcomes will be that it will be you destroying the world instead of Musk, but in that case who gives a damn. On the other hand, the throne is such a juicy price that it is well worth gambling your lifespan on it even if it is an unlikely outcome, expected value 110 QALYs.
As with lichdom, a vast number of souls are footing the bill for your elevation, only that in the case of ascension through ASI, they are doomed in the timelines where you fail.
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I like the God-Emperor meme because it succinctly refers to that gambit while also not clothing it in sanitized language (like "becoming CEO of the light-cone"). Even if you believe that achieving this outcome is mathematically impossible, it seems plausible that other actors in the AI space believe it. I also do not think it is harmful to name this belief and thereby spread the idea that it exists, because the number of people who will be in the position to decide to build ASI seems rather small and smart enough that the idea occurred to them independently.
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