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Notes -
AI X-Risk Goes Mainstream?
Jacob Coxon:
116,400,000 views, 634,000 likes.
Evan Hubinger (head of alignment at Anthropic):
34,000,000 views, 51,000 likes.
None of this is substantially different from what certain AI industry insiders have been saying for 5-ish years now, but it's clear from the replies, quote-tweets, and engagement statistics that most people are hearing about this for the first time. Yes, there was clearly some coordination with friendly media prior to the announcement given the almost simultaneous WSJ article (whereas news outlets were initially reluctant to publish anything on the unexpected news of OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize Problem). One can take the maximally conspiratorial position that this is a 4D bankshot by Democrats to end tech innovation forever, but it was going to break through eventually.
In other words, Coffeezilla is now on the case.
These people never seem to outline specifically what they think is going to happen. It's just "if you saw what I saw".
Pretend there is a gun pointed at all of humanity. You helped build the gun. There is one bullet in the gun, and the gun is going to randomly spin itself and go off some time in the next 10 years.
Do you:
A) Quit. Vaguepoast about it online?
B) Try to destroy the gun.
I feel similar about these people as I do about UFO grifters. You're telling me that you're 100% sure there are interdimensional beings in frequent contact with members of the US gov't, who have unlimited energy machines that allow them to cross dimensions and infinite space and...you're still paying your taxes? You show up to your job in congress everyday and whine about Obama?
Bullshit to all of this.
What would be the point? Even if you manage to destroy Anthropic's datacenters, that just means OpenAI kills everyone next week, or Google the week after that, or China six months later. The only way we survive is if, at a minimum, Washington and Beijing coordinate to shut down all frontier research.
There are arguably much better ways to do it than coordinating with China lol
(I guess that means I am vagueposting about it online).
A thermonuclear decapitation strike? Or invading Taiwan and taking TSMC?
No.
Look, I think most of this "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL" stuff is mostly nonsense.
But logically, to maintain the alignment of a rational but secretly misaligned AI, you need to be able to introduce reasonable belief on its part that it might not survive behaving in an unaligned way. This is not "hard" to do.
How is it not "hard" to do?
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