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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.
Greater than 10% of apocalypse over the next decade? That is such spectacular risk tolerance that I have a hard time believing this 10% number is genuinely held, which could just be that the people who believe in the "10%" chance do not really know what it means to take a 10% risk.
Most people would take a 90% risks of immense wealth or a 10% chance of death in 10 years. People have gambled for far less at a far greater risks of their life.
I think the average person would take the risks but you can certainly find many humans will to risks that.
1 out of 10 is incredibly high, though. Are there ANY activities you can think of with a 10% death rate? The death rate for heroin is 1-2% of users per year. The death rate for hang gliders is 1/1000 per year. BASE jumping is 1/2300 jumps; for this to be a lifetime rate would require an average jumper to do 230, which sounds pretty high. These are the absolute riskiest activities I can think of. Death is much higher stakes than a 10% chance of portfolio wipeout - no one takes 10% death chances, and apocalypse is even worse.
Elite mountaineering, for example summiting Annapurna apparently has a 13.42% fatality rate.
Pre-modern infantry combat and modern battlefields if you're on the wrong side as a rebel or guerilla fighter would likely have a >10% casualty rate as well. We could also count things like suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots which would be obviously much much higher than 10%.
If we're counting lifetime rate, I believe free soloing and pre-modern childbirth would also exceed >10% lifetime as well.
I don't really disagree that 10% is very high, but I do also agree that many people have the demonstrated drive to risk 10% or even higher odds for causes they believe in.
But there are only about 600 ascents of Annapurna ever - this is not even a fringe hobby like BASE jumping. It cannot be that Anthropic and frontier developers are just chock full of these incredibly rare people and that this level of risk tolerance is also well-correlated with AI coding ability.
On war, the calculus on risk has drastically changed over time, at least for people in wealthy, developed countries. The US fatality rate for Vietnam, for example, was less than 3% - and this is the war that completely destroyed the political plausibility of a draft for anything except defending an invasion of American soil, and AI developers have very high opportunity costs for death since they would otherwise be well-compensated programmers.
I'm not so sure that's unlikely, given the degrees and decades of filtering, how they occurred, and general, ah, crackpot factors related to frontier discoveries. Think of, say, newon and alchemy, or Kary Mullis inventing PCR versus basically all of his ideas/beliefs that aren't PCR.
Anthropic in particular is an experiment in distilling down the people at the intersection of high coding ability and extreme AI neuroticism, so everyone that makes it through their filters is going to be kind of a crackpot from the pov of a normal human being.
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