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Scott Alexander, the guy who hosted the Culture War Thread on his blog slatestarcodex before that landed him in so much heat (from the woke left) that it was moved to reddit under the name /r/theMotte (and from there, subsequently, to themotte.org to preempt a reddit crackdown) comes usually across as a kind and considerate person to me. Charitable interpretations are very much his thing. While he has always engaged in CW topics on occasion, his forays deep into the trenches are rare (and in my impression have become rarer compared to the SSC days).
Apparently, there is a person called Steven Pinker. I have been vaguely aware that there was a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature which was probably authored by someone, but he was not someone I really had on my radar.
From the WP article, he seems solidly Grey Tribe. Believes in a computational theory of mind, Ashkenazi Intelligence Hypothesis, critical of both the woke left (cancellations) and the MAGA right (foreign student restrictions).
The main topic where he disagrees with Scott Alexander is AI x-risk.
Scott has now responded, and his reponse is a bit less than maximum charitable.
While Scott is diligent enough with his technical points, it is clear that he is personally hurt by Pinker's decision to ridicule AI x-risk. So his post is also a broadside fired against him. He cites Garfinkel et al 2017 who "proved" that machines will never be larger than humans using common philosophical arguments for AI being harmless.
Scott points out that while Pinker is busy berating the LW crowd for distracting from the more mundane risks of AI, x-risk advocates are willing to work hand in hand with groups with a more practical focus to combat pro-AI PACs like Leading the Future.
On model welfare (which is certainly not the core topic of the x-risk advocates):
He accuses Pinker of endorsing the "lowest quality voices", quoting Claire Lehmann:
Or
It ends with Scott seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker:
Scott has admitted in the comments that this is already the toned-down version of the post he originally wrote. I think that while he held back verbally (nobody get's called a "Vogon spy in a skin suit" this time), he uses his craft well to show his frustration.
For what it's worth, I think that Pinker is correct that Eliezer is in fact over-confident in p(doom|default-ASI). Just like Pinker is when he declares that any fear of doom is ridiculous.
The main difference is that for practical purposes, it does not matter much if your p(doom) is 0.99 or 0.05. Both would be pressing problems whose solution is the most important thing in the world.
Eliezer was bullish on AI capabilities when that was far out of the Overton window, back when the machines could beat humans at chess at most. Steven Pinker was tweeting that "deep learning has probably peaked" in 2019.
This might be giving too much credit to Pinker, but here is Clarke's first law:
AI X risk is just this round of global warming catastrophism(we're going to be underwater by
200020122020[oh wait, that was a different ridiculous hysteria we'd all be better off ignoring]) because seriously, datacenters are fragile and require constant inputs from outside that we can just cut off. Like against Skynet we can take some collateral damage if we've got to. It's not worth worrying about, it's just another made up problem to justify giving ridiculous people more power. In this case, a literal sex cult.Running inference on data centers is a contingent and temporary state of affairs. At a minimum, autonomous weapons will have locally-running AI to protect against jamming.
Drones might have ai on them, but it will be a specialized ai and not a humanity ending skynet superintelligence on each drone. And no they are not going to form a hivemind
There will be AI all the way down. The strongest AI running in the Cheyenne DC, then subordinate AIs at various command centers, division HQs and so on down to the last soldier and drone, each level dumber than the last, but still good enough to perform its immediate task without additional guidance from above. Otherwise, a single attack would be able to cripple the whole military.
The whole system will have to be self-healing as well. If your battalion HQ is destroyed together with its AI, company HQ AIs will automatically attach themselves to other battallion-level AIs in the same brigade.
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You don't think autonomous drones, designed and incentivized to mimck soldiers, would form a hivemind?
I've talked about this a bit before, but you wouldn't generally put a general-purpose intelligence system on drones (and you wouldn't have drones mimic soldiers).
The drones would be designed with a threat library that would need to be updated regularly, and insofar as they acted autonomously, they would do it in response to their threat library or otherwise very specific programming (e.g. "return fire" or "make this a no-fly zone.")
They probably wouldn't use LLMs unless they had a very small one to understand natural language communications. For stuff like weapons engagements they would probably use deterministic logic trees and perhaps computer vision for target recognition. Running, say, Fable on a drone would be a massive waste of payload capacity and require tremendous amounts of cooling and power. Most of Fable is dedicated to doing things that an autonomous drone has no need to do.
They would have mesh or "hive" connections, certainly, a lot of which would be to route information "upstairs" to their command. Using drones as a distributed computing space would make them exceptionally vulnerable to jamming.
It's not like any of this is particularly new or even particularly speculative by the way, the Soviets were working on anti-ship missiles with swarm logic to destroy US aircraft carriers.
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You think soldiers would form a hive mind? Grunts would be running around like headless chickens without a chain of command.
And no a chain of command is not a hivemind even if it has some collaboration.
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