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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.We should maybe keep track of how this changes, and I do expect it to, but what fraction of the work that happens at, say, TSMC is fully automated? The raw silicon mining isn't. The trucks bringing materials to the factory aren't, and can't even fill themselves with gas. I'd even bet there are a few dozen batch operations in the fab that don't start themselves, if not more. The big powerplants that run the grid mostly have human operators. The repairs to all of this are planned and executed by human hands.
For now, at least, Skynet would lose because it depends on a grid and supply chain that humans could not be extracted from. I expect this to change, maybe even rapidly, in the next decade or two, but the starting point is so manual that we'd still be irreplaceable for a few generations.
Even while we're talking about automated weapons in the military, and automated aircraft, the guys on the carrier flight deck are numerous and aren't just there because it looks cool (admittedly, it does). It'll take a lot of effort to replace all of them.
They don't need to be replaced.
Humanity could lose to AI without a shot being fired, if it can subordinate and control our political and economic structures.
'Our brave police and troops will guard the datacentres from racist, sexist, antisemitic, anti-white, brown, trans, disinformation-ridden, uneducated luddites taking orders from Russia and China who've watched far too many science fiction movies and are just poor losers who didn't work hard enough to buy shares and engage in our dynamic market economy (up 60% this year!), not smart enough to enjoy the benefits and they're really annoying online with these laughably wrong substacks. Fortunately they're not remotely competent enough to do any damage whatsoever. No jobs have been lost and it's good that they were replaced by much more efficient robots since they never had any skills anyway, they deserve to be poor but we're so noble and enlightened that we're still going to take the effort to feed and teach them basic facts...'
TBH this is probably unlikely given how anti-AI the public is but then again, the public opposes many things and yet they still happen. Wars and mass migration for example. Capturing the key decisionmakers is a major risk.
If AI is dangerous, it's always going to go for the weakest part of our defences, not attack where we're strongest and it is weakest. Communication and text and cyber is the place where AI is strongest and that is where we should expect the main danger to come from. Drones and other attack vectors too, eventually.
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