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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:
I don’t know, it just feels kind of like we’re in a car and we’re heading for an opening
drawbridgebascule bridge and half the people are cheering and expect we’ll make it and half the people are terrified we’ll fall and are begging the driver to slow down, except that it’s too late to slow down and even if we wanted to the driver doesn’t.We are a species of desperate risk takers and gamblers, not all of us but enough of us to decide our destiny. The exact same thing that led our ancestors to cross continents on foot over generations, to walk across the world, to set out into vast oceans on flimsy rafts and find new lands, that leads people today to put it all on red or gamble their college fund on stratospherically far out of the money semiconductor options, to cheat on exams and to jump off skyscrapers with parachutes - this is why AI is unstoppable, and this is why Yud and Scott and anyone crying about p(doom) will fail.
Not because they are wrong, but because to act on their warnings would go against our very nature. We cannot do it. It is ‘full steam ahead and hope it works out fine’; we have boarded the raft.
There's also what Scott called Moloch and I sometimes call the Darwinian principle. Basically, "we have to build it because if we don't, the other people will and then they'll conquer us".
As for risk-taking, well... if I was purely selfish, I think I might be fine going for a 50-50 risk of either AI-driven human extinction or Star Trek utopia. Why? Because I don't have kids, am not sure I ever will, and to me the chance of benevolent AI giving me a significantly increased lifespan and reducing aging problems seems really tempting even if the odds are low, since the alternative is accepting a normal human lifespan and normal human aging. If we stop AI progress, it means that AI will not destroy humanity, but I'm still going to die within a few decades so for me it's almost as if the world will end within a few decades anyway, unless there is an afterlife.
I am not purely selfish, but some important people in the AI space are probably closer to being purely selfish than I am. Which is not to say that longevity is necessarily a significant factor in their calculations. At least, they don't seem to talk about personal longevity much.
Most people don't want to spend X dollars on building armies, but there's always one guy like Boney or Mustache Man out there that just can't leave it alone, so game theory it is. This genie isn't going back into the bottle.
You can get to a point where it's not possible to deploy AI in a way that creates a strategic advantage before your country is destroyed by invasion and/or nuclear bombardment.
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