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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'd say that I lost some respect for both of them through this argument, but to be honest I don't think I ever had much respect for Pinker. The ignorant and strawmannish Enlightenment Now really ended any sympathy I had for him as a thinker. Nonetheless, Pinker's letter to Scott was courteous and concise; I think you can tell that Pinker is a better or at least more professional writer.
Scott's response... to be honest, it reminded me of point six here. The world Scott is in is small and homogenous - there's an awful lot of citing Omohundro and Hinton, and after a while one starts to think that that's because he's only got a handful of people, and is shocked and appalled that anybody disagrees with them. Scott does land some real hits on Pinker - the RAND study mistake is an embarrassing mis-step by Pinker - but also avoids some of Pinker's stronger arguments, and sets up his own straw men.
I'm not particularly interested in nitpicking many of the specific disagreements, especially because plenty of them leave ample room for both to be, in a sense, right. Pinker is correct that 'intelligence' can't be modelled as a single variable; Scott is correct that nonetheless it is reasonable to talk about 'intelligence' in a general sense.
What stood out to me, personally, was the way that the mask came down a bit, and setting aside all disputes about facts, Scott is dedicated to normative commitments that I think are repulsive, or frankly insane. Consider:
I'm sorry, but this is lunatic. We need to invest in language models or human civilisation will be permanently stunted? What? He's got some sort of science fiction eschatology in mind that seems both absurd on the factual merits and, perhaps more importantly, morally blinkered. While I did always know that Scott had some of those bizarre transhumanist beliefs (and I'm certainly not a convert to Phil-Torres-like conspiracism), it is, at least, a useful reminder that he approaches the whole issue of technology from a bizarre starting point that I cannot sympathise with.
There are surely some technologies or techniques that human minds cannot comprehend but AI can.
No realistic number of people doing calculations by hand could match a modern CPU. There could be no online banking, CGI rendering, internet without computers.
The same principle applies for AI. We are already seeing this in mathematics, human efforts are increasingly being left in the dust. It follows that restricting AI forever will result in us not attaining the most sophisticated technologies that require immense feats of comprehension to discover and deploy.
There's nothing bizarre about this either, most people seem to agree that it's possible to make AIs that are qualitatively superior to human intelligence, certainly most AI scientists.
You're leaping up a tower of assumptions here. Let's go in order:
1: A greater intelligence than humans is possible.
2: An artificial intelligence greater than human intelligence is possible.
3: Humans are able to create an artificial intelligence greater than our own.
4: Language models are a viable means by which such an intelligence might be created.
5: It is possible that humans might create such an intelligence via language models in the short to medium term future.
6: It is desirable to create such an intelligence.
7: If we fail to create such an intelligence in the short term, human civilisation will be permanently stunted or developmentally limited.
Scott asserted 7, and in return, I asserted that 7 is an insane position. You have responded to me by asserting something in the range of 2-4.
Let me make some other suggestions. It might be possible to choose not to make super-intelligences via LLMs now, but to do it in two hundred years, or five hundred years, or on any other timeline you like. Or it might be possible to make super-intelligences via some other, non-LLM means. There's no reason to think that LLMs specifically need to be used to conjure up super-intelligence right now or else the human race has no future.
I'm also inclined to challenge him just on the grounds of goals and values. He mentions 'civilisational childhood or an early grave'. Well, what would constitute 'civilisational adulthood'? What is civilisational maturity? He's making a value judgement. Suppose I don't think that technical or computational capacity is identical to civilisational maturity. That just seems implausible on the face of it - and certainly I don't believe that the worth of a civilisation or a people should be measured linearly and quantitatively like that. On the contrary, in individual humans I think that maturity involves a capacity for self-control and restraint; if that applies also on the civilisational level, then one might argue that civilisational adulthood would involve the ability to choose not to go down a path that we judge to be unwise.
In Scott's response, he says that thinking of an AI as all-powerful would be shituf, which is a sin. Firstly, that's not what shituf means, and secondly, arguably the whole point of shituf is that it's not sin for a Gentile. Shituf is an ad hoc attempt to be merciful to Gentiles who hold opinions that, in Jewish eyes, are not properly monotheistic. (I consider this to be grounded in a mistaken understanding of the Trinity, but I do appreciate the attempt to extend grace.) But if we're going to invoke the wisdom of the Jewish tradition, Scott and Pinker both being Jewish, I might suggest also considering another story in the Torah.
I cannot help but read that statement about 'civilisational childhood' and picture someone standing in front of a half-built tower reaching into the heavens and explaining, "If we stop building this tower to heaven, we are consigning ourselves to permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave."
Tolkien's reaction to the news of the atomic bombs was, in Letter #102 (9 August 1945):
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
Evolution has selected for intelligence in us, but has selected for intelligence only to the extent that the trade-offs are worth it. Since such trade-offs (size of birth canal, caloric requirements, etc) exist, it seems supremely unlikely that our level of intelligence is the highest one possible.
And even if von Neumann or Einstein or whichever specific individual you care to name is the absolute highest level of intelligence possible, it should be obvious that the ability to create an arbitrary number of such individuals, who do not need to sleep and who do not need to rest, would be able to produce a higher aggregate intelligence-driven output than humanity.
Human intelligence runs on physical hardware. There is nothing magic about a human mind. Building anything that occurs in nature is just an engineering problem.
A weak assumption, since we have already done so across a wide variety of domains.
The core argument really doesn't hinge on whether LLMs is the path that leads to AGI. If LLMs are a dead end, just replace "invest in LLM" with "invest in Ai research".
Nobody has said anything about the time frame.
Again, nobody said anything about time frame.
But these go together: If human level intelligence isn't the highest possible level of intelligence (and all signs point to "not"), and if there exists technologies or scientific insights that require a higher level of intelligence to discover or make proper use of, then it is trivially true that humans are locked out of such technologies.
The italicized assumption above is the only assumption that isn't trivially true and that is actually necessary for the stunting argument to be true.
You've mis-used the word 'trivial'. All those arguments you've made might be true, but none of them are trivially true. They all depend on contingent claims about the world. Any claim that is meaningfully evidence-based cannot be trivial.
At any rate, I read Scott as clearly concerned about time frame. I do not think he is talking about abstract possibilities. Yes, the word 'forever' is in that passage I quoted, but he is plainly talking about short-term technology policy. His view, as far as I can tell, is that we need to 'solve the alignment problem' while creating 'AI' in the immediate short term, or else not make 'AI' at all, and he views the latter option as some sort of permanent stunting of human potential.
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I'm not making assumption 6, that's the whole crux of the issue. Concerns about the specific nature of the intelligence are the whole point in question.
1-5 are trivial.
With 7 you're bringing in 'short term'. Scott is specifically saying 'not right now' and neither am I. Scott wrote about Plan A where he explicitly asks for 15 or so years to make sure it's done right, not racing ahead. His big thing is 'let's not do it just yet, it is coming soon but we are not properly preparing or implementing it so let's slow down and do it right'. The alternative to 'we need more time to prepare' is 'never do it', which is what he is criticizing as unacceptable.
Realistically, people are not going to wait two hundred years, or five hundred years, or any 'safely beyond any need to care about it' distance of time to reap immense gains in wealth and power. This isn't wise but it's happening anyway. Non-LLM AI doesn't really work for general tasks, only LLMs have shown generality or long-horizon capabilities.
Well, you may not care for technical capacity. In some abstract sense, the Zulu empire and the British empire were equal peers. But in all real and significant senses, obviously the British were better and greater and the Maxim Gun settled the question.
The Tower of Babel is not a real thing and I don't see any need to care about it. Tolkien also writes about unreal things, things that could not be real, do not hold to principles we actually observe in the world. His genre is fantasy.
Science fiction actually relates to reality in a certain sense, that's the key distinction here. Things start off in sci-fi (like the atomic bomb) and have been made real, often by creators inspired by the fiction. You can't criticize sci-fi by appealing to fantasy, Jewish or otherwise.
I don't actually think 1-5 are all obvious, but my point is that you responded to my criticism of my Scott with points that are in the 1-5 area.
Do I think that people are actually going to stop making LLMs? No, I don't. If I had to bet, I'm in the camp that sees LLMs as a 'normal technology'. I think they will exist, more use will be made of them, and that the uses found will be moderate and not that interesting. I think both the doomers and the singularitans will be disappointed.
The point that I made that you took issue with was that it is ludicrous to say that if we don't make LLM-based 'AI', we're '[consigned] to a permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave'. That is absurd. If we don't pursue that technology, we're not even locking ourselves out of artificial intelligence, much less locking ourselves out of civilisational maturity.
The Babel example was meant to be evocative, not an argument as such. You're an atheist, fine, whatever. Scott made a comparison from Judaism so I felt it was within-bounds to reply with another comparison from Judaism.
Fifteen years is short term.
This is one of the weird things about the debate to me - the absurdly short timelines everybody seems to be approaching it with. From my perspective, Scott and the 'AI pause' people are basically one subgroup of accelerationist AI-enthusiast arguing with another subgroup of accelerationists. Five, ten, fifteen years, that's all still the short term. That is the immediate future. Medium-term for me means 'within the next hundred years or so', i.e. within the lifetimes of people alive today, and long-term means after that.
I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.
Can you give some examples where the "more" would diverge meaningfully from the "sheer destructive power"? What's an example of a "mature civilization" with minimal destructive potential? The Amish?
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