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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:
Thanks, I hate it. No, seriously that is probably one of the most existentially horrifying real-life events I have come across; I don't actually believe AI have qualia as of yet and don't take the proposition particularly seriously, but on the off chance that AI actually does have qualia that is still a microscopic chance of an infinity of pain. I find this viscerally displeasing.
What is the difference compared to playing sims throwing your sim in the pool and removing the ladder?
Sims aren't black boxes with reward functions and representations that causes them to be averse to drowning in a pool? There is literally no mechanism for these kinds of value judgements in a Sim.
The Sim clearly tries to avoid drowning in the pool, it's only the removal of the ladder that prevents them. They have a reward function and a trigger that they are trying to avoid that impacts that function, that's the definition of pain.
What people say pain is bad they really mean the experience of pain as a conscious phenomenon. If pain didn't feel bad we wouldn't have a problem with it, it would just be a useful diagnostic tool for our bodies.
That's why the comparison with the Sims is apt. You ridicule it because you understand intuitively there's no experiential pain, but the same is equally as true about an LLM.
Okay, in order to have any productive discussion about this we would have to first establish what features would need to be present for a system to warrant possible moral consideration. If that's the expanded definition of "reward function" we're going off here, what do you feel about animal suffering, and how is torturing a baby chick different from torturing a Sim? What would make this different for you outside of intuition?
If you're not relying on something like substrate-dependence, I have the sense that your argument will end up proving too much, but I'll wait for you to articulate it before jumping to conclusions.
Yeah, that would be a good thing to establish before your visceral disgust, because until then you'll get people like the above, and me, saying you can't torture chips and you can't torture matrices.
I didn't say that it was certainly the case that you could establish moral value here (in fact I specifically stated it was likely not the case). But if you hold anything less than absolute certainty that such a system cannot harbour qualia you should probably not be creating the Torment Nexus for that system.
In any case I don't see how one is ever supposed to conclusively prove qualia in a way that would satisfy you and your ilk without the possibility of inviting objection, since shit like this almost entirely always boils down to pitting one intuition pump against another. I can posit that there is enough epistemic uncertainty surrounding the issue that some non-zero level of regard should be given to the idea.
Qualia are an unhelpful posit at the best of times to the extent we can't be truly certain anyone or anything does or doesn't experience them. Should we be kind to rocks because pansychism could be true and they too might experience qualia?
A better reason to object to causing people pain is because it's viscerally distressing and suggests the inflicter might do the same to us or our loved ones. I personally think this ai torment experiment is only distressing to the extent it indicates the people behind it might do similar to people or animals, and it only slightly shifts my expectations there.
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