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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Was a bit surprised to see this hadn't been posted yet, but yesterday Yudkowsky wrote an op-ed in TIME magazine where he describes the kind of regime that he believes would be necessary to throttle AI progress:

https://archive.is/A1u57

Some choice excerpts:

Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.

The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for anyone, including governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

if its presence in the CW thread needs justifying, well, it's published in a major magazine and the kinds of policy proposals set forth would certainly ignite heated political debate were they ever to be seriously considered.

"Yudkowsky airstrike threshold" has already become a minor meme on rat and AI twitter.

I've been over the doom porn esque feel of AI talk for years now it seems and it just keeps cranking higher & higher. We're basically on track with doom porn global warming catastrophe. It's just a race to the nonexistent finish line to see who can be doomier and gloomier on what subject.

Personally I'm ready to be told AI will cure blindness, and cancer, and give us 2 hour work days, and on and on.

I can't take any of these people even remotely seriously. AI will be fine. Our lives will be better. Just like having a fridge, or shoes. But just like food poisoning or dress shoes inspired plantar fasciitis - some shit will happen. Shut up and stop trying to retard the future (not to anyone here - just a general sort of want from me).

What do you think society looks like, in a thousand years, if "strong AI" is developed within a hundred? Do humans still control the 'general direction' of society? Their own personal fates? What role does AI play / not play?

If the concern is that AI will drive us to (near) extinction like humans have whales, I would observe that culling humans seems to lack the economic incentives of whaling -- although it's unclear from the whales' perspective what those incentives are, I suppose. Matrix-like human farming arrangements seem like fiction tropes, but not practical future realities.

Compared to our ancestors a few centuries ago, we consider ourselves wiser in many ways, and we appreciate the conserving wildlife is worth dollars we might spend elsewhere in many cases (although admittedly our actions fare quite poorly). I see the particular case of AGI capable of consistently outsmarting and overpowering humans but also incapable of having a rational discussion about why human culture is worth preserving over paperclips seems unlikely. Worth considering, certainly, but the singular focus on it seems driven by a God-less eschatology in which humans are presumed to be not worth saving.

I'm not sure what that "rational discussion about why human culture is worth preserving" would look like if one agent didn't already values those things more than almost any competing concern. How much of your time do you dedicate to preserving, idk, virus culture? Random rock pile culture? Could ghonorrea or tuberculosis convince you that its presence (and use of precious resources such as human bodies) was a net positive, if it were sufficiently eloquent?

How much of your time do you dedicate to preserving, idk, virus culture? Random rock pile culture? Could ghonorrea or tuberculosis convince you that its presence (and use of precious resources such as human bodies) was a net positive, if it were sufficiently eloquent?

Probably? We still keep around Smallpox samples in labs purely for the potential research its genetic diversity brings. People are surprisingly passionate about random rock piles, doubly so for interesting cases [1] [2] [3] [4]. There are a few Star Trek episodes that ponder the idea of sentient parasites, for which I'd admit the answers are less clear.

Okay, but smallpox is a good example - we keep it in an entirely disempowered state, as we do for almost all wildlife. But again, if we didn't already think something was worth keeping around in the state they want to be kept in (e.g. serial killers), what could they possibly say to change our minds?

Sure, 'total human death' isn't guaranteed. but ... what will happen to humans? Will we fully separate? Will we be left alone ... given our own portion of the earth, fenced off, to develop and grow and fight wars in? Can we go outside? Will we have to run out from under the feet of the AI when it decides to plant down a gigafactory wherever it decides? But, separation doesn't seem likely, given how AI is being shoved into every piece of human civilization it can be, even as primitive as it is today ... but if it's integrated, then what? Will it remain subservient to explicit human decisionmaking despite being gigantically more capable than humans? Is that even meaningful? Maybe humans are "aligned to dogs", but will we all be domesticated as dogs are? Why won't the reins of control over corporations, human lives, politics be handed over to it, to the immense benefit of whoever does so? And what will it do with those reins? Why would it give humans the unprecedented and strange level of 'personal freedom / control over course of life' we have today (and is that even worth much)? What prevents it, as it stumbles through its own development of technology and politics and 'action' generally, from 'changing its mind' about what the course of human civilization should look like - just as we have, looking at how much human 'values' and political and economic organization has changed over the past few centuries?

How is the AI going to do any of that. There’s so much leaps of logic in AI that it’s impossible to even argue against.

Sure, AI being capable of all that should be argued for first. But plenty of people believe "AI will become as smart as, or smarter than, humans eventually", but don't take that all the way to "... and will determine the future of human civilization on this planet" as a result.

GPT-4 sure seems like it's capable of a lot of things! What, exactly, separates 'GPT-4 but scaled up 1000x' from what people can do? Even outside that, what, in principle, prevents a computer from being intelligent? And we're sure trying very hard to create intelligent machines. Even if you'd claim something not-mechanistic, like a spirit or something is important in human experience or intelligence - clearly the 'matter', the incredibly complex biology of the brain, is plays a big role in human intelligence, so why can't machines with that be intelligent too? And then technology has revolutionized every other facet of human life, and the smartest people are putting their effort into creating intelligence on a computer ... even if the current 'make transformers scale' thing fails somehow, they'll be hard at work for something that does.

I’m not saying there won’t be AGI sometime. Or very smart AI. But then it’s the taking over the world in an unexplained way that’s not explained.

The AI is rounding up humans and turning us into batteries within a few years. What’s never explained is how.

If you accept the possibility of the existence of a hyper-intelligent AI then there is no utility in trying to guess how such an AI might take over the world. By mere virtue of the AI being hyper-intelligent and you being, well not, the AI is sure to out think you.

Also I disagree that such explanations don't exist in the first place. Off the top of my head I think of nanobot swarm, but I could think of ten more in an hour.

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It’s not about humans being “worth saving”. It’s about humans being a threat to the AI (because they can theoretically build another AI that competes with it), and the AI having an instrumental goal to remove that threat.

If the AI is so smart couldn't it easily disempower humanity without even going through the effort of killing us all?

That might end up being the same thing. It doesn't need to actively kill humans, deciding that it needs some finite resource like fossil fuels more than humans do would kill billions without any intervention more aggressive than blocking access to production sites. It seems plausible that an all-powerful AI might not mind people living in pre-modern farming communities, but that would also mean huge reductions in QoL and the number of humans around.

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