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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38005 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 think Yud is messing up badly and making AI concerned people look crazy. I"m more pro-rationalist than most people I talk to and there's so many leaps in his theory that it's hard to get normies to make. His own little ingroup venerates him and he's done a good job of persuading them but once this becomes a real technology where money and improvements to people's lives are at stake he's gonna get shredded in the public arena by people actually good at this.

As a semi humorous aside the obvious correct tactic for AI doomers who don't think we're on the brink of FOOM is to try to do an AI false flag attack, get GPT-6 to blow up a building or something and try to launch a Global War on Terror style response.

On the contrary. Yudkowsky got me thinking about the UN coming to search for Weapons of Mass Instruction. I don’t think we have anything resembling the political will for bringing force to an AI inspection, not when it can be pattern-matched to that mobilization.

AI doomers are smart enough to know the predictably horrible outcome that awaits them if they piss off both the AI and the people building the AI too much.

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