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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?

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