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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38003 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.

It's not possible without a world state with global hegemony. If China claims their fancy new datacenter is REALLY just for the tracking of political dissidents and their social credit scores and is totally not running an AI, what is an anti-AI US going to do about it?

China

Since I probably won't get a better chance to bring this up: there's something I don't understand about the China fearmongering.

The basic argument for why AI is a good thing is that it will lead to the singularity. Post-scarcity future, incredible scientific development, transhumanism and the realization of human potential, and so on and so forth. Implicit in this argument seems to be the premise that, if we get a good outcome with a benevolent aligned AI, then the singularity will be a good thing for all humans. I've never seen it suggested that any individual or group in particular has anything to fear. It's implied that the benefits of the singularity will be relatively evenly distributed.

If that's the case, and AI is going to lead us to a utopia... why does it matter if China gets there first? The benevolent robot god is still going to lead humanity to the land of milk and honey either way, regardless of whether it happens to be built in the US or China, so why does it matter if China eclipses the US in AI development?

Or is the singularity not actually going to be evenly distributed? If China builds ASI first, are they just going to genocide the rest of the world outside of China, and then have fun until the heat death of the universe with the robot god? Why restrict ourselves to just analyzing things at the country level? Shouldn't we be equally worried about Sam Altman genociding everyone he doesn't like if OpenAI are the first ones to get to ASI? I don't know what the sequence of events is supposed to look like here.

The constant refrains of "we can't fall behind China" make AI sound a lot closer to a conventional weapon of war, rather than the pure unadulterated good that AI advocates want to present it as, which is all the more reason that it should be tightly regulated, in a proper international framework.

I also find the "WHAT IF CHINA/RUSSIA/ETC. GET THERE FIRST?" arguments extremely silly.

With a the exception of a tiny number of particularly unhinged sadistic psychopaths (the number is probably roughly epsilon), the vast vast majority of people are going to press the "create paradise" button not something so parochial as the "make my country hegemonic forever" or the "kill all the ethnic group I don't like" button. Even people who are, right now, merciless hardnosed Machiavellians would press the paradise button since they could do so without any trade-off for themselves or their in-group.

OK so they press the 'create paradise' button but they'd still keep the master key to themselves. Then, if there are any disputes or troubles in paradise...

Even with vast resources, there will still be questions of allocation. Posthumans will probably reproduce very quickly or have very high material aspirations or both.

I think the problems of such a future age would be so divorced from those of the present day that it would be difficult to predict from their present-day positions and motives and histories whether Sam Altman or Xi Jingping or anyone else would be particularly likely abuse the keys to the kingdom.

Indeed, I don't trust anyone to control the lamp with the genie in it. We should not be creating powerful entities with alien mindsets, certainly not letting anyone have monopoly access to them.

Okay, but my only point is that I don't think it makes a real difference for better or worse whether China creates AGI or whether the US does, whereas a lot of people think it does make a real difference.

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