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Sooo, Big Yud appeared on Lex Fridman for 3 hours, a few scattered thoughts:
Jesus Christ his mannerisms are weird. His face scrunches up and he shows all his teeth whenever he seems to be thinking especially hard about anything, I didn't remember him being this way in the public talks he gave a decade ago, so this must either only be happening in conversations, or something changed. He wasn't like this on the bankless podcast he did a while ago. It also became clear to me that Eliezer cannot become the public face of AI safety, his entire image, from the fedora, to the cheap shirt, facial expressions and flabby small arms oozes "I'm a crank" energy, even if I mostly agree with his arguments.
Eliezer also appears to very sincerely believe that we're all completely screwed beyond any chance of repair and all of humanity will die within 5 or 10 years. GPT4 was a much bigger jump in performance from GPT3 than he expected, and in fact he thought that the GPT series would saturate to a level lower than GPT4's current performance, so he doesn't trust his own model of how Deep Learning capabilities will evolve. He sees GPT4 as the beginning of the final stretch: AGI and SAI are in sight and will be achieved soon... followed by everyone dying. (in an incredible twist of fate, him being right would make Kurzweil's 2029 prediction for AGI almost bang on)
He gets emotional about what to tell the children, about physicists wasting their lives working on string theory, and I can see real desperation in his voice when he talks about what he thinks is really needed to get out of this (global cooperation about banning all GPU farms and large LLM training runs indefinitely, on the level of even stricter nuclear treaties). Whatever you might say about him, he's either fully sincere about everything or has acting ability that stretches the imagination.
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.
Eliezer also makes an interesting observation/prediction about when we'll finally decide that AIs are real people worthy of moral considerations: that point is when we'll be able to pair midjourney-like photorealistic video generation of attractive young women with chatGPT-like outputs and voice synthesis. At that point he predicts that millions of men will insist that their waifus are actual real people. I'm inclined to believe him, and I think we're only about a year or at most two away from this actually being a reality. So: AGI in 12 months. Hang on to your chairs people, the rocket engines of humanity are starting up, and the destination is unknown.
I would enjoy engaging more with the AGI x-risk doomer viewpoint. I fully agree AI narrow risks are real, and AI sentience/morality issues are important. Where my skepticism lies is when presented with this argument:
Human intelligence is apparently bounded by our biology
Machine intelligence runs on machines, which is not bounded by biology!
Therefore, it may rapidly surpass our intelligence
Machine intelligence may even be able to improve its own intelligence, at an exponential rate, and develop Godlike power relative to us
This would be really bad if the MI was not aligned with humanity
We can't (yet) prove it's aligned with humanity!
Panicdoom
Where I have trouble is #2-4.
One variant of this Godlike argument I've seen (sorry if this comes across as a strawman, gaining traction on this debate is part of why I'm even asking) is that humans just becoming a little bit smarter than monkeys let us split atoms and land on the moon. Something much smarter than us might continue to discover fundamental laws about reality and they would similarly be Gods compared to us.
The reason I don't buy it is because we've been able to augment our intelligence with computers for some time now: by moving our thinking into computers we can hold more stuff in our head, evaluate enormous computations, have immediate recall, and go real fast. Sadly, the number of new game-changing fundamental laws of nature that have popped out of this have been approximately zero.
I believe we've discovered all of the fundamental laws of nature low-hanging fruit and the higher hanging fruit just isn't so computationally reducible: to learn more about reality we'll have to simulate it, and this is going to require the marshaling of an enormous degree of computation resources. I'm thinking less on the scale of entire data-centers in The Dalles full of GPUs and more like something the size of the moon made of FPGAs.
Stated another way, what I think holds humanity back from doing more amazing stuff isn't that we've failed to think hard and deep and uncover more fundamental truths and we could do that if we were smarter. What holds us back are coordination issues and simply the big hill to climb to boot up being able to harness more and bigger sources of energy and mine progressively stronger and rarer materials.
An AGI that wanted to do game-changing stuff to us would need to climb similar hills, which is a risk but that's not really a Godlike adversary -- we'd probably notice moon-sized FPGAs being built.
I recognize an AGI that was fast and coordinated and numerous could be a dangerous adversary too, but I'd like to only focus on why we think a massive increase in IQ (or rather, g) is the big x-risk.
Also, humans have been a little bit smarter than monkeys for a couple hundred thousand years at least, and yet we didn't go to the moon until my dad was twenty years old. It's clear that just being a little smarter than monkeys doesn't mean you're going to the moon next Tuesday, there's something more to it than that. Likewise, being a little bit smarter than humans doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be disassembling the solar system for atoms tomorrow.
That "little bit" was enough to create the exponential technology curves we take for granted today, and each generation built off the last.
Ergo, a Superhuman AGI would have access to all of our current technology, and thus be in a position to accelerate even ludicrously fast modern growth curves to its benefit.
Do you think it matters if it takes the malign AGI a day or a century to dismantle the Solar System? You won't be living much past a few days in all likelihood if it has it out for you.
Not really, at least until very recently. The life experience of the average human being was just about static for thousands of years before the industrial revolution. Humans may have become a little more intelligent over the centuries but they didn't suddenly become several hundred times more intelligent c. 1750.
Yes I think it matters if I die tomorrow or in 100 years.
I meant in the sense that each generation had access to all the knowledge and technology of the last, not that they got significantly smarter (the how declining Flynn effect on IQ not withstanding).
That's not what I mean, I expect that once a hostile AGI makes a move, it'll eliminate humans with speed and judiciousness in both scenarios, regardless of whether it takes it a day or a century to fulfill its resource demands afterwards. Both scenarios are considerably easier once you have pesky future competitors such as humans out of the way.
So from your perspective, you die at the same time, in both cases soon rather than later if you consider typical AI timeliness.
Right, but for most of human history technology and knowledge didn't really accumulate much over the generations. We probably learned and built more in the last 200 years than in the 20,000 before that, but the sudden explosion c. 1750 doesn't seem to be down to a similar explosion in "raw" human intelligence.
I'm skeptical that a human-level artificial intelligence will be in a position to wipe out mankind immediately (i.e a few days/weeks/years) after its 'awakening.'
Hmm? I don't see why you would say that tech and knowledge didn't accumulate, it did, but orally, and then picked up in volume as literature was invented.
There's definitely a pickup in progress in the 18th century onwards, but to me, that illustrates that even our barely changed intelligence as anatomically modern humans suffices for exponential growth. So I'm even more concerned by minor but significant advances in the same, a little intelligence goes a long way, and it won't be starting from scratch.
I consider human level AGI to be far less of a threat than superhuman AGI, but the latter seems to be a tiny roadbump on the road to the latter. GPT 3.5 went from being like an overly eager med student to 4 being a better doctor than I am!
That being said, even a human level AGI can exponentially self-replicate, cease control of industrial equipment, and create a super-pathogen with near 100% lethality, because humans could quite trivially do the latter if we were insane enough (GOF research suggests we are..).
But even then, I think it would lie in wait to become stronger, and do so in stealth, so once again, from our perspective, it appears out of nowhere and kills us post haste, without any warning. How long it takes to turn the solar system into spare parts is an academic exercise afterwards, we wouldn't be there to witness it!
Very very little. For most of human history, each generation improved only very slightly, if it improved at all, upon the knowledge base of the foregoing generation. Then in the 17th or 18th century or so everything changed. It was once possible for an educated man to be, more or less, an 'expert' in all fields because the pool of general knowledge was not very deep. The explosion in understanding and know-how of the scientific and industrial revolutions has rendered that impossible of course.
But this explosion happened without any similarly sudden explosion in the "raw" cognitive power of human beings (some argue that there was an increase in raw intelligence around this time, but even if so it clearly wasn't a several-hundred fold increase). The slight step up from monke to anatomically modern human wasn't enough on its own to take us to the moon or even create steam power, because we had to wait millennia for the proper conditions (whatever those were) in which such inventions could be realized.
Which is why I don't think "AI becomes a little smarter than us" is immediately followed by "AI becomes 50,000+ times smarter than us and then begins turning the universe into grey goo." Humans becoming a little smarter than monkeys wasn't followed by spaceflight, or even the agricultural revolution, for a long, long time.
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