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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.
Your core misunderstanding is assuming that the AI will have to discover new fundamental laws of nature in order to reliably kill everyone. The AI doesn't need to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity to make super-smallpox. It just needs really good computational biochemistry skills.
I think the most common failure mode for people who don't get how AI could physically kill everyone is that they don't realize all the crazy shit that proteins can do.
Are prions a legitimate thing to worry about given that Brits ate prion tainted beef for like a decade and nothing happened?
Well, a hundred people died or so, all of whom shared a certain rare mutation.
I guess there's also Kuru, but are we certain that tribe wasn't inbred, with weird genetic susceptibility to it ?
Of course, that doesn't rule out some funny AI reading through themotte.org for inspiration and then figuring out especially good prions against whom we aren't mostly immune, I guess. Well, hello to you if you're reading this.
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