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How ironic, I'm a little disappointed that anyone bothers to waste an iota of intellectual effort on those nothingburger risks when Skynet-like scenarios are potentially bearing down on you.
When the Skynet term in your expectation function has a probability >0 and an expected utility of minus infinity, worrying about the small stuff like "They took our jerbs" is imo a bit dumb.
Plus I can always just... choose not go into the pleasure cube, whereas I can't choose not go into the paperclip nanobot.
I think the problem here is interpreting whether the non-existential objections are nearest risks or the maximal risk from the objector. Suppose our roommate wants to bring a gorilla to live with us. I object that it will eat all our bananas. You say "Eat our bananas! Who cares it's going to rip our arms off while we sleep!"
The key here is that my objections can be interpreted in two ways:
(maximal risk) If we get the banana grabbing figured out, I'm on board.
(nearest risk) The banana grabbing already meets the threshold for me to veto it, I don't even to weigh all the additional risks beyond that, which I would if the banana grabbing was solved, and would still veto.
In this hypothetical, your response, assumes I mean 1, when I might mean 2. Why talk about whether the gorilla might kill us in our sleep when we can align around the banana thing and get the same outcome of no-gorilla. This is especially helpful if our fourth roommate thinks the night-murder thing is ridiculous, but can be convinced of banana grabbing concerns.
Screaming harder about night-murder and dismissing banana-grabbing as trivial, actually hurts the case with the fence sitter, who's name is Allan and loves the beach.
It gets worse when I say to Allan in concession, look there's like a 90% chance of banana grabbing and a 50% chance, of night-murders too. Then you jump in and scoff at my 50% as too low and of trivializing the real danger. Now we are in an inside baseball debate that simultaneously makes Allan take both banana-grabbing and night-murder less seriously.
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This is called Pascal's Mugging.
Except the arguments for the existence of the risk are substantially stronger than those presented by the theoretical mugger.
After all, we can all clearly see that the AIs exist now and that them becoming smarter-than-human is, indeed, plausible. This does not require you to take the mugger's words at face value.
So what's irrational about considering the actual evidence that exists?
"Probability >0 and expected utiulity of minus infinity" doesn't contain any qualifier about the probability being strong. In fact, it tries to argue that the size of the probability doesn't matter at all.
Sure, if we also ignore any timelines on the the expected event occurring, and ignore whether we have the ability to impact the expected utility outcomes here. We're not JUST talking about the probability of humanity going extinct, although yes, that factor should loom larger than any other.
The flip side of AI doomerism is the belief that if we get a friendly AI then that's an instant win condition and we get post-scarcity in short order. i.e. heaven.
Funny enough, though, people don't seem to argue as vehemently that the risk' of creating a benevolent is basically zero, they seem to think that that's the default assumption?
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No they're not. Superintelligence and other fictions have exactly as much evidence backing them as God.
AIs don't exist now, never have, and likely never will.
The implications of the existence of LLMs might be great of small, but to see them in this paradigm of "intelligence" is boneheaded and ridiculous, and I remain convinced that history will show this framing to be completely delusional.
What do you think human intelligence is?
Or more precisely, if we're leaving God off the table, then why should whatever humans do that produces the appearance of intelligence be impossible to reproduce artificially?
I don't know, neither do you, and that's exactly why.
I'm by default skeptical of the ability to reproduce processes we do not even understand.
That's completely fair.
But the argument on the other side is that a blind tinkerer known as natural selection managed to get us as far as an intelligent entities like Isaac Newton, Richard Feymann, Jon Von Neumann. And getting that far was enough for humans to create nuclear weapons.
It seems probable that humans can improve upon the work of a million years of random chance in this department, to me.
And unlike Pascal's mugging, you aren't solely and completely relying on the mugger's words for your decision, you have access to all the same records and evidence that AI alarmists do, they're not hiding the ball in that way.
We had to understand the physics of the atom before even beginning to design such weapons.
Nobody stumbled upon atomics. It was a deliberate effort and even back then people weren't sure if the theory would hold up to experimentation. Here we don't even have theory.
It seems wildly unlikely to me. Our crude attempts at making our own Sun have so far been met mostly with failure, after all. Let alone anything better than what nature has wrought.
And we understand the Sun in pretty excruciating detail.
I maintain that history will regard AI safety with the same bemusement as we do predictions of human equivalent mechanical intelligence by 1975.
Or worse, it will see the safetyists as the guilty myth makers of the coming totalitarianism.
This is a poor analogy. We would have been able to reconstruct the Sun easily if we had access to requisite time, resources and tools to wield them. Fusion is very different from the Sun, it's an attempt to recreate the core principle at vastly smaller scale, with vastly more sophistication-dense processes. ML is an attempt to recreate some interesting aspects of a thing that can be produced by a 1.5L of jelly on 20W of power, on a significantly simpler substrate, whatever the scale and cost.
We have a track record of successes with such things in experimental physics, materials science, biology and other domains.
We understand, and LLMs prove, that plenty of high-level cognition is reducible to computation. It's proven that neural networks can approximate arbitrary computable functions. So even if the current paradigm doesn't pan out for some contingent reasons, it's provable that the solution cannot be far away.
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I agree with you, although I think talking about "They took our jerbs" is both a good way to get people to understand that everything is going to change, and also a plausible and relatively mundane route to total human disempowerment.
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