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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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While I am no fan of alarmism and I think Yud is a clown, I am struggling to understand this mental block you - and others - have whenever it comes to the dangers of AI.

You seem to feel the need to understand something before it can kill you. There are plenty of things in this world that can kill you without you understanding the exact mechanisms of how, from bizarre animal biology to integrated weapons systems.

There are plenty of things in this world with proven - not unproven - capability, that regular human beings can use to kill you. An AI that demonstrates no more capability than regular human beings can kill you, as well as potentially a large number of other humans - and this is only with the methods my stupid animal brain can come up with! It doesn't even need to be particularly smart, sentient, conscious, or even close to AGI to do so. It could be something as simple as messing with the algorithms that have an outsized disparate impact on large amounts of everyday life.

And that's without even considering the things that bare-ass naked-ape plain old humans could get up to with a force multiplier as big as AI!

There are massive amounts of x-risk from regular people, doing regular things, fucking up, or intentionally doing things that will cause an untold amounts of suffering. Some people consider regulated research on viruses or prions extremely dangerous! Is it a failure of imagination? Do you need to know every chess move Magnus Carlssen makes before believing that he can beat you at chess?

Then why do you have difficulty believing that someone - or something - of similar intelligence to him could figure out that you are going to attack him with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, pay private security, and pre-emptively deal with you beforehand?

We're not even talking about superhuman capabilities, here.

I'm beginning regret making that first post.

I do think the specific AI doom scenarios are a bit handwavy, but that's because they boil down to "there is a level of intelligence at which an intelligent being could easily kill all humans on earth" which I guess I don't really contest, with caveats. But the AI-doom argument relies on the idea that once we create a "human-level" AGI it will reach that level very shortly and with relative ease, and that (the intelligence explosion idea) is what I really have the biggest problem with and what I think is one of the weakest points in the AI doom case.

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