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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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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 haven't listened to the whole conversation but what I've heard and seen I have question. When did Autistic Catastrophizing become accepted by the mainstream? We got Greta Thunberg and now we have the "Big Yud" getting his opinion in the Time.

How do I become mainstream with my Catastrophizing that the combination of attention grabbing AI that subvert our lives with knowledge of behavioral psychology and the combination with generative AI giving us personalized content just massaging our brains just right? Imagine people trapped in a pleasure cube just watching personal generated colors and sounds that only has meaning to them....

How do I become mainstream with my Catastrophizing that the combination of attention grabbing AI that subvert our lives with knowledge of behavioral psychology and the combination with generative AI giving us personalized content just massaging our brains just right?

I'm a little disappointed that "AI safety" is so strongly associated with Skynet-style scenarios, instead of concerns about (in my view) more plausible near-term AI risks like this (and others - social unrest from sudden mass unemployment, expanding surveillance capabilities, etc). But, I'm certainly willing to make common cause with the x-riskers if it also gets people thinking about near-term AI risks as well.

I'm a little disappointed that "AI safety" is so strongly associated with Skynet-style scenarios, instead of concerns about (in my view) more plausible near-term AI risks like this (and others - social unrest from sudden mass unemployment, expanding surveillance capabilities, etc).

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.

When the Skynet term in your expectation function has a probability >0 and an expected utility of minus infinity,

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?

Except the arguments for the existence of the risk are substantially stronger than those presented by the theoretical mugger.

"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?

Except the arguments for the existence of the risk are substantially stronger than those presented by the theoretical mugger.

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.

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