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Yet another Eliezer Yudkowsky podcast. This time with Dwarkesh Patel. This one is actually good though.
Listeners are presumed to be familiar with the basic concepts of AI risk, allowing much more in-depth discussion of the relevant issues. The general format is Patel presenting a series of reasons and arguments that AI might not destroy all value in the universe, and Yudkowsky ruthlessly destroying every single one. This goes on for four hours.
Patel is smart and familiar enough with the subject material to ask the interesting questions you want asked. Most of the major objections to the doom thesis are raised at some point, and only one or two survive with even the tiniest shred of plausibility left. Yudkowsky is smart but not particularly charismatic. I doubt that he would be able to defend a thesis this well if it were false.
It feels like the anti-doom position has been reduced to, “Arguments? You can prove anything with arguments. I’ll just stay right here and not blow myself up,” which is in fact a pretty decent argument. It's still hard to comprehend the massive hubris of researchers at the cutting-edge AI labs. I am concerned that correctly believing yourself capable of creating god is correlated with falsely believing yourself capable of controlling god.
Yeah... I have almost no desire to listen to that.
Hey look people, if you are really worried about AI risk then please figure out how to present it in such a way that the average smart guy who is not obsessed with writing 10 paragraphs when 1 would do would appreciate reading the argument.
I think that AI risk might be important but I have more immediate things on my mind. Like how to get laid and how to make money for example.
Tell me why I should give any more of a shit about AI risk than I should give a shit about climate change or whatever the leftist boogeyman of the hour is.
It's not that I even have any particularly important things to do right now, it's just that right now I could go to bed and jerk off and it would bring me pleasure... OR I could read a 40000 word essay about AI risk.
Why the fuck would I do the latter? I don't even have any kids so my caring about the future is pretty fucking limited.
So AI risk people, why should I care?
And those who want to convince me to care... could you please try to explain yourself in one or two succinct paragraphs instead of in giant essays or multi-hour long podcasts?
Edit: @Quantumfreakonomics, sorry for the abrasive tone. I was inebriated when I posted this. I should have bothered to actually engage with the content rather than go on a rant.
I'm adding +1 to my dataset of "People without kids shouldn't be allowed to vote".
I don't think there's really much more to say on that but on the other hand I don't wanna get canned for low effort posting, so here's (closer to) the aforementioned "10 paragraphs when 1 would do":
If you don't have any higher / longer term aspirations than jacking off then I guess you shouldn't care about AI doomerism, but also you shouldn't care about anything medium to long term, so complaining at AI doomers for being uniquely unconvincing is kind of an isolated demand for rigor.
However, even a degenerate coomer might have some investment in the future because with voice cloning you can already make your one 11/10 porn audios. Sadly the good Elevenlabs utilities went back behind the paywall, but I'm hopeful they'll be leaked / opensourced soon, leading to a golden age of jacking off. Wouldn't want to have that shining future snatched away from you because of Skynet.
If I do not get canned for it then you should not either.
But I do! I have all kinds of them. That does not mean that I want to listen to 4 hour long AI danger podcasts though, or read boring essays on the topic. Surely someone can just succinctly present the matter in a few paragraphs. I am not so easily bored by verbosity! I have read The Iliad and Moby Dick several times each. I have studied advanced mathematics for fun. But I am usually bored by the typical AI doomer post.
My reference to jerking off was just a humorous example. I am in bed right now and I am probably not about to jerk off. But I also am not about to read some boring 40000 word essay about AI risk any more than I am going to go read some white paper about the threat of climate change.
It is not that I do not believe that those dangers are real. Actually, I believe that to some extent both the danger of climate change and the danger of AI are real.
It is just that I do not give a shit about either on the emotional level!
Those would change the masses at large's opinions about these topics would be wise to pay attention to the emotional level.
No, I am not going to listen to some 4 hour podcast about AI risk. Nor would I spend any more than about ten or twenty minutes at most per month at most reading about the threat of climate change. I just don't give that much of a shit! If you want to reach people who are like me in this regard... and no, we are not just degenerate coomers... we are actually probably the overwhelming majority of the human population... then please explain it in a way that nails it through my mind so that I have no choice but to agree. 4 hour podcasts or verboseshit essays won't do the trick for me or people like me. You have to make people like me actually give a shit. Right now, I don't. The problem for those who do give a shit is... people like me who don't give a shit are most of the world's population.
4 hour long podcasts and giant essays are not going to shift the needle. I am an intellectual and they have not shifted it even for me. They will shift the needle even less for people who are not intellectuals, and that is most of the world's population.
In the time and effort you spent writing your replies , you probably could have listened to half of it at 2x speed, but I agree 4 hours is way too long to make a case. People don't have time for that. But it's like watching a football game. Why watch the whole game, which takes hours, when you can just get the score online or updates on your phone/ Because the very act of watching is part of the entertainment.
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You and everyone you know and love could possibly die to this thing, it's much more likely than many think and even if it doesn't kill us all it's going to almost certainly profoundly transform nearly every aspect of everyone's lives. NVIDIA thinks the hardware necessary to run AIs is going super Moore's law at 275x per 2 years. They're already better than a lot of low level white color employees. If this thing can go super human there is a real risk the improvement goes recursive which is the generally believed most likely catalyst for a singularity type event. If this isn't enough for you then just jack off in ignorant bliss for the few remaining years before reality asserts itself. If your threat response is so atrophied and your intellectual curiosity is so empty that you can't give a single evening to figuring this out then why should anyone care about evangelizing you?
S-tier Freudian slip.
Hah I thought that was intentional, if not agreed!
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Another one? That's what they said about COVID-19.
When you see exponential, think logistic.
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