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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.
personal perspective: I've listened to the first two Eliezer interviews and part of this one. Yes the guys, presentation is horrible etc, but I'm actually suprised at how receptive I've been to hear him out. I have always had very negative view of most ratsphere things, and Eliezer was prime example.
He does not present well outside of his fanbase in writing. Twitter to lessWrong, to HPMOR, he's always come off to me as insufferably arrogant, weird, and over concerned with how clever he is. (Anything SA has ever written on AI has been much much worse, his regular simple penetration of issues falls apart on the subject of AI, and has done more to make me (wrongly) dismissive of the whole thing than anything else.)
Back to Yud, having never actually seen or heard him before, I am shocked by how much more I like the guy in video format. He seems a lot nicer and sympathetic and likable than I ever imagined him. To the point that for the first time ever, I'm honestly open to hearing out his concerns and combined with Musk's views on the issue, I am in medium to high medium support of any 'pause' efforts, but tentative to being done in a way that doesn't require nuclear war or a totalitarian world government.
It is very bizarre to me that every normie in the world may have to, in their lifetimes, decide where they stand on a 'Butlerian Jihad'. This is a possibility I would have mocked relentlessly 18m ago, and am depressed that I even have given thought to.
I don’t personally care much about his style but what I do worry about is that presentations like what he’s doing are not going to appeal to normies. Unless you’re pretty nerdy and into computers and familiar with the idea and the issues of AI, his presentation is pretty bad. And the thing for me isn’t that I’m worried that smart guys won’t get it, I’m worried that the normies will see a presentation as “very long form autistic screeching” and ignore the issues.
What I wish I had was someone like Ezra Klein or Sam Harris or other fairly intelligent, well-spoken people who could explain what the dangers of AI are, how likely they are, and what can or should be done about it — in terms that are understandable to people who’ve generally used computers for email and candy crush. Yud isn’t the guy for that, and I hope he doesn’t become the face of the issue because most people would dismiss him based on presentation alone.
this is one of those instances where appealing to normies is not a problem. Normies are not in a position to fix this.
I kinda disagree. As long as the problem lacks a critical mass of concerned citizens, no political solution will even be sought. Politician don’t care if the world might blow up ten years from now, but if their donors or voters think it will and want you to do something about it, you will. A few cranks making long videos and podcasts might as well talk to the wall, because until the problem is mainstream enough that not dealing with it is a problem, it’s not going to happen.
This has always been a problem. The people who care about the environment are basically hippies and college kids. Nobody really cares, and as long as it remains the preview of low status nobodies, the best you get is lip service. More recently, there was the Reddit antiwork fiasco. Until then, people were starting to consider the idea of improving working conditions. It stopped dead once the face of the movement because a loser nonbinary woman who walked dogs a few hours a week while living in her parents’s home in California. Once the movement was tainted with that image— a low status laughingstock— any hope for progress was lost.
I suggest that people like that are the face of antiwork because antiwork doesn't mesh with the real world very well and someone like that is insulated from the real world considerations that make it obvious that antiwork is impractical.
That is, the lack of popularity is not some happenstance and the movement didn't just get unlucky.
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Stuart Russell is the guy you want for that job. Professor at Stanford, literally wrote the textbook on AI, and can articulate the worries very well.
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