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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.
The primary difference between us and apes is that our brains are a little bit bigger and there's probably some extra dedicated hardware for language. A little bit of extra intelligence goes a long way - we rule the world and apes live or die at our pleasure.
Computers can be immensely large and powerful, a million times the mass and power consumption of our 20-watt brains. Logically, advanced computers should end up being immensely smarter than we are, the gap would be much further than that between apes and men. While there may be some upper limit to how intelligent one can be, it is very unlikely that our brains are near it. They have to be small enough to fit through a pregnant mother's legs after all.
We have never created any intelligent being other than humans before. There are surely various unknown challenges with doing something like this for the first time. The psychology of a computer would be extremely alien, it is unfamiliar to our mode of thinking. It's interests may not be aligned with ours and its power would be very great.
This is a major threat, more important than climate change or systemic _____ism. Climate change cannot plot against us and all problems with human minds can be solved with other human minds.
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I wouldn't call a brain three times as large 'a little bit bigger.'
length vs volume. something can have way more volume despite not appearing much bigger, i am guesing that is what he means
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