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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32206 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Yeah, I feel like EY sometimes mixes up his "the AGI will be WAY SMARTER THAN US" message with the "AI CAN KILL US IN EXOTIC AND ESOTERIC WAYS WE CAN'T COMPREHEND" message.

If you're arguing about why AI will kill us all, yes, you need to establish that it is indeed going to be superhuman and alien to us in a way that will be hard to predict.

But the other side of it is that you should also make a point to show that the threshold for killing us all is not all that high, if you account for what humans are presently capable of.

So yes, the AGI may pull some GALAXY-BRAINED strat to kill us using speculative tech we don't understand.

But if it doesn't have to, then no need to go adding complexity to the argument. Maybe it just fools a nuclear-armed state into believing it is being attacked to kick off a nuclear exchange, then sends killbots after the survivors while it builds itself up to omnipotence. Maybe it just releases like six different deadly plagues at once.

So rather than saying "the AGI could do [galaxy brained strategy] which might trigger the audience' skepticism," just argue "the AGI could do [presently possible strategy] but could think of much deadlier things to do."

"How would it do this without humans noticing?"

"I've already argued that it is superhuman, so it is going to make it's actions hard to detect. If you don't believe that then we should revisit my arguments for why it will be superhuman."

Don't try to convince them of the ability to kill everyone and the AI being super-intelligent at the same time.

Take it step by step.

If you're arguing about why AI will kill us all, yes, you need to establish that it is indeed going to be superhuman and alien to us in a way that will be hard to predict.

I don't even think you need to do this. Even if the AI is merely as smart and charismatic as an exceptionally smart and charismatic human, and even if the AI is perfectly aligned, it's still a significant danger.

Imagine the following scenario:

  1. The AI is in the top 0.1% of human IQ.

  2. The AI is in the top 0.1% of human persuasion/charisma.

  3. The AI is perfectly aligned. It will do whatever its human "master" commands and will never do anything its human "master" wouldn't approve of.

  4. A tin-pot dictator such as Kim Jong Un can afford enough computing hardware to run around 1000 instances of this AI.

An army of 1000 genius-slaves who can work 24/7 is already an extremely dangerous thing. It's enough brain power for a nuclear weapons program. It's enough for a bioweapons program. It's enough to run a campaign of trickery, blackmail, and hacking to obtain state secrets and kompromat from foreign officials. It's probably enough to launch a cyberwarfare campaign that would take down global financial systems. Maybe not quite sufficient to end the human race, but sufficient to hold the world hostage and threaten catastrophic consequences.

Bioweapons, kompromat, and cyberwarfare are probably doable. Nukes require a lot of expensive physical infrastructure to build; that can be detected and compromised.

Perhaps the AI will become so charismatic that it could meme "LEGALIZE NUCLEAR BOMBS" into reality.

Feels almost like ingroup signaling. It's not enough to convince people that AI will simply destroy civilization and reduce humanity to roaming hunter-gatherer bands. He has to convince people that AI will kill every single human being on Earth in order to maintain his street cred.

Given a consequentialist theory like utilitarianism, there is also a huge asymmetry of importance between "AI kills almost all humans, the survivors persist for millions of years in caves" and "AI kills the last human."

Yep.

Although the thing that always makes me take AI risk a bit more seriously is the version where it doesn't kill all the humans, but instead creates a subtly but persistently unhappy world for them to inhabit and that gets locked in for eternity.

Oh yes, the vast majority of cases of unaligned AI kill us, but in those cases at least it will be quick. The "I have no mouth and I must scream" scenarios are more existentially frightening to me.

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