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I just got done listening to Eliezer Yudkowski on EconTalk (https://www.econtalk.org/eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-dangers-of-ai/).
I say this as someone who's mostly convinced of Big Yud's doomerism: Good lord, what a train wreck of a conversation. I'll save you the bother of listening to it -- Russ Roberts starts by asking a fairly softball question of (paraphrasing) "Why do you think the AIs will kill all of humanity?" And Yudkowski responds by asking Roberts "Explain why you think they won't, and I'll poke your argument until it falls apart." Russ didn't really give strong arguments, and the rest of the interview repeated this pattern a couple times. THIS IS NOT THE WAY HUMANS HAVE CONVERSATIONS! Your goal was not logically demolish Russ Roberts' faulty thinking, but to use Roberts as a sounding board to get your ideas to his huge audience, and you completely failed. Roberts wasn't convinced by the end, and I'm sure EY came off as a crank to anyone who was new to him.
I hope EY lurks here, or maybe someone close to him does. Here's my advice: if you want to convince people who are not already steeped in your philosophy you need to have a short explanation of your thesis that you can rattle off in about 5 minutes that doesn't use any jargon the median congresscritter doesn't already know. You should workshop it on people who don't know who you are, don't know any math or computer programming and who haven't read the Sequences, and when the next podcast host asks you why AIs will kill us all, you should be able to give a tight, logical-ish argument that gets the conversation going in a way that an audience can find interesting. 5 minutes can't cover everything so different people will poke and prod your argument in various ways, and that's when you fill in the gaps and poke holes in their thinking, something you did to great effect with Dwarkesh Patel (https://youtube.com/watch?v=41SUp-TRVlg&pp=ygUJeXVka293c2tp). That was a much better interview, mostly because Patel came in with much more knowledge and asked much better questions. I know you're probably tired of going over the same points ad nauseam, but every host will have audience members who've never heard of you or your jargon, and you have about 5 minutes to hold their interest or they'll press "next".
I think his problem isn't so much that he's bad at communicating his ideas, it's just that his ideas aren't that great in the first place. He's not a genius AI researcher, he's just a guy who wrote some meandering self-insert Harry Potter fan fiction and then some scifi doomsday scenarios about tiny robots turning us into goop. He can't make an argument without imagining a bunch of technologies that don't exist yet, may never exist and might not even be possible. And even if all of those things were true his solution is to nuke China if they build GPU factories which, even if it was a good plan (it isn't), he would never in a million years be able to convince anyone to do. I really can't understand the obsession with this guy.
Yudkowsky's arguments are robust to disruption in the details.
An ASI does not need dry nanotech to pose an existential risk to humanity, simple nukes and bioweapons more than suffice.
Not to mention that, as I replied to Dase above, just because he was wrong about the first AGI (LLMs) being utterly alien in terms of cognition, doesn't mean that they don't pose an existential risk themselves, be it from rogue simulacra or simply being in the hands of bad actors.
It would be insane to expect him to be 100% on the ball, and in the places where he was wrong in hindsight, the vast majority of others were too, and yet here we are with AGI incipient, and no clear idea of how to control it (though there are promising techniques).
That earns a fuck ton of respect in my books.
I don't expect him to be 100% on the ball but what are his major predictions that have come true? In a vague sense yes, AI is getting better, but I don't think anybody thought that AI was never going to improve. There's a big gap between that and predicting that we'll invent AGI and it will kill us all. His big predictions in my book are:
We will invent AGI
It will be able to make major improvements to itself in a short span of time
It will have an IQ of 1000 (or whatever) and that will essentially give it superpowers of persuasion
None of those have come true or look (to me) particularly likely to come true in the immediate future. It would be premature to give him credit for predicting something that hasn't happened.
I don't think you're giving him enough credit. Before he was known as the "doom" guy, he was known as the "short timelines" guy. The reason that we are now arguing about doom is because it is increasingly clear that timelines are in fact short. His conceptualization of intelligence as generalized reasoning power also seems to jive with the observed rapid capability gains in GPT models. The fact that next-token prediction generalized to coding skill, among myriads of other capabilities, would seem to be evidence in favor of this view.
2010, to be precise.
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Eh. I gave him some respect back when he was simply arguing that timelines could be short and the consequences of being wrong could be disastrous, so we should be spending more resources on alignment. This was a correct if not particularly hard argument to make (note that he certainly was not the one who invented AI Safety, despite his hallucinatory claim in "List of Lethalities"), but he did a good job popularizing it.
Then he wrote his April Fool's post and it's all been downhill from here. Now he's an utter embarrassment, and frankly I try my best not to talk about him for the same reason I'd prefer that media outlets stop naming school shooters. The less exposure he gets, the better off we all are.
BTW, as for his "conceptualization of intelligence", it went beyond the tautological "generalized reasoning power" that is, um, kind of the definition. He strongly pushed the Orthogonality Hypothesis (one layer of the tower of assumptions his vision of the future is based around), which is that the space of possible intelligences is vast and AGIs are likely to be completely alien to us, with no hope of mutual understanding. Which is at least a non-trivial claim, but is not doing so hot in the age of LLMs.
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