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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".
Found this AI, Fermi, Great Filter papee interesting
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.05653.pdf
The one thought I had on it is my fear with AI was one that had evolutionary biological goals of self preservation and replication thru growth.
The issue I see is it doesn’t solve the Fermi paradox. Shouldn’t we have seen AI in the galaxy? If AI = great filter then it seems like it would need to kill us before it developed self improvement which would lead it to look for more compute power and start settler mars.
The author makes a pretty egregious mathematical error on page 7. Without offering any justification, they calculate the probability of being born as the kth human given that n total humans will ever be born as k/n. This just doesn't make sense. It would work if he defined H_60 as the event of being born among the first 60 billion humans, but that's clearly not what he's saying. Based on this and some of the other sloppy probabilistic reasoning in the paper, I don't rate this as very intellectually serious work.
I don’t check the math in these things. It just seems like there too many unknown unknowns for any number to mean much.
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