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Notes -
The anti-doomer's flowchart, courtesy of Ross Scott.
You may remember that, a while back, Ross Scott (of Civil Protection, Freeman's Mind, and Ross's Game Dungeon fame) hosted a discussion with Big Yud himself over AI risk. I couldn't finish the video, but I gathered that Ross was not impressed by Yud's arguments from the premise of AI gaining consciousness and thus wasn't really grasping what Yud saw as the problem. For the many of you who are averse to long videos, the above image lays out Ross's positions on AI risk, with reasons for why.
On what basis is Ross Scott qualified to discuss AI risk? I know Yud isn't the most formally qualified person in the world but he's at least spent a very long time thinking about the topic and philosophy generally. What intellectual basis do random youtubers have to talk about instrumental convergence and so on?
Point blank, if he thinks AI is less of a threat than homelessness (as stated in the bottom) then he's wildly missing the target area. Look what we did to great apes - they're on the endangered list. We're basically a great ape with a bigger brain. Intelligence is enormously useful! We used it to take over the entire world in a vanishingly short timespan by biological standards. Intelligence includes communications ability, charisma and so on, basically all mental stats.
Look what we did to the rest of the Homo genus! Not a single one survives. There's some debate as to whether we murdered or bred them into extinction, or a mix of both. Either way, it didn't end well for any of our competitors.
We should not bring in any new competitors to a battle royale that we just won, especially if they possess enormous potential. Computer minds can be enormously large in physical terms, enormously power-hungry, enjoy the resources of a giant global supply chain as opposed to whatever proteins can be scrounged up on a tiny budget. Computers can run at gigahertz, they can train on huge amounts of information, self-modify... Even if we don't understand the complexity of the brain, we could stumble upon something far superior that only works if you have gigawatts to throw at it. Far better to upgrade human intelligence slowly and steadily than invite competition.
'Maybe it won't become sapient' or 'maybe it won't become superintelligent' are not risks we should be taking. Of course it's going to become superintelligent, there's no universal cap on intelligence that fits just above the smartest people in history. Why would 20 watts be the point at which there are literally no further returns to scale?
About as much as any one of us do on this forum. Ross is by no means an expert, but he is decidedly (for lack of a better term) a 'weird' guy who discusses all kinds of weird stuff through his videos, they aren't exactly stardard game reviews/retrospectives, and he does it reasonably compellingly too. His unique, even if non-expert, outlook alone I think justifies some interest in what he thinks (I say this as a admitted fan of his videos)
I think I made an error in word choice. 'Discuss' is fine. People discuss things all the time. I also thought his videos were fun.
But has he read any of the papers, books, content written on the topic? I'm pretty sure he hasn't, going off the state of his flowchart. If you commit to a debate where thousands of people will watch you, you should at least have some in-depth understanding of what the other side has been saying. Robin Hanson for instance is credible, he's put a lot of thought into it.
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