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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.
"risks happening right now: white collar jobs being replaced"
checks BLS stats: unemployment rate lowest ever, and labor force participation rising or stable
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/LSE_2023_participation-gap_amiti_ch3.png
Jobs lost due to AI will probably be replaced by new ones such as 'AI risk consultant' or other bullshit jobs.
"AI used to develop viruses"
Huh? That doesn't even make sense. How can the "risks bigger than AI" , which includes nuclear war, be bigger than the possible risk of AI starting a nuclear war?
AI risk seems like another religion or pseudoscience. I remember similar hype from the early 2000s about nanotechnology destroying the world. It was called the grey goo scenario.
To the best of my understanding, Yudkowsky's current risk model involves AI using nanotechnology to destroy the world.
Nah his current risk model is more like "AI discovers fundamental new principles of science, and exploits phenomena we don't know about to kill everyone", that's what the "send an air-conditioner blueprint to the past" example he keeps talking about is meant to illustrate. The nanotech/biotech distinction doesn't seem especially sharp or important to me, it's just different ways of getting at fine-grained control of very small things.
And in the typical FOOM scenario (which is admittedly probably unlikely), you might get an AI that can do like 100 years of intellectual work of an entire civilization made of Geniuses every single second, at which point it seems like it could solve nanotech trivially.
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