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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?
I don't take this series of posts as really being about trying to wring a great novel take on AI out of Scott so much as testing what impact a long conversation with Yud has on reasonably smart and curious laymen. This has important implications on messaging for doomers.
Precisely; I should have mentioned in my post above that Ross Scott is much more of an internet layman and a techno-optimist and is thus probably the exact kind of person Yud needs to convince, and didn't.
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