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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.
My first take on the flowchart is that "consciousness" is horribly abused as a concept here. Not to abuse authority here, but: I've spent most of my academic career writing about consciousness, with the last 5 years focused on AI consciousness, I'm on the boards of multiple journals in the field, and have numerous publications in top cogsci and philosophy and even AI journals on the topic. I would say that almost without exception, anyone who knows anything about AI risk and consciousness realises there's very little connecting the two.
The interesting part of consciousness is the hard problem (aka qualia, subjectivity, zombies), and that is explicitly divorced from the kind of cognitive capabilities that could be scary; it's the mystery layer on reality, and fwiw I do think it's genuinely mysterious. I have no idea whether future superintelligent AIs are likely to be conscious -- or rather, my thoughts on the subject are complex, meandering, and dense. By contrast, it's pretty straightforward to see how an agential AI that outmatches us in capacities like strategic planning, social cognition, and behaviour anticipation is scary as fuck.
I don't care if it's conscious. I care whether it's able to outthink me.
I know you said your thoughts about AI and consciousness are complex, but what are they, roughly?
Remind me about this if I haven’t replied or posted next week! Not ignoring your nice question at all but will need to find 30 mins to do it justice.
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