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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.
Ross comes close to understanding what the real risks are in his top-right "unforeseen consequences" node, but then he somehow links that with free will and consciousness, which is just a moronic misunderstanding of the AI-risk position. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to have found a convincing argument against AI doom.
People here like to harp on the bad arguments of doomers. The arguments of anti-doomers are so much worse. I think it would interesting to make a taxonomy of the bad arguments.
Here are some common bad arguments I can think of off the top of my head.
AI is not a threat because...
It won't have consciousness
LLMs don't currently have some abilities
LLMs don't have "real" understanding when they write a coherent 10 paragraph graduate-level essay
You can't conclusively prove AI will kill us in the near future
Other threats have come (nuclear weapons) and we've always come through them
We will be able to "pull the plug" if we see things going badly
There have been no Earth-shattering releases since GPT-4 two months ago
AI will not be able to manipulate the physical world
I asked Chat-GPT something and it gave me a bad answer
Doomers like EY have unlikeable personalities
The human brain his hithero-undiscovered quantum computing abilities
AI doom scenarios feel "far-fetched". I can't personally imagine what will happen.
And, of course, the one pointed out by Scott.
Which ones did I miss?
I would actually really like to see a rebuttal of this one, because the doomer logic (which looks correct to me) implies that we should all have died decades ago in nuclear fire. Or, failing that, that we should all be dead of an engineered plague.
And yet here we are.
The Anthropic principle for one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
The probability of "extinction events in the past" given "we are here to observe it" is 0%. We can't infer, therefore, anything about the chance of these events happening based on prior history.
But, you might (wisely) point out that nuclear weapons are not actually extinction events. And, so far, in humanity we have seen very limited use of nukes. This gives us weak evidence that uniquely dangerous weapons can be contained. Here's why it's not a great argument.
It's an N of 1.
Nukes and AI are different. The technology to create nuclear weapons can be controlled by anti-proliferation efforts. AI could be much harder to contain (short of bombing GPU clusters). Nukes also have a bounded downside. It's a very large downside but it's bounded. The technology is well understood. One nuke isn't going to destroy the world. Neither will a full nuclear exchange. However, a runaway AI could destroy the world. We have 1 megaton bombs. There is no reason to believe that 1 teraton bombs will happen anytime in the near future. However, with AI it's possible to imagine a near-term situation where the capabilities of AI increase by orders of magnitude quickly. What is N today could be 1 billion N in 10 years.
I think the anthropic principle is fine for pointing out why we don't see things with bimodal outcomes of "everything is fine" / "everyone is dead".
But nuclear and biological weapons don't look like that. If 5% of worlds have no nuclear war, 40% have one that killed half the population, and the other 55% have one that wipes out everyone, 80% of observers should be in the "half of the population died in a nuclear war" worlds.
Which means one of the following:
Nuclear war will generally kill everyone in pretty short order (and thus by the anthropic principle most observers are in worlds where nuclear war has never started)
We're quite lucky even taking the anthropic principle into account: most observers are in more disastrous worlds than us
Nuclear war isn't actually very likely: most observers are in worlds where it never gets started
Something else weird is going on (e.g. simulation hypothesis is correct).
Hypothesis 1 seems unlikely to me since the models I've seen of even a full counter-value exchange don't seem to kill more than half the people in the world. Hypothesis 3 seems like the sort of world that does not contain the Cuban missile crisis, Petrov, the Norwegian rocket incident.
Which leaves us with the conclusion that either hypothesis 2 is correct and we're just lucky in a way that is not accounted for by the anthropic principle, or our world model has a giant gaping hole in it.
I think it's probably the "giant gaping hole" one. And so any doomer explanation that also would have predicted nuclear (or biological) doom has this hole. And it's that point I would like to see the doomers engage with.
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