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What the hell, buddy? I implore you to think through what kinds of scenarios where humanity ends you'd actually think were worth the aesthetics. A lot of the scenarios that seem plausible to me involve humans gradually being priced out of our habitats, ending up in refugee / concentration camps where we gradually kill each other off.
I largely agree with @2rafa, but another important consideration is the dysgenic spiral we’re seeing intelligence in many first world countries. The Yuddite argument is generally to take it slow. However if you see our civilization and intellectual capacity going into decline due to stagnation, why would you argue to slow it down? What makes you think our children will have a better ability to align AI, in the counterfactual where we lock it all down?
I’m always surprised that folks in the AI doomer camp seem to be so tech positive, but don’t see the downside of restricting one of the most useful technologies we’ve ever created. If we slow down the economic engine too much, we’ll have a much harder time with AI alignment in my view.
Like missing out on "... a Mars visit, and also a grand unified theory of physics, and a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, and a cure for obesity, and a cure for cancer, and a cure for aging, and a cure for stupidity ..."? ("The Power of Intelligence", Yudkowsky, 2007; now in video form!)
There's an important difference between "don't see the downside" and "see the downside, but also the upside, and concluded that the latter is larger". Even if their conclusion is wrong, the doomers are all very much in the second category. Nobody thinks superintelligence is some kind of evil magic that can never be harnessed for good; they just think that at this rate it's too unlikely to be.
You know what they say about surprise - it's your brain's way of letting you know that something you believed wasn't so. In this case, I'd suggest "they're coming to conclusions based on affinity for general categories rather than analysis of specific distinctions" might be the belief to ditch.
I personally think restrictions would do more harm than good, though. We'll get to AGI eventually regardless, and the more hardware overhang that's built up when we get there, the less crazy a rapid "foom" scenario looks. Our best odds now aren't to get the whole world to coordinate until we have proven safety via mathematical theory without experiments, but rather to hammer on safety as we improve capabilities and hope our results extrapolate to superintelligences too. "Hope our results extrapolate" might be in vain, but not so certainly as "get the whole world to coordinate" or "proven safety via mathematical theory without experiments".
I think Dase and others in the "let it rip" side of things would argue that we will already miss out on things like that by taking the conservative/retreat route as things currently are.
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There are many ways we can address dysgenics, and we have tons of time to do so. Even if we stop AI now we're probably going to see massive increases in wealth and civilizational capacity, even as the average human gets dumber. Enough that even if some Western countries collapse due to low-IQ mass immigration, the rest will probably survive. I'm not sure, though!
That's a great question, but I think in expectation, more time to prepare is better.
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I know what Yud thinks, but I'm asking what you think. You seemed to be asserting that the end of the world coming in our lifetimes is good, because it'd be so satisfying to get to know the answer to how our civilization ends. Is that not what you were saying?
Okay, thanks for clarifying. I think where we differ is that I think there's a substantial possibility of something quite ugly and valueless replacing us. I want to have descendants in a (to me) meaningful sense, and I'm not willing to say "Jesus take the wheel" - to me, that's gambling with the lives of my children and grandchildren.
Gambling with the lives of your children and grandchildren is unavoidable. And not just with the ai question, which I think is also unavoidable, but in a profound sense all actions you take are to some degree gambling with their lives. Especially if you have no had them yet in selecting/attracting a mate, in choosing where and how to raise them with what resources, in choosing in how you marshal the resources that you use for the previous parts and to pass onto them. These are all gambles and you don't even know the odds of them. I'm not saying you need to accept this dice throw at any odds but you cannot categorically get away from gambling with the lives of your children and grandchildren, you can only optimize.
I agree gambling is unavoidable. I should have said, I don't think human extinction is unavoidable, and want to try to optimize. I'm confused by your newest reply, because about you seemed to assert we have zero influence over outcomes.
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