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Notes -
The future of AI is likely decided this week with Sam Altman's Congressional testimony. What do you expect?
EDIT: the recording is here.
Frankly I've tried to do my inadequate part to steer this juggernaut and don't have the energy for an effortpost (and we're having a bit too many of AI ones recently), so just a few remarks:
AI Doom narrative keeps inceasing in intensity, in zero relation to any worrying change in AI «capabilities» (indeed, with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI; recent results seem to be negative for the LLM shoggoth/summoned demon hypothesis, which is now being hysterically peddled by e.g. these guys). Not only does Yud appear on popular podcasts and Connor Leahy turns up on MSM, but there's an extremely, conspicuously bad and inarticulate effort by big tech to defend their case. E.g. Microsoft's economist proposes we wait for meaningful harm before deciding on regulations – this is actually very sensible if we treat AI as an ordinary technology exacerbating some extant harms and bringing some benefits, but it's an insane thing to say when the public's imagination has been captured by Yuddist story of deceptive genie, and «meaningful harm» translates to eschatological imagery. Yann LeCun is being obnoxious and seemingly ignorant of the way the wind blows, though he's beginning to see. In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.
Anglo-American regulatory regime will probably be more lax than that in China or the Regulatory Superpower (Europeans are, as always, the worst with regard to enterpreneural freedom), but I fear it'll mandate adherence to some onerous checklist like this one (consider this as an extraordinary case of manufacturing consensus – some literally who's «AI policy» guys come up with possible measures, a tiny subset of the queried people, also in the same until-very-recently irrelevant line of work, responds and validates them all; bam, we can say «experts are unanimous»). Same logic as with diversity requirements for Oscars – big corporations will manage it, small players won't; sliding into an indirect «compute governance» regime will be easy after that. On the other hand, MSNBC gives an anti-incumbent spin; but I don't think the regulators will interpret it this way. And direct control of AGI by USG appointees is an even worse scenario.
The USG plays favourites; on the White House meeting where Kamala Harris entered her role of AI Czar, Meta representatives weren't invited, but Anthropic's ones were. Why? How has the safety-oriented Anthropic merited their place among the leading labs, especially in a way that the government can appreciate? I assume the same ceaseless lobbying and coordinating effort that's evident in the FHI pause letter and EU's inane regulations is also active here.
Marcus is an unfathomable figure to me, and an additional cause to suspect foul play. He's unsinkable. To those who've followed the scene at all (more so to Gwern) it is clear that he's an irrelevant impostor – constantly wrong, ridiculously unapologetic, and without a single technical or conceptual result in decades; his greatest AI achievement was selling his fruitless startup to Uber, which presumably worked only because of his already-established reputation as an «expert». Look at him boast: «well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance». He's a small man with a big sensitive ego, and I think his ego will be used to perform a convincing grilling of the evil gay billionaire tech bro Altman. Americans love pro wrestling, after all.
Americans also love to do good business. Doomers are, in a sense, living on borrowed time. Bitter academics like Marcus, spiteful artists, scared old people, Yuddites – those are all nothing before the ever-growing legion of normies using GPT-4 to make themselves more productive. Even Congress staff got to play with ChatGPT before deliberating on this matter. Perhaps this helped them see the difference between AI and demons or nuclear weapons. One can hope.
Scott has published a minor note on Paul Ehrlich the other day. Ehrlich is one of the most evil men alive, in my opinion; certainly one of those who are despised far too little, indeed he remains a respectable «expert». He was a doomer of his age, and an advocate for psyops and top-down restrictions of people's capabilities; and Yud is such a doomer of our era, and his acolytes are even more extreme in their advocacy. Both have extracted an inordinate amount of social capital from their doomerism, and received no backlash. I hope the newest crop doesn't get so far with promoting their policies.
I expect nothing to happen for another few years, by which time it's too late. As @2rafa mentioned below, I'm convinced AI research and development is already far ahead of where it needs to be for AGI in the next couple of years. Given the US's embarrassing track record of trying to regulate social media companies, I highly doubt they'll pass an effective regulation regime.
What I would expect, if something gets rushed through, is for Altman and other big AI players to use this panic the doomers have generated as a way to create an artificially regulated competitive moat. Basically the big players are the ones who rushed in early, broke all the rules, then kicked the ladder down behind them. This is a highly unfortunate, but also highly likely future in my estimation.
It's ironic that we've entered into this age of large networks and systems, yet with the rise of AGI we may truly go back to the course of humanity being determined by the whims of a handful of leaders. I'm not sure I buy the FOOM-superintelligence arguments, but even GPT-4 optimized with plug-ins and website access will be a tsunami of change over the way we approach work. If there are more technical advancements in the next few years, who knows where we will end up.
What annoys me most is that this doomer rhetoric lets politicians act like they're doing something - stopping the AI companies from growing - when in reality they need to face the economic situation. Whether it's UBI, massive unemployment benefits, socialized housing, or whatever, our political class must face the massive economic change coming. At this rate it seems neither side of the aisle is willing to double down on the idea that AI will disrupt the workforce, instead they prefer to argue about the latest social issue du jour. This avoidance of the economic shocks coming in the next five years or less is deeply troubling in my view.
Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
You're drastically overestimating how cold blooded those at the top of society are. I find this sort of rhetoric so infuriating - do you really think elites all walk around with a view that they are better than all others, and the peasants can just die if they're useless? No, that's not how it works.
Most rich or wealthy folk want the approval of the masses. Status is arguably more desirable than wealth for many. They conceive of themselves as popular, someone that others look up to, and that helps give elites their sense of self. Even if there were absolutely no point to "peasants" living, which I still doubt, elites would let them live out of a sense of care for other human beings, and a need for adoration.
Regardless, humanity still produces quite a bit of important work, and will continue to into the era of AI. We can judge things, laugh, provide companionship, and generally instill meaning in a meaningless world. Even though we have a foolish scheme of employment vs unemployment that disregards vast swathes of human work, I'm optimistic AI will help us reimagine what it means to work. We very well could have people building community, caring for themselves and others, child rearing, discussing novel ideas, etc. after AI rises to swallow most of the economy. It depends on what we want to see happen.
I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
It's throw-away lines like this that make me avoid commenting here.
Then it's followed up by
Ahh, such steel-manning, such charity - definitely no booing outgroup here!
You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times. This forum does have a certain political slant, it's unavoidable. But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
I don't. I expect people to follow the rules such as
Be Kind
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Be charitable.
Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
The comment I was responding to violates these. The great grand parent violates these:
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comments like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
Why not? I have better places to discuss topics like this where. I wish this place were better, because then I'd find much more value out of discussing things here, but c'est la vie. [edit: for instance, I found the /r/slatestarcodex threads much more pleasant and insightful]
"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.
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