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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.
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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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