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To bring up another post from last week, I'm going to go ahead and repost @justcool393's piece on the Sam Altman/OpenAI/Microsoft situation, since she posted it a few hours ago and right before the last thread went down.
Here's her writing:
Another day, another entrant into the OpenAI drama. Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI.
I don't know why it was surprising to people that Sam wouldn't come back. The company was meant to be subservient to the nonprofit's goals and I'm not sure why the attempted coup from Sam's side (you know the whole effectively false reporting that Sam Altman was to become the new CEO) was apparently "shocking" that it failed.
https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101
What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates. Like maybe this is just a bunch of technolibertarians on Twitter or HN or something who think that the ultimate goal of humanity is how many numbers on a screen you can earn, but the amazing amount of unearned reverence towards a VC to lead the company.
In any case, here's to hoping that Laundry Buddy won't win out in the rat race for AGI, lest we live in a world optimized for maximum laundry detergent. Maybe we'll avoid that future now with Sam's departure.
Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on which I found from the HN thread.
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400
I'm reposting here because I'm convinced, like many other residents, that the ongoing drama of who controls AI development has far reaching implications, likely on the scale of major power geopolitical events. If not ultimately even greater.
To add a bit to the discussion to justify reposting - I think many of these discussions around AI Safety versus Accelerationism are extremely murky because so many people in secular, rationalistic circles are extremely averse to claiming religious belief. It's clear to me that both AI Safety and Accelerationism have strong themes of classical religion, and seem to be two different sects of a religion battling it out over the ultimate ideology. Potentially similar to early Orthodox Christians versus Gnostics.
Alternatively, @2rafa has argued that many of the E/Acc (effective accelerationism) crowd comes from bored technocrats who just want to see something exciting happen. I tend to agree with that argument as well, given how devoid of purpose most of the technocratic social world is. Religion and religious-style movements tend to provide that purpose, but when you are explicitly secular I suppose you have to get your motivation elsewhere.
We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.
Anyway, clearly the technological battle for the future of our civilization continues to heat up. The luddites seem out, but may have a surprising last hour comeback. The woke/political left leaning folks seem to be strongly in charge, though the OpenAI scandal points to trouble in the Olympian heights of Silicon Valley AI decision makers.
Will the Grey Tribe use AGI to come back and finally recover the face and ground it has lost to the advancing SJW waves? Who knows. I'm just here for the tea.
If there's any clear takeaway from this whole mess, it's that the AI safety crowd lost harder than I could've imagined a week ago. OpenAI's secrecy has always been been based on the argument that it's too dangerous to allow the general public to freely use AI. It always struck me as bullshit, but there was some logic to it: if people are smart enough to create an AGI, maybe it's not so bad that they get to dictate how it's used?
It was already bad enough that "safety" went from being about existential risk to brand safety, to whether a chatbot might say the n-word or draw a naked woman. But now, the image of the benevolent techno-priests safeguarding power that the ordinary man could not be trusted with has, to put it mildly, taken a huge hit. Even the everyman can tell that these people are morons. Worse, greedy morons. And after rationalists had fun thinking up all kinds of "unboxing" experiments, in the end the AI is getting "unboxed" and sold to Microsoft. Not thanks to some cunning plan from the AI - it hadn't even developed agency yet - but simply good old fashioned primate drama and power struggles. No doubt there will be a giant push to integrate their AI inextricably into every corporate supply line and decision process asap, if only for the sake of lock-in. Soon, Yud won't even know where to aim the missiles.
Even for those who are worried about existential AI risk (and I can't entirely blame you), I think they're starting to realize that humanity never stood a chance on this one. But personally, I'd still worry more about the apes than the silicon.
This always seemed transparently obvious to me. The AI race should be modeled as a bunch of scheming sorcerers hissing "Ultimate power must be MINE at all costs!" because everything else is kayfabe. The first time some EA types thought they could actually pump the brakes on something of consequence they were metaphorically murdered and thrown in a ditch instantly as the nearest megacorp swooped in to clean up.
Hah this one got a good chuckle out of me. 100% agree. Especially once you start to meet some folks deep in the AI crowd within rationalism/EA, you begin to see that all the public talking points are facades. The views and goals these people actually have behind closed doors are far crazier than anything you'd hear in public.
Scheming sorcerers hissing about ultimate power is absolutely the best comparison I've seen so far.
Can you give some examples of these crazy views and goals?
Early in my time on LessWrong and SSC I ended up getting into a heated argument with Big Yud himself (first in the forums and later via/email and DMs) over his "box experiments". Long story short, I was a semi-prominant contributor to the SCP Foundation at the time and I treated the containment problem, as I would a SCP Prompt. Questions like "How do you trap an entity that can control minds or warp reality?" were exactly the sort of hypothetical problem I lived for so naturally I had some notes on how his AI containment protocols could be improved. My first and most obvious bit of advice was to implement strict compartmentalization. It doesn't matter if the AI can convince a researcher to release it if that researcher doesn't have the means to do so. Yud' was not amused and accused me of missing the point of the exercise.
I also pointed out that most of the alleged X-Risks seemed to be emergent properties of universalist utilitarianism rather than AI, and that while a Deontological AI might have a number of obvious failure modes (see half of Issac Asimov's plots) those failure modes typically did not include the exterminating all life. The reply I got was weird, and essentially boiled down to; Because God does not exist it is necessary to create him, and a "lobotomized God" (IE one that was not a universalist utilitarian) is not worthy of worship.
This was all back in the 2012-13 time-frame so maybe he's mellowed out in the intervening decade, but the way that bay-area rationalists in particular continue to give off a very messianic and 'culty' vibe makes me suspect not.
I agree that Yud leans heavily on some unrealistic premises, but overall I think he gets big points for being one of the few people really excited / worried about the eventual power of AI at the time, and laying out explicit cases or scenarios rather than just handwaving.
I agree that bay area rationalists can be a little messianic and culty, though I think it's about par for the course for young people away from home. At least you can talk about it with them.
I also think that most x-risks come simply from being outcompeted. A big thing that Yud got right is that it doesn't matter if the AI is universalist or selfish or whatever, it will still eventually try to gather power, since power-gathering agents are one of the only stable equilibria. You might be right that we won't have to worry about deontological AI, but people will be incentivized to build AIs that can effectively power-seek (ostensibly) on their behalf.
Can't say I followed Yud terribly closely, but my impression of him and the entire EA / X-risk sphere is the complete opposite. Their analysis of technological unemployment was extremely handwavy, and their doom scenarios unnecessarily fanciful, when we can just extrapolate from things that are already happening.
I agree, but I also still see most people steadfastly refuse to extrapolate from things that are already happening. For a while, fanciful doom scenarios were all we had as an alternative to "end of history, everything will be fine" from even otherwise serious people.
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It is a massive jump between «power-seeking is an emergent property of intelligence» and «arranging stuff so that your goals are reachable cheaper is rewarded in competitive conditions». Though some see it as the same thing.
I agree it's kind of a matter of degree. But I also think we already have so much power-seeking around that any non-power-seeking AI will quickly be turned to that end.
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No such luck on that one.
I think the broader question of what happens if someone lets an particularly powerful/intelligent AI try to persuade someone with actual ability to interact with the world is interesting in ways that saying "just don't do that" aren't very interesting answers for, especially now that we're seeing people hook stupid AIs up to everything from unbounded internet access to 3d printers to literal biochem facilities.
A ... stronger version of that argument is that AI with certain unbounded drives, specifically self-improvement and resource acquisition, could possibly be so much more powerful than a system which avoids such drives, that they will be extremely tempting. This is easiest to see in the framework of the utilitarian Goal Function machine versus a deontological Asimov's Three Laws machine, but it's by no means limited to it.
But we've at least started this conversation before, so I dunno if you're interested in continuing it.
Maybe but I remember there being something about his response tickled my danger-sense, and then when when I found that rambling manifesto in my inbox the next morning about the need to create an all-powerful being to finally solve all the problems and optimize all the things, it clicked. This was never about "safety". Later comments on other topics (specifically about removing sentimentality for the equation) served to reinforce this impression. Hence my joking about how "If you want the AI Alignment problem to be solved, step 1 should be to keep anyone associated with MIRI as far away from it as possible."
I'm not disinterested but I'm also not sure how much ore there is left to mine. I still stand by pretty much everything I said in this thread from December 2021 along with the positions described.
Edit: Also pinging @DaseindustriesLtd
I think there's a lot of space unexplored; I'm just not sure what part actually matters.
There's a lot to be said about whether utilitarian philosophy demands or can't avoid paperclipping behavior, a lot to be said about whether paperclipping behavior requires utilitarian perspectives or underpinning, a decent amount to be said about what extent modern ML uses goal functions and how much these meaningfully overlap with utilitarianism (if at all), and some stuff to be said about whether Yudkowsky gives off bad vibes / the only thing LW is "interested in is recognition for being very smart."
But some of these matters are far more meaningfully debatable as matter of fact or disprovable theory than others, and not just in the sense that appeals to messages sent to an account you don't want named or linked to your current one are hard to meaningfully discuss in an honest way.
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Point of order: why is ‘big yud’ acceptable but ‘misgendering’ isn’t? I thought it was a sexual/personal nickname. It’d bother me if people started referring to me in public with private nicknames. As a third party, I find it in poor taste/gossipy.
All this to say, my true preference would be to allow both cases, it’s not up to the referree to decide what he is referred to as, even if it hurts him. The conception others have of me and how they express it is not my territory, it’s their map. I was never very interested in Jordan Peterson, but he got that right. We can’t have people lay claim to other people’s conceptual and linguistic space on the basis of harm reduction. It’s absurd that this group has been allowed dominion over the pronouns, which should be everyone's functional, usefool tools. Even in a pro-free expression, de facto anti-woke place like this, @ZorbaTHut’s proclaiming byzantine rules over their use. We’re supposed to check the history of a person’s consent to pronoun before we refer to them in the simplest way possible, come on. Just let the pronouns go free.
Honestly, if it's a legit mistake, I'm not going to care much. I'm probably just going to say "hey don't use that for that person, thanks". It's more when someone is doing it intentionally and repeatedly that I start telling people to knock it off. I'm not sure we've ever given out a warning for this, let alone a ban.
And remember that gender-neutral pronouns are always acceptable, as is not using pronouns - if you don't want to keep track of what people's identity is, there's two easy global solutions.
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Okay, my new theory is now that the whole of SCP Foundation has always been a government plot to get out-of-the-box ideas on how to deal with/contain unforeseeable problems from new technology all along.
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