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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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This sort of outcome is what makes it very, very difficult for me to take the AI doomerism seriously. Yes, we may get Paperclip Maximiser AGI, but I think it's much more likely to come about by "humans in notional charge think it will make them trillions and so follow blindly its advice" than "machine becomes agent and decides on its own goals".

I'm not sure I follow your logic here.

You don't take AI doomerism seriously because you think that AI doom is likely but through a different path than the 'paperclip maximizer'? I'm pretty certain that the AI safety crowd are just as worried about manipulative oracle AIs as they are about mindless paperclip maximizers.

I think the problem is not machines, but people. And if people blindly put their trust in "the machine output must be correct" because they have visions of dollar signs, then we're screwed, but it's not the AI that decided to screw us, it's the people who were doing things in accordance with what the AI said.

Right now, OpenAI - which has its lovely charter about safety and so forth - is trashed. It wasn't their AI that suddenly woke up and became an agent with goals of its own that did it, it was good old-fashioned greed. Getting rid of Altman was supposed to slow down the adoption of unaligned or insufficiently aligned AI. It was perceived as costing money, and so money won in the end.

Sounds like you still agree with us doomers? We don't expect human greed / competitive pressures to go away any time soon, which is why we're worried about exactly the kinds of money-winning scenarios you propose.

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