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AGI and ASI are the two greatest power-centralizing systems imaginable. Do we want them controlled by the two most powerhungry groups in the world - venture capitalists and government officials? I believe that power corrupts and these are the most corruptible people. What if they decide 'hey there are a lot of resources in this lightcone, how about I not share them with the overwhelming majority of the world population and take them for myself - what are they gonna do'? Some people are insatiable, some people have uncommon ideas about marginal value/simulations/clones - AI venture capitalists are very likely to have such greedy thoughts.
I favour regulation that slows down the corporate and state AI programs, to the benefit of open-source and decentralized AI. But we're unlikely to get that, regulation is most likely to hurt the less well connected players. Better not to have regulation at all, in that case.
But there are plenty of people in the general population with the same sorts of thoughts. Not everyone, obviously. But more than you might suppose - if everyone had their own personal ASI, then people who would normally be stopped by incompetence or laziness can offload all the work to the ASI.
You might think "well I'm a god anyway, so I'll still be able to get everything I want". But you have to remember that your adversaries are also gods who are putting a roughly equal amount of intelligence and material resources into their goals as you are into yours.
If power is distributed widely, people can gang up in coalitions to stop aggression. If we all had our own ASI and roughly equal resources, there would be no problem.
If only one country has a nuclear arsenal, they could conquer the world quite easily. If many countries have nukes, there is no such danger. There are other dangers but no hegemonic danger.
Right, there's value in deterrence. But presumably you don't think that every individual on earth should have personal direct access to the nuke button - instead we try to limit that power to a small number of trusted actors. It seems to me that everyone having unrestricted personal access to ASI is the same as giving everyone a direct line to the button.
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Compared to an amoeba, I'm a God and so are my adversaries. Actually, I don't really have adversaries. I live in a pretty functional world with eight billion Gods (relatively speaking) and I'm still here. They haven't killed me. What is qualitatively different about the world where our powers are scaled up by the amount AI will allow?
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The traditional Yudkowskian rebuttal would be the fact that any given sufficiently advanced AI could operate on models of decision theory visible to other similarly-advanced AIs but not as knowable to you, so that collusion would be possible in the better interest of such AIs with probable compromises and trade-offs in order to better cement their goals per shares of the future lightcone. Such conspiracies could most probably be worse off for humanity rather than simply having one generalized-up-to-super artificial intelligence, given that such a combination of already-complex goals by multiple agencies acting as one seems notoriously harder to comprehend or predict as compared to the (already) ineffable possible future super-AI. This is the defeater to the ‘just make AIs fight each other bro’ take that LeCun et al. posit. Open-sourcing wouldn’t do anything if the alignment problem isn’t solved, and accelerating AI development through open-sourcing seems to be a bad idea, as that also increases the probability of ‘near-misses’ when it comes to alignment, which is considerably more likely to lead to s-risks rather than blatantly robust misalignment.
Yud is right in that a ‘pivotal act’ by some first actor with an aligned AGI is needed in order to safeguard humanity, but the corollary problem with this is that this actor would subsequently become the ‘conditioner’ of all possible future human societies and hence become possibly the worst tyrant ever seen in the history of mankind, especially with the moral ontologies expected of SanFran Venture Capitalists.
In all frankness I’m not sure what the best mode of action is. I doubt humans at our current state can even sufficiently wield such power with wisdom, which is why Yud’s proposal of pausing AI development, going for intelligence augmentation, then going for the gold seems wise. Otherwise I think we’re fucked (…until the parousia).
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