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"Apocalypse cults are always wrong, AI safety is an apocalypse cult, therefore it is (probably) wrong" is an argument which really only betrays the ignorance of
by yanderekko 4y ago
"Apocalypse cults are always wrong, AI safety is an apocalypse cult, therefore it is (probably) wrong" is an argument which really only betrays the ignorance of the speaker regarding the specifics of the AI doomer argument. Why are apocalypse cults always wrong? Do the same specific reasons apply to the doomers here?
- geraldhh 4y ago> Why are apocalypse cults always wrong? because we are still here
- yanderekko 4y agoThat's the consequence of them being wrong, not the cause..
- geraldhh 4y agodenying the existence of circular dependencies does not invalidate them
- roenxi 4y agoIf there was an apocalypse cult in ancient Pompeii predicting the mountain would explode and bury everyone with ash, they would not be here. And there easily could have been. This is not an argument, it is a tautology powered by the anthropic principle.
- geraldhh 4y agothat example is a local disaster, not an apocalypse. but yes, there most certainly were people predicting it and they probably didn't get a chance to enjoy being right.
- simple-thoughts 4y agoHumans are attracted to certain types of mythological stories - and there’s nothing wrong with that. It becomes a problem when the stories and reality are conflated, like is happening with AI. The idea that apocalypse cults are always wrong comes from two source: (1) empirical evidence, every time there’s been one it’s wrong and (2) understanding human sociology, humans are susceptible to making certain types of thought errors as groups and apocalypse cults such as the AI one demonstrate those errors everywhere. So yeah an apocalypse cult could be right, but it would necessarily be for the wrong reasons. Just like a broken clock that matches the current time 2 minutes of the full day.
- AbrahamParangi 4y agoI am well aware of the AI doomer argument, but you appear to assume that argumentation can be trusted just because it is convincing*. I believe you are not factoring in the possibility of epistemological error. *for what it's worth I do not find it convincing but I am arguing "even if I found it convincing, I wouldn't believe it"
- mitthrowaway2 4y agoWhat's your approach? Do you only believe arguments that sound unconvincing? Or just ignore all arguments, and try to adopt the beliefs that the popular kids in the schoolyard talk about?
- AbrahamParangi 4y agoThe first step would be to recognize the error bounds on epistemological error and redo one’s estimates, but the tl;dr is that one’s certainty on edge case predictions should drop by a lot.
- mitthrowaway2 4y agoHaving low certainty on edge case predictions is fine, but it also should result in correspondingly larger updates when those edge-case predictions come true, which one had previously doubted. For me, that was the case with AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and now ChatGPT. In all three cases I was highly skeptical that, in my lifetime, AI would ever beat humans at Go, adapt the same architecture to problems like protein folding, and blow the Turing Test right out of the water. I've had to update accordingly, and now I'm less skeptical that the barriers ahead will be harder to break than the ones behind us.