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AGI is a break-capitalism lottery ticket I'm willing to entertain. If the marginal cost of labor collapses to zero then either we'll get robot police or finally

AGI is a break-capitalism lottery ticket I'm willing to entertain. If the marginal cost of labor collapses to zero then either we'll get robot police or finally be free to pursue lives of leisure.

cmsonger 4y ago
Except that it's going to be robot police. What in the current world order suggests labor wins. Who controls LLMs? Who has the compute to produce AGI?
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  To be fair, there is always someone on the bottom. It just historically hasn't been people we cared about. That really says more about us than it says about AI. The time to complain about these power asymmetries was prior to them affecting us. Now it just sounds like garden variety sour grape hypocrisy. Not saying there aren't good points. Only pointing out that many, many people can all view the consequences of this dynamic differently.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    The only people who view this favorably are people at the top. People near the bottom perhaps feel disdain for people in the middle but that is misdirected because people at the top always were the ones in control. AI hasn't changed that dynamic.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      By 'this' do you mean AI or the petition?
      - noobermin 4y ago
        AI. I am replying to the parent comment, but I too get that this petition is being signed onto by people at openAI specifically because they already made it with GPT-4. They definitely would not sign on to it if their (arbitrary) threshold for what to stop doing AI research with was a tool at a GPT-3 or GPT-3.5 level or higher or it included GPT-4 in their threshold, and not merely beyond it.
- Teever 4y ago
  Why do you think the fact that only select view control this technology today that it will always be like that?
tazjin 4y ago
Take the time to read a very pessimistic take like (like [0]) and see if you reconsider. [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I wish it was more convincing. As it stands, it says more about the author's egoistic view of humanity than of AI. Imagine for a second taking Feuerbach's The Essence of Religion and applying it to Descartes' rationality and Plato's nous. We'd get a critique of the rational human's construction of his own ideal - the essence of intellect. AI threatens this ideal and ego-threats get sublimated into existential threats by those unable to understand themselves well enough to express themselves directly.
  - jimrandomh 4y ago
    Maybe it's wrong, and things will be fine. Maybe it's right. But you can't psychoanalyze your way to truth. Whether future AIs will destroy humanity or not is a fact about future AIs, and the landscape of intelligent systems, not a fact about Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Pass. Yudlowsky is all explanation, but too important to summarize his core thesis. This is always a giant red flag for me. I am simply not going on a long journey with someone that won't make the effort to sketch out the destination in an abstract. People write page after page about how it might kill us all in a flash, without ever offering a good explanation of why it would want to. My experience with people whose immediate reaction to something they're scared of is to destroy it is that they're panicky screechers who are an annoying distraction to the person actually handling the situation, whether that's wild animals, fire, or interpersonal violence. I'm not saying 'just let me handle it bro, I totally got this.' There's a lot of potential risks, I don't think anyone is qualified to say they can mitigate all those, or even most of them. But I trust a machine intelligence - even one that's vast, cool, and unsympathetic - far more than the would-be Butlerians.
versteegen 4y ago
That is the best possible outcome, but I worry that we have a single shot at it. If the massive wealth generated isn't distributed evenly, what will ever level it out other than the things that have in the past: war, disaster, revolution and state collapse (see The Great Leveler).

AGI is a break-capitalism lottery ticket I'm willing to entertain. If the marginal cost of labor collapses to zero then either we'll get robot police or finally be free to pursue lives of leisure.

cmsonger 4y ago

Except that it's going to be robot police. What in the current world order suggests labor wins. Who controls LLMs? Who has the compute to produce AGI?

bilbo0s 4y ago
To be fair, there is always someone on the bottom. It just historically hasn't been people we cared about. That really says more about us than it says about AI. The time to complain about these power asymmetries was prior to them affecting us. Now it just sounds like garden variety sour grape hypocrisy. Not saying there aren't good points. Only pointing out that many, many people can all view the consequences of this dynamic differently.
- noobermin 4y ago
  The only people who view this favorably are people at the top. People near the bottom perhaps feel disdain for people in the middle but that is misdirected because people at the top always were the ones in control. AI hasn't changed that dynamic.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    By 'this' do you mean AI or the petition?
    - noobermin 4y ago
      AI. I am replying to the parent comment, but I too get that this petition is being signed onto by people at openAI specifically because they already made it with GPT-4. They definitely would not sign on to it if their (arbitrary) threshold for what to stop doing AI research with was a tool at a GPT-3 or GPT-3.5 level or higher or it included GPT-4 in their threshold, and not merely beyond it.
Teever 4y ago
Why do you think the fact that only select view control this technology today that it will always be like that?

tazjin 4y ago

Take the time to read a very pessimistic take like (like [0]) and see if you reconsider. [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

kelseyfrog 4y ago
I wish it was more convincing. As it stands, it says more about the author's egoistic view of humanity than of AI. Imagine for a second taking Feuerbach's The Essence of Religion and applying it to Descartes' rationality and Plato's nous. We'd get a critique of the rational human's construction of his own ideal - the essence of intellect. AI threatens this ideal and ego-threats get sublimated into existential threats by those unable to understand themselves well enough to express themselves directly.
- jimrandomh 4y ago
  Maybe it's wrong, and things will be fine. Maybe it's right. But you can't psychoanalyze your way to truth. Whether future AIs will destroy humanity or not is a fact about future AIs, and the landscape of intelligent systems, not a fact about Eliezer Yudkowsky.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Pass. Yudlowsky is all explanation, but too important to summarize his core thesis. This is always a giant red flag for me. I am simply not going on a long journey with someone that won't make the effort to sketch out the destination in an abstract. People write page after page about how it might kill us all in a flash, without ever offering a good explanation of why it would want to. My experience with people whose immediate reaction to something they're scared of is to destroy it is that they're panicky screechers who are an annoying distraction to the person actually handling the situation, whether that's wild animals, fire, or interpersonal violence. I'm not saying 'just let me handle it bro, I totally got this.' There's a lot of potential risks, I don't think anyone is qualified to say they can mitigate all those, or even most of them. But I trust a machine intelligence - even one that's vast, cool, and unsympathetic - far more than the would-be Butlerians.

versteegen 4y ago

That is the best possible outcome, but I worry that we have a single shot at it. If the massive wealth generated isn't distributed evenly, what will ever level it out other than the things that have in the past: war, disaster, revolution and state collapse (see The Great Leveler).