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> Presumably the experts who feel differently about AI x-risk have similar disregard for your opinion. That you aren't persuaded by experts who disagree doesn'
by ke88y 3y ago
> Presumably the experts who feel differently about AI x-risk have similar disregard for your opinion. That you aren't persuaded by experts who disagree doesn't show anything.
Of course. I was merely explaining the reason why my response would focus on x-risk rather than better surveys, and why.
> but it's not like the oil and gas engineers dismissing climate change risks would describe themselves as self-interested liars either. They would likely say, as you realize, "No, my dismissal of the concerns of other experts is legitimate!"
Okay. But I have more to gain than to lose by advocating for AI Safety, since that's what I work on.
> The thing is, it doesn't require a lot of expertise to understand that there is actually an enormous risk
My comment was about X-risk and AGI. Find any of a myriad of comments here where I agree there are real risks that should be taken seriously. Those risks -- the reasonable ones -- are not existential and have nothing to do with AGI.
> Systems as smart or smarter than we are, that are not controlled for the benefit of humanity, are an existential risk...
I am not an adherent to this religious dogma and have seen no empirical evidence that the powerful rationalisms people use to talk themselves into these positions has any basis in current or future reality.
I want the LessWrong cult to have fewer followers in the halls of power precisely because I actually do give a damn about preventing the worst-case FEASIBLE outcomes, which have nothing to do with AGI bullshit.
BTW: if we're all too busy worrying about AGI who's going prevent the pile of ridiculous should-be-illegal bullshit that's about to cause a bunch of real harm? No one. If you want conspiracies about intent, look at who's funding all this AGI x-risk bullshit.
And you can be sure as hell of one thing: no one in big tech wants me giving Congress advice on what our AI and data privacy regulations should look like. They would MUCH prefer endless hearings on "risks" they might even know are bullshit nonsense.
But why focus any effort on 100% risks of data privacy instrusions, copyright infringement, wanton anti-trust violations, and large-scale disinfo campaigns when there's a 1% risk of extinction, right?
But anyways. I'm just some fool who has actually spent over a decade in the trenches trying to prevent specific bad outcomes. I'm sure the sci-fi essays and prognostications from famous CEOs are far more persuasive and entertaining and convicting than the ramblings of some nobody actually try to fix real problems with mostly boring solutions.
- ALittleLight 3y agoThe reason you aren't persuasive is because you just ignore arguments without responding to them. At least, you've done so here - perhaps you've responded other places with your decade of experience. When presented with surveys and claims of experts, you just dismiss those out of hand "I'm an expert too, therefore ignore other experts." When presented with an argument you just say "That's religious dogma and I reject it." I can't stop you from rejecting things out of hand, but you shouldn't be surprised that you come off as totally unpersuasive when you say and do these things. In the simplest form: 1. AI could become smarter than humanity. 2. AI is rapidly progressing towards super-human intelligence. 3. If AI is smarter than humanity it could destroy or dominate humanity. 4. We aren't certain AI won't destroy or dominate humanity. Therefore, there is some non-negligible existential risk from AI. Which of these points do you disagree with, or do you think the conclusion doesn't follow?
- rixed 3y agoCould you elaborate on 3? It's easy to envision how AI can be used by $powerful to improve its control of $powerless, even before AGI, but how an AI would grab power from $powerful and then behave even worse is harder to imagine.
- ALittleLight 3y agoRemember that an AI doesn't have to grab power or be sentient or be an agent of any kind. AI could lead to the destruction or domination of humanity, even if AI is simply a passive tool completely obedient to its operators. Suppose GPT5 or 6 is multimodal and extremely intelligent. Any work that could be done remotely at a computer could be done by the superhuman intelligence of GPT 6. This is everything from creating music and movies, virtual YouTubers and live streamers, to customer support agents, software developers and designers, most legal advice, and many more categories besides. Providing all of these jobs at extremely low cost will make Open AI exceedingly rich - what if they want to get richer? How about robotics? The AI can help them not only design and iterate and improve on robots and robot hardware, but the AI can also operate the robots for them. Now they can not only do the kind of jobs that can be done on the computer. They can do the jobs that require physical manipulation as well and that category of jobs extends to things like security, military, police. At this point there are at least two possibilities. First is that the AI is effectively controlled by OpenAI in which case the decision makers that open AI would have effective and lasting control over all of humanity. No plucky band of rebels could possibly overthrow the AI powered tyranny - That's the strength of relentless super intelligence. The second possibility is that open AI doesn't have it well controlled - that could mean bugs or unexpected behavior or it could mean the model expressing some kind of agency of its own - think of the things that the Bing AI was saying before Microsoft got it mostly under control. If the AI isn't under control, it may choose to eliminate humanity simply because we might be in its way or we might be an impediment to its plans.