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> as evidenced by various similar events in human history The issue is that people are jumping to the conclusion that the present conditions are analogous to t

> as evidenced by various similar events in human history The issue is that people are jumping to the conclusion that the present conditions are analogous to the “false” panics of the past, while discounting “real” panics that turned out to be justified. Global warming, thalidomide, lead, the growing surveillance state, sex abuse in the Catholic church, etc. were all dismissed as panics until they turned out to be real issues. The problem is that we look back and no longer categorize these as “moral panics”, because in the end they turned out to be real and few people remember them that way. Only the “false” panics remain, which leads to some fallacious conclusions IMO. I don’t think panic is ever a good default stance on anything. But this is an issue orthogonal to the true underlying danger of whatever people are panicking about.

squigz 3y ago
> The issue is that people are jumping to the conclusion that the present conditions are analogous to the “false” panics of the past, while discounting “real” panics that turned out to be justified. Again, I'm not really sure this is fair, at least in my experience. I think when most people reference these past events, it's to point out that - despite panic about those events - we managed to solve the issues involved with them, and move on.
- haswell 3y ago
  Which events are you referring to? The “false” panics or the “real” ones? Because when people invoke moral panic as an argument against AI concerns, it’s almost universally as a device to completely invalidate the concerns. > we managed to solve the issues involved with them, and move on Even if the point is that “see, we worked through these past issues just fine”, it’s not clear why working through those issues tells us anything about the present. The only structure holding the analogy together is “we had a problem” and “we solved the problem”. If the nature of the problem is not the same, it’s unclear why this analogy carries any weight at all. The reality is that we have not solved the issues related to many “real” panics. We just don’t refer to them as panics anymore. Prohibition may have been a deeply misguided solution, but the social problem of alcoholism was and continues to be real. “Moving on” means that 13K people are killed every year in alcohol related traffic deaths, and over 130K each year from other alcohol related afflictions. I’m not arguing for a ban on alcohol, but pointing out that we rarely do a good job of solving these messy issues. They just become a new accepted societal norm. I think this can be roughly broken down into four buckets: 1. Panics that turned out to be bullshit 2. Panics that resulted in action and an eventual solution 3. Panics that resulted in the worst fears being fully realized 4. Panics for which we have no current answer or solution The issue I have with your argument is that it seems to dismiss the possibility of 3 and 4.
  - dcow 3y ago
    Charitably, nobody is arguing that AI shouldn’t be taken seriously. People are arguing about whether it will dismantle society and pave the way to the end of times. Surely we can agree that while there are valid indicators that we should tread carefully, there is no proof that any existing technology in our hands is the harbinger of doom.
    - haswell 3y ago
      > nobody is arguing that AI shouldn’t be taken seriously As far as I can tell, this is exactly what is happening when someone invokes “it’s just a moral panic”. It’s an unserious argument, in that it has no direct relevance to the underlying concerns. > there is no proof that any existing technology in our hands is the harbinger of doom We have a pretty good idea of how the world could look if nuclear war broke out. We can’t prove to the last detail exactly what it would look like, but we know it’s bad, and something we don’t want. We DO have proof that existing technology is leading to direct harm, and we can form reasonable extrapolations of what further harm will result from further proliferation of similar tech. And I don’t think doom is even the primary concern. The concern is the vast space leading up to doom. Doom is a distraction from what is right in front of us.
      - dcow 3y ago
        How did we get from AI LLMs to nuclear apocalypse? You’ve articulated my point better than I have, it seems (= Edit: I see you misinterpreted my comment. I should have been specific and said “any existing AI adjacent technology” in our hands… Anyway I hope it’s abundantly clear that the argument at this point in the thread is not “the canaries were wrong in the past they are obviously wrong about AI” (as TFA suggests) or even “we’ve survived disaster before meh we can do it again” (a more cavalier take). It’s that the burden of proof falls on the doomsayers to convince humanity that <insert potentially dangerous technology> is sufficiently dangerous to warrant censorship and regulation, etc.
        haswell 3y ago
- cubefox 3y ago
  We often didn't manage to solve the issues. We didn't solve climate change or AIDS or the holocaust or cancer from smoking. And when we solved some issues (like the ozone hole) or remedied them (like smoking) it was only because people did what you dismiss as panicking. Imagine if someone tried to warn you, in 1938, that a second world war will happen with significant probability, and you just answer: "I think most people realize the risks, but also realize that panicking like this is the end of {art, culture, etc} isn't very helpful either, as evidenced by various similar events in human history"
  - squigz 3y ago
    Interesting that this conversation started with comparisons to the printing press, comic books, and D&D, and has progressed to comparisons to World War 2. Of course, panic about World Wars is certainly what I was referring to originally...
    - haswell 3y ago
      To be fair, I specifically called out the printing press, comic books, and D&D as examples of panics we got wrong. The other side of this coin is that there are indeed cases where concerns were justified, and only focusing on the situations when they were not justified is at the heart of the issue.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      This didn't start out with comic books, we started with AI risk and people dismissing it by arbitrarily comparing it to things that turned out to be harmless.
cubefox 3y ago
> The problem is that we look back and no longer categorize these as “moral panics”, because in the end they turned out to be real and few people remember them that way. Only the “false” panics remain, which leads to some fallacious conclusions IMO. This is a good point. A similar case: In early 2020, many journalists, TV experts and politicians emphasized that you shouldn't panic. This was true insofar "panic" is by definition irrational, but false insofar they also said that much more people die from the flu in a year, which ended up being false: For several years much fewer people died from the flu. Or when they said "currently the risk is low, so don't worry" -- that few people are being infected now (in early 2020) doesn't mean that the risk of infection is low, because current risk includes the probability of bad things happening in the future. If you race towards a cliff with your car, the risk of dying is already high before you fall of the cliff. So "don't panic!" is ambiguous between "don't be irrational!" (which is a tautology) and "the risk is not high!" which requires justification and may well be false.
cauch 3y ago
The way I see it is rather: The past has shown that for each technology, there were "worriers". Imagine a distribution graph with the x-axis being the scale from "very worried" to "confident in the future". For each technology, there is a bell-shape distribution. So, for this technology, such distribution has to exist. The question is: where are the natural worriers? can you point to them? Because if you cannot distinguish the natural pedestal that will always exist, then it feels like you are giving credit to this pedestal rather than giving credit to real worry. It would be very useful to see those distributions for different technologies or events and, based on the known conclusion, see if some shapes are indicating that the "worriers" are mainly the natural left-tail of the distribution. For me, what push me to keep away from that debate and not mangle to the people interested in this subject (even if it turns out there are reason to worry) is the fact that a big part of people worried about "superintelligent AI threatening humankind" are usual quite clueless on societal dangers otherwise. They usually are supporting views close in philosophy to tech bros/bro-science, utilitarians or libertarians, which is all showing a pretty naive understanding of the complexity of society.
- haswell 3y ago
  I think that understanding the meta-phenomenon of worriers vs. non-worriers is interesting in its own right. But independent of this, I took the original post to be focusing on the fact that there are better and worse reasons to worry or not to worry. So maybe someone is predisposed to worry about things, but understanding why they worry (and how likely the “why” is to be valid) is more important than the fact that they’re worrying. Conversely, examining why an optimist is optimistic is also important, because if their optimism is rooted in specious arguments and conclusions, their status as a “non worrier” is less indicative of reason to care about about their lack of worry relative to the distribution of worriers. In other words, I think it’s an interesting way to think about the people involved in the worry/non-worry, but not likely to get us closer to an answer about whether or not anyone should worry. Clearly there are situations that we know enough about to warrant a high degree of concern regardless of the distribution of worry vs. non-worry (see: climate change). I think a major issue with the AI subject is a lack of consensus on what exactly people are worried about, and worries ranging from near term loss of employment and other immediate downsides to the eventual extinction of the human race. I don’t think the “threatens all humankind” concerns are the most worrisome because they’re by far the most far fetched. There’s a whole lot of potential harm between where we are today and those extreme outcomes, but those extremes tend to get the most airtime and subsequent dismissal, and overshadow the more realistic and mundane concerns.

squigz 3y ago

> The issue is that people are jumping to the conclusion that the present conditions are analogous to the “false” panics of the past, while discounting “real” panics that turned out to be justified. Again, I'm not really sure this is fair, at least in my experience. I think when most people reference these past events, it's to point out that - despite panic about those events - we managed to solve the issues involved with them, and move on.

haswell 3y ago
Which events are you referring to? The “false” panics or the “real” ones? Because when people invoke moral panic as an argument against AI concerns, it’s almost universally as a device to completely invalidate the concerns. > we managed to solve the issues involved with them, and move on Even if the point is that “see, we worked through these past issues just fine”, it’s not clear why working through those issues tells us anything about the present. The only structure holding the analogy together is “we had a problem” and “we solved the problem”. If the nature of the problem is not the same, it’s unclear why this analogy carries any weight at all. The reality is that we have not solved the issues related to many “real” panics. We just don’t refer to them as panics anymore. Prohibition may have been a deeply misguided solution, but the social problem of alcoholism was and continues to be real. “Moving on” means that 13K people are killed every year in alcohol related traffic deaths, and over 130K each year from other alcohol related afflictions. I’m not arguing for a ban on alcohol, but pointing out that we rarely do a good job of solving these messy issues. They just become a new accepted societal norm. I think this can be roughly broken down into four buckets: 1. Panics that turned out to be bullshit 2. Panics that resulted in action and an eventual solution 3. Panics that resulted in the worst fears being fully realized 4. Panics for which we have no current answer or solution The issue I have with your argument is that it seems to dismiss the possibility of 3 and 4.
- dcow 3y ago
  Charitably, nobody is arguing that AI shouldn’t be taken seriously. People are arguing about whether it will dismantle society and pave the way to the end of times. Surely we can agree that while there are valid indicators that we should tread carefully, there is no proof that any existing technology in our hands is the harbinger of doom.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > nobody is arguing that AI shouldn’t be taken seriously As far as I can tell, this is exactly what is happening when someone invokes “it’s just a moral panic”. It’s an unserious argument, in that it has no direct relevance to the underlying concerns. > there is no proof that any existing technology in our hands is the harbinger of doom We have a pretty good idea of how the world could look if nuclear war broke out. We can’t prove to the last detail exactly what it would look like, but we know it’s bad, and something we don’t want. We DO have proof that existing technology is leading to direct harm, and we can form reasonable extrapolations of what further harm will result from further proliferation of similar tech. And I don’t think doom is even the primary concern. The concern is the vast space leading up to doom. Doom is a distraction from what is right in front of us.
    - dcow 3y ago
      How did we get from AI LLMs to nuclear apocalypse? You’ve articulated my point better than I have, it seems (= Edit: I see you misinterpreted my comment. I should have been specific and said “any existing AI adjacent technology” in our hands… Anyway I hope it’s abundantly clear that the argument at this point in the thread is not “the canaries were wrong in the past they are obviously wrong about AI” (as TFA suggests) or even “we’ve survived disaster before meh we can do it again” (a more cavalier take). It’s that the burden of proof falls on the doomsayers to convince humanity that <insert potentially dangerous technology> is sufficiently dangerous to warrant censorship and regulation, etc.
      - haswell 3y ago
cubefox 3y ago
We often didn't manage to solve the issues. We didn't solve climate change or AIDS or the holocaust or cancer from smoking. And when we solved some issues (like the ozone hole) or remedied them (like smoking) it was only because people did what you dismiss as panicking. Imagine if someone tried to warn you, in 1938, that a second world war will happen with significant probability, and you just answer: "I think most people realize the risks, but also realize that panicking like this is the end of {art, culture, etc} isn't very helpful either, as evidenced by various similar events in human history"
- squigz 3y ago
  Interesting that this conversation started with comparisons to the printing press, comic books, and D&D, and has progressed to comparisons to World War 2. Of course, panic about World Wars is certainly what I was referring to originally...
  - haswell 3y ago
    To be fair, I specifically called out the printing press, comic books, and D&D as examples of panics we got wrong. The other side of this coin is that there are indeed cases where concerns were justified, and only focusing on the situations when they were not justified is at the heart of the issue.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    This didn't start out with comic books, we started with AI risk and people dismissing it by arbitrarily comparing it to things that turned out to be harmless.

cubefox 3y ago

> The problem is that we look back and no longer categorize these as “moral panics”, because in the end they turned out to be real and few people remember them that way. Only the “false” panics remain, which leads to some fallacious conclusions IMO. This is a good point. A similar case: In early 2020, many journalists, TV experts and politicians emphasized that you shouldn't panic. This was true insofar "panic" is by definition irrational, but false insofar they also said that much more people die from the flu in a year, which ended up being false: For several years much fewer people died from the flu. Or when they said "currently the risk is low, so don't worry" -- that few people are being infected now (in early 2020) doesn't mean that the risk of infection is low, because current risk includes the probability of bad things happening in the future. If you race towards a cliff with your car, the risk of dying is already high before you fall of the cliff. So "don't panic!" is ambiguous between "don't be irrational!" (which is a tautology) and "the risk is not high!" which requires justification and may well be false.

cauch 3y ago

The way I see it is rather: The past has shown that for each technology, there were "worriers". Imagine a distribution graph with the x-axis being the scale from "very worried" to "confident in the future". For each technology, there is a bell-shape distribution. So, for this technology, such distribution has to exist. The question is: where are the natural worriers? can you point to them? Because if you cannot distinguish the natural pedestal that will always exist, then it feels like you are giving credit to this pedestal rather than giving credit to real worry. It would be very useful to see those distributions for different technologies or events and, based on the known conclusion, see if some shapes are indicating that the "worriers" are mainly the natural left-tail of the distribution. For me, what push me to keep away from that debate and not mangle to the people interested in this subject (even if it turns out there are reason to worry) is the fact that a big part of people worried about "superintelligent AI threatening humankind" are usual quite clueless on societal dangers otherwise. They usually are supporting views close in philosophy to tech bros/bro-science, utilitarians or libertarians, which is all showing a pretty naive understanding of the complexity of society.

haswell 3y ago
I think that understanding the meta-phenomenon of worriers vs. non-worriers is interesting in its own right. But independent of this, I took the original post to be focusing on the fact that there are better and worse reasons to worry or not to worry. So maybe someone is predisposed to worry about things, but understanding why they worry (and how likely the “why” is to be valid) is more important than the fact that they’re worrying. Conversely, examining why an optimist is optimistic is also important, because if their optimism is rooted in specious arguments and conclusions, their status as a “non worrier” is less indicative of reason to care about about their lack of worry relative to the distribution of worriers. In other words, I think it’s an interesting way to think about the people involved in the worry/non-worry, but not likely to get us closer to an answer about whether or not anyone should worry. Clearly there are situations that we know enough about to warrant a high degree of concern regardless of the distribution of worry vs. non-worry (see: climate change). I think a major issue with the AI subject is a lack of consensus on what exactly people are worried about, and worries ranging from near term loss of employment and other immediate downsides to the eventual extinction of the human race. I don’t think the “threatens all humankind” concerns are the most worrisome because they’re by far the most far fetched. There’s a whole lot of potential harm between where we are today and those extreme outcomes, but those extremes tend to get the most airtime and subsequent dismissal, and overshadow the more realistic and mundane concerns.