RSI capabilities could be charted, and are likely to be AI-complete.
What does RSI stand for?
Lately I've been listening to audiobooks (at 2x speed) in my down time, especially ones that seem likely to have passages relevant to the question of how well policy-makers will deal with AGI, basically continuing this project but only doing the "collection" stage, not the "analysis" stage.
I'll post quotes from the audiobooks I listen to as replies to this comment.
More (#3) from Better Angels of Our Nature:
...let’s have a look at political discourse, which most people believe has been getting dumb and dumber. There’s no such thing as the IQ of a speech, but Tetlock and other political psychologists have identified a variable called integrative complexity that captures a sense of intellectual balance, nuance, and sophistication. A passage that is low in integrative complexity stakes out an opinion and relentlessly hammers it home, without nuance or qualification. Its minimal complexity can be quantified by counting words like absolutely, always, certainly, definitively, entirely, forever, indisputable, irrefutable, undoubtedly, and unquestionably. A passage gets credit for some degree of integrative complexity if it shows a touch of subtlety with words like usually, almost, but, however, and maybe. It is rated higher if it acknowledges two points of view, higher still if it discusses connections, tradeoffs, or compromises between them, and highest of all if it explains these relationships by reference to a higher principle or system. The integrative complexity of a passage is not the same as the intelligence of the person who wrote it, but the
Okay. In this comment I'll keep an updated list of audiobooks I've heard since Sept. 2013, for those who are interested. All audiobooks are available via iTunes/Audible unless otherwise noted.
Outstanding:
Worthwhile if you care about the subject matter:
A process for turning ebooks into audiobooks for personal use, at least on Mac:
Personal and tribal selfishness align with AI risk-reduction in a way they may not align on climate change.
This seems obviously false. Local expenditures - of money, pride, possibility of not being the first to publish, etc. - are still local, global penalties are still global. Incentives are misaligned in exactly the same way as for climate change.
RSI capabilities could be charted, and are likely to be AI-complete.
This is to be taken as an arguendo, not as the author's opinion, right? See IEM on the minimal conditions for takeoff. Albeit if &q...
(I don't have answers to your specific questions, but here are some thoughts about the general problem.)
I agree with most of you said. I also assign significant probability mass to most parts of the argument for hope (but haven't thought about this enough to put numbers on this), though I too am not comforted on these parts because I also assign non-small chance to them going wrong. E.g., I have hope for "if AI is visible [and, I add, AI risk is understood] then authorities/elites will be taking safety measures".
That said, there are some steps in...
I personally am optimistic about the world's elites navigating AI risk as well as possible subject to inherent human limitations that I would expect everybody to have, and the inherent risk. Some points:
I've been surprised by people's ability to avert bad outcomes. Only two nuclear weapons have been used since nuclear weapons were developed, despite the fact that there are 10,000+ nuclear weapons around the world. Political leaders are assassinated very infrequently relative to how often one might expect a priori.
AI risk is a Global Catastrophic Risk i
The argument from hope or towards hope or anything but despair and grit is misplaced when dealing with risks of this magnitude.
Don't trust God (or semi-competent world leaders) to make everything magically turn out all right. The temptation to do so is either a rationalization of wanting to do nothing, or based on a profoundly miscalibrated optimism for how the world works.
/doom
I think there's a >15% chance AI will not be preceded by visible signals.
Aren't we seeing "visible signals" already? Machines are better than humans at lots of intelligence-related tasks today.
Which historical events are analogous to AI risk in some important ways? Possibilities include: nuclear weapons, climate change, recombinant DNA, nanotechnology, chloroflourocarbons, asteroids, cyberterrorism, Spanish flu, the 2008 financial crisis, and large wars.
Cryptography and cryptanalysis are obvious precursors of supposedly-dangerous tech within IT.
Looking at their story, we can plausibly expect governments to attempt to delay the development of "weaponizable" technology by others.
These days, cryptography facilitates international trade. It seems like a mostly-positive force overall.
One question is whether AI is like CFCs, or like CO2, or like hacking.
With CFCs, the solution was simple: ban CFCs. The cost was relatively low, and the benefit relatively high.
With CO2, the solution is equally simple: cap and trade. It's just not politically palatable, because the problem is slower-moving, and the cost would be much, much greater (perhaps great enough to really mess up the world economy). So, we're left with the second-best solution: do nothing. People will die, but the economy will keep growing, which might balance that out, because ...
Here are my reasons for pessimism:
There are likely to be effective methods of controlling AIs that are of subhuman or even roughly human-level intelligence which do not scale up to superhuman intelligence. These include for example reinforcement by reward/punishment, mutually beneficial trading, legal institutions. Controlling superhuman intelligence will likely require qualitatively different methods, such as having the superintelligence share our values. Unfortunately the existence of effective but unscalable methods of AI control will probably lull el
Congress' non-responsiveness to risks to critical infrastructure from geomagnetic storms, despite scientific consensus on the issue, is also worrying.
Even if one organization navigates the creation of friendly AI successfully, won't we still have to worry about preventing anyone from ever creating an unsafe AI?
Unlike nuclear weapons, a single AI might have world ending consequences, and an AI requires no special resources. Theoretically a seed AI could be uploaded to Pirate Bay, from where anyone could download and compile it.
The use of early AIs to solve AI safety problems creates an attractor for "safe, powerful AI."
What kind of "AI safety problems" are we talking about here? If they are like the "FAI Open Problems" that Eliezer has been posting, they would require philosophers of the highest (perhaps even super-human) caliber to solve. How could "early AIs" be of much help?
If "AI safety problems" here do not refer to FAI problems, then how do those problems get solved, according to this argument?
@Lukeprog, can you
(1) update us on your working answers the posed questions in brief? (2) your current confidence (and if you would like to, by proxy, MIRI's as an organisation's confidence in each of the 3:
Elites often fail to take effective action despite plenty of warning.
I think there's a >10% chance AI will not be preceded by visible signals.
I think the elites' safety measures will likely be insufficient.
Thank you for your diligence.
There's another reason for hope in this above global warming: The idea of a dangerous AI is already common in the public eye as "things we need to be careful about." A big problem the global warming movement had, and is still having, is convincing the public that it's a threat in the first place.
Who do you mean by "elites". Keep in mind that major disruptive technical progress of the type likely to precede the creation of a full AGI tends to cause the type of social change that shakes up the social hierarchy.
Combining the beginning and the end of your questions reveals an answer.
Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of [nuclear weapons, climate change, recombinant DNA, nanotechnology, chloroflourocarbons, asteroids, cyberterrorism, Spanish flu, the 2008 financial crisis, and large wars] just fine?
Answer how just fine any of these are any you have analogous answers.
You might also clarify whether you are interested in what is just fine for everyone, or just fine for the elites, or just fine for the AI in question. The answer will change accordingly.
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know:
From Roose's Young Money:
Fashion Meets Finance is a singles mixer series with a simple premise: take several hundred male financiers, put them in a room with several hundred women who work in the fashion industry, and let the magic happen. The series was started in 2007, and it is predicated on the idea that male Wall Streeters and female fashion workers, as the respective alpha ascenders of their tribal clans, deserve to meet and procreate, preserving the dominant line in perpetuity. It’s social Darwinism in its purest, most obnoxious form.
Fashion Meets Finance hit a snag in 2008, when the financial sector nearly collapsed, taking bankers down a few notches on the Manhattan social ladder and necessitating a brief hiatus. But in 2009, it returned with a vengeance. Its organizers proclaimed proudly: "2008 was a confusing time, but we are here to announce the balance is restoring itself to the ecosystem of the New York dating community. We fear that news of shrinking bonuses, banks closing, and the Dow plummeting confused the gorgeous women of the city.…The uncertainty caused panic which caused irrational decisions—there’s going to be a two-year blip in the system where a hot fashion girl might commit to a pharmaceutical salesman.…Fashion Meets Finance has returned to let the women of fashion know that the recession is officially over. It might be a year before bonuses start inflating themselves again, but it will happen. Invest in the future; feel confident in your destiny. Hold on. It will only be a couple more years until you can quit your job and become a tennis mom."
I almost admired the candor with which Fashion Meets Finance accepted noxious social premises as fact. (One early advertisement read, “Ladies, you don’t need to worry that the cute guy at the bar works in advertising!”) But others disagreed. Gawker called one gathering “an event where Manhattan banker-types and fashion slaves meet, consummate, and procreate certain genetics to create lineages of people you’d rather not know.”
...This installment of Fashion Meets Finance, held after a yearlong break, had undergone a significant rebranding. Now, it was being billed as a charity event (proceeds were going to a nonprofit focused on Africa), and the cringe-worthy marketing slogans had been erased. Now, the financiers and fashionistas were joined by a smattering of young professionals from other industries: law, consulting, insurance, even a few female bankers.
After a few hours of drinking and socializing, I had filled my douchebag quota many times over. I had seen and heard the following things:
A banker showing off his expensive watch (which he called “my piece”) to a gaggle of interested-looking women.
A former Lehman Brothers banker explaining his strategy for picking up women. “I use Lehman to break the ice—you know, get their sympathy. Then I tell them I make twice as much as Lehman paid me at my new job. They love my story, and then they end up in my bed.”
A private equity associate using the acronym “P.J.” to refer to his firm’s private jet.
A hedge fund trader giving dating advice to his down-and-out friend: “Girls come in many shapes and sizes. But just remember: when you hold them by the ankles and look down, they all look the same!”
As the night wore on, I identified the two primary strains of Fashion Meets Finance attendees. There were the merely curious, the people who had heard about the event from a friend and were intrigued enough about the premise to pay $25 for a ticket. These people mainly stood or sat on the perimeter of the roof deck, where they could observe (and, in some cases, laugh at) the commingling of the other partygoers.
And then there were the true believers. A portion of the attendees at Fashion Meets Finance seemingly had no idea that the event had become a punch line. They were bankers and fashionistas who were determined to find their matches at a superficial singles mixer, and they had no qualms about it. “I want the real deal!” said one female fashionista, who was sprawled out on a white sofa on Bar Basque’s terrace, sipping a vodka soda and watching the men walk by. “I’m really independent,” she said, “and I don’t want someone who needs to be around me all the time. I want them to work 150 hours a week at Goldman Sachs.”