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.
From Lewis' Flash Boys:
Like every other trader on the Chicago exchanges, [Spivey] saw how much money could be made trading futures contracts in Chicago against the present prices of the individual stocks trading in New York and New Jersey. Every day there were thousands of moments when the prices were out of whack — when, for instance you could sell the futures contract for more than the price of the stocks that comprised it. To capture the profits, you had to be fast to both markets at once... The exchanges, by 2007, were simply stacks of computers in data centers. The speed with which trades occurred on them was no longer constrained by people. The only constraint was how fast an electronic signal could travel between Chicago and New York...
What Spivey had realized, by 2008, was that there was a big difference between the trading speed that was available between these exchanges and the trading speed that was theoretically possible... Incredibly to Spivey, the telecom carriers were not set up to understand the new demand for speed. Not only did Verizon fail to see that it could sell its special route to traders for a fortune; Verizon didn’t even seem aware it owned anything of special value. “You would have to order up several lines and hope that you got it,” says Spivey. “They didn’t know what they had.” As late as 2008, major telecom carriers were unaware that the financial markets had changed, radically, the value of a millisecond.
...The construction guy [driving the route] with him clearly suspected he might be out of his mind. Yet when Spivey pressed him, even he couldn’t come up with a reason why the plan wasn’t at least theoretically possible. That’s what Spivey had been after: a reason not to do it. “I was just trying to find the reason no [telecom] carrier had done it,” he says. “I was thinking: Surely I’ll see some roadblock.” Aside from the construction engineer’s opinion that no one in his right mind wanted to cut through the hard Allegheny rock, he couldn’t find one.
So Spivey began digging the line, keeping it secret for 2 years. He didn't start trying to sell the line to banks and traders until a couple months before the line was complete. And then:
The biggest question about the line — Why? — remained imperfectly explored. All its creators knew was that the Wall Street people who wanted it wanted it very badly — and also wanted to find ways for others not to have it. In one of his first meetings with a big Wall Street firm, Spivey had told the firm’s boss the price of his line: $10.6 million plus costs if he paid up front, $20 million or so if he paid in installments. The boss said he’d like to go away and think about it. He returned with a single question: “Can you double the price?”
More (#1) from Flash Boys:
......why did the market in any given stock dry up only when he was trying to trade in it? To make his point, he asked the developers to stand behind him and watch while he traded. “I’d say, ‘Watch closely. I am about to buy one hundred thousand shares of AMD. I am willing to pay forty-eight dollars a share. There are currently one hundred thousand shares of AMD being offered at forty-eight dollars a share—ten thousand on BATS, thirty-five thousand on the New York Stock Exchange, thirty thousand on Nasdaq, and twenty-five thousand
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: