[Crossposted from Karlin's Blog].
One of the most interesting concepts in rationalist thought relates to “Anthropic Shadow.” This is the idea that existential risks are implicitly conditioned on the existence of human observers, and are therefore biased to the downside, since any event severe enough to kill all present observers and prevent the emergence of future ones will leave no observable traces of its past existence.
If we extend these anthropic considerations into the near future, we may reach some disquieting conclusions. Worlds that “make it” remember and/or simulate their history, whereas those that die, do not. This loads on what is known as the Strong Self-Sampling Assumption (SSSA), which relates to the idea... (read 5265 more words →)
Frontier LLM performance on offline IQ tests is improving at perhaps 1 S.D. per year, and might have recently become even faster. These tests are a good measure of human general intelligence. One more such jump and there will be PhD-tier assistants for $20/month. At that point, I expect any lingering problems with invoking autonomy to be quickly fixed as human AI research acquires a vast multiplier through these assistants, and a few months later AI research becomes fully automated.
The scenario I am most concerned about is a strongly multipolar Malthusian one. There is some chance (maybe even a fair one) that a singleton or oligopoly ASI decides or rigorously coordinate respectively to preserve the biosphere - including humans - at an adequate or superlative level of comfort or fulfillment, or help them ascend themselves, due to ethical considerations, for research purposes, or simulation/karma type considerations.
In a multipolar scenario of gazillions of AI at Malthusian subsistence levels, none of that matters in the default scenario. Individual AIs can be as ethical or empathic as they come, even much more so than any human. But keeping the biosphere around would be a... (read more)
It's not at all insane IMO. If AGI is "dangerous" x timelines are "short" x anthropic reasoning is valid...
... Then WW3 will probably happen "soon" (2020s).
https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1713451023610634348
I'll develop this into a post soonish.
It's ultimately a question of probabilities, isn't it? If the risk is ~1%, we mostly all agree Yudkowsky's proposals are deranged. If 50%+, we all become Butlerian Jihadists.
My point is I and people like me need to be convinced it's closer to 50% than to 1%, or failing that we at least need to be "bribed" in a really big way.
I'm somewhat more pessimistic than you on civilizational prospects without AI. As you point out, bioethicists and various ideologues have some chance of tabooing technological eugenics. (I don't understand your point about assortative mating; yes, there's more of it, but does it now cancel out regression to the mean?). Meanwhile, in a... (read more)
I disagree with AI doomers, not in the sense that I consider it a non-issue, but that my assessment of the risk of ruin is something like 1%, not 10%, let alone the 50%+ that Yudkowsky et al. believe. Moreover, restrictive AI regimes threaten to produce a lot of outcomes things, possibly including the devolution of AI control into a cult (we have a close analogue in post-1950s public opinion towards civilian applications of nuclear power and explosions, which robbed us of Orion Drives amongst other things), what may well be a delay in life extension timelines by years if not decades that results in 100Ms-1Bs of avoidable deaths (this is not... (read more)