CarlShulman

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I'm interested in my $250k against your $10k.

 I assign that outcome low probability (and consider that disagreement to be off-topic here).
 

Thank you for the clarification. In that case my objections are on the object-level.

 

This post is an answer to the question of why an AI that was truly indifferent to humanity (and sentient life more generally), would destroy all Earth-originated sentient life.

This does exclude random small terminal valuations of things involving humans, but leaves out the instrumental value for trade and science, uncertainty about how other powerful beings might respond. I know you did an earlier post with your claims about trade for some human survival, but as Paul says above it's a huge point for such small shares of resources. Given that kind of claim much of Paul's comment still seems very on-topic (e.g. hsi bullet point .
 


Insofar as you're arguing that I shouldn't say "and then humanity will die" when I mean something more like "and then humanity will be confined to the solar system, and shackled forever to a low tech level", I agree, and


Yes, close to this (although more like 'gets a small resource share' than necessarily confinement to the solar system or low tech level, both of which can also be avoided at low cost). I think it's not off-topic given all the claims made in the post and the questions it purports to respond to. E.g. sections of the post purport to respond to someone arguing from how cheap it would be to leave us alive (implicitly allowing very weak instrumental reasons to come into play, such as trade), or making general appeals to 'there could be a reason.'



Separate small point:

And disassembling us for spare parts sounds much easier than building pervasive monitoring that can successfully detect and shut down human attempts to build a competing superintelligence, even as the humans attempt to subvert those monitoring mechanisms. Why leave clever antagonists at your rear?

The costs to sustain multiple superintelligent AI police per human (which can double in supporting roles for a human habitat/retirement home and controlling the local technical infrastructure) is not large relative to the metabolic costs of the humans, let alone a trillionth of the resources. It just means some replications of the same impregnable AI+robotic capabilities ubiquitous elsewhere in the AI society.

Most people care a lot more about whether they and their loved ones (and their society/humanity) will in fact be killed than whether they will control the cosmic endowment. Eliezer has been going on podcasts saying that with near-certainty we will not see really superintelligent AGI because we will all be killed, and many people interpret your statements as saying that. And Paul's arguments do cut to the core of a lot of the appeals to humans keeping around other animals.

If it is false that we will almost certainly be killed (which I think is right, I agree with Paul's comment approximately in full), and one believes that, then saying we will almost certainly be killed would be deceptive rhetoric that could scare people who care less about the cosmic endowment into worrying more about AI risk. Since you're saying you care much more about the cosmic endowment, and in practice this talk is shaped to have the effect of persuading people to do the thing you would prefer it's quite important whether you believe the claim for good epistemic reasons. That is important to disclaiming the hypothesis that this is something being misleadingly presented or drifted into because of its rhetorical convenience without vetting it (where you would vet it if it were rhetorically inconvenient).

I think being right on this is important for the same sorts of reasons climate activists should not falsely say that failing to meet the latest emissions target on time will soon thereafter kill 100% of humans.

A world of pure Newtonian mechanics wouldn't actually support apples and grass as we know them existing, I think. They depend on matter capable of supporting organic chemistry, nuclear reactions, the speed of light, ordered causality, etc. Working out that sort of thing in simulation to get an Occam prior over coherent laws of physics producing life does seem to be plenty to favor QM+GR over Newtonian mechanics as physical laws.

I agree the possibility or probability of an AI finding itself in simulations without such direct access to 'basement level' physical reality limits the conclusions that could be drawn, although conclusions 'conditional on this being direct access' may be what's in mind in the original post.

In general human cognitive enhancement could help AGI alignment if it were at scale before AGI, but the cognitive enhancements on offer seem like we probably won't get very much out of them before AGI, and they absolutely don't suffice to 'keep up' with AGI for more than a few weeks or months (as AI R&D efforts rapidly improve AI while human brains remain similar, rendering human-AI cyborg basically AI systems). So benefit from those channels, especially for something like BCI, has to add value mainly by making better initial decisions, like successfully aligning early AGI, rather than staying competitive. On the other hand, advanced AGI can quickly develop technologies like whole brain emulation (likely more potent than BCI by far).

BCI as a direct tool for alignment I don't think makes much sense. Giving advanced AGI read-write access to human brains doesn't seem like the thing to do with an AI that you don't trust. On the other hand, an AGI that is trying to help you will have a great understanding of what you're trying to communicate through speech. Bottlenecks look to me more like they lie in human thinking speeds, not communication bandwidth.

BCI might provide important mind-reading or motivational changes (e.g. US and PRC leaders being able to verify they were respectively telling the truth about an AGI treaty), but big cognitive enhancement through that route seems tricky in developed adult brains: much of the variation in human cognitive abilities goes through early brain development (e.g. genes expressed then).

Genetic engineering sorts of things would take decades to have an effect, so are only relevant for bets on long timelines for AI.

Human brain emulation is an alternative path to AGI, but suffers from the problem that understanding pieces of the brain (e.g. the algorithms of cortical columns) could enable neuroscience-inspired AGI before emulation of specific human minds. That one seems relatively promising as a thing to try to do with early AGI, and can go further than the others (as emulations could be gradually enhanced further into enormous superintelligent human-derived minds, and at least sped up and copied with more computing hardware).

What level of taxation do you think would delay timelines by even one year?

With effective compute for AI doubling more than once per year, a global 100% surtax on GPUs and AI ASICs seems like it would be a difference of only months to AGI timelines.

This is the terrifying tradeoff, that delaying for months after reaching near-human-level AI (if there is safety research that requires studying AI around there or beyond) is plausibly enough time for a capabilities explosion (yielding arbitrary economic and military advantage, or AI takeover) by a more reckless actor willing to accept a larger level of risk, or making an erroneous/biased risk estimate. AI models selected to yield results while under control that catastrophically take over when they are collectively capable would look like automating everything was largely going fine (absent vigorous probes) until it doesn't, and mistrust could seem like paranoia.

 

I'd very much like to see this done with standard high-quality polling techniques, e.g. while airing counterarguments (like support for expensive programs that looks like majority but collapses if higher taxes to pay for them is mentioned). In particular, how the public would react given different views coming from computer scientists/government commissions/panels.

This is like saying there's no value to learning about and stopping a nuclear attack from killing you because you might get absolutely no benefit from not being killed then, and being tipped off about a threat trying to kill you, because later the opponent might kill you with nanotechnology before you can prevent it.

Removing intentional deception or harm greatly increases the capability of AIs that can be worked with without getting killed, to further improve safety measures. And as I said actually being able to show a threat to skeptics is immensely better for all solutions, including relinquishment, than controversial speculation.

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