Which is funny because there is at least one situation where robin reasons from first principles instead of taking the outside view (cryonics comes to mind). I'm not sure why he really doesn't want to go through the arguments from first principles for AGI.
GPT-2 does not - probably, very probably, but of course nobody on Earth knows what's actually going on in there - does not in itself do something that amounts to checking possible pathways through time/events/causality/environment to end up in a preferred destination class despite variation in where it starts out.
A blender may be very good at blending apples, that doesn't mean it has a goal of blending apples.
A blender that spit out oranges as unsatisfactory, pushed itself off the kitchen counter, stuck wires into electrical sockets in order to burn open your produce door, grabbed some apples, and blended those apples, on more than one occasion in different houses or with different starting conditions, would much more get me to say, "Well, that thing probably had some consequentialism-nature in it, about something that cashed out to blending apples" because it ended up at highly similar destinations from different starting points in a way that is improbable if nothing is navigating Time.
It doesn't seem crazy to me that a GPT type architecture with the "Stack More Layers" could eventually model the world well enough to simulate consequentialist plans - i.e given a prompt like:
"If you are a blender with legs in environment X, what would you do to blend apples?" and provide a continuation with a detailed plan like the above (and GPT4/5 etc with more compute giving slightly better plans - maybe eventually at a superhuman level)
It also seems like it could do this kind of consequentialist thinking without itself having any "goals" to pursue. I'm expecting the response to be one of the following, but I'm not sure which:
Small world, I guess :) I knew I heard this type of argument before, but I couldn't remember the name of it.
So it seems like the grabby aliens model contradicts the doomsday argument unless one of these is true:
Thanks for the great writeup (and the video). I think I finally understand the gist of the argument now.
The argument seems to raise another interesting question about the grabby aliens part.
He's using the hypothesis of grabby aliens to explain away the model's low probability of us appearing early (and I presume we're one of these grabby aliens). But this leads to a similar problem: Robin Hanson (or anyone reading this) has a very low probability of appearing this early amongst all the humans to ever exist.
This low probability would also require a similar hypothesis to explain away. The only way to explain that is some hypothesis where he's not actually that early amongst the total humans to ever exist which means we turn out not to be "grabby"?
This seems like one the problems with anthropic reasoning arguments and I'm unsure how seriously to take them.
There doesn't seem to be many surveys of the general population on doom type scenarios. Most of them seem to be based on bias/weapons type scenario. You could look at something like metaculus but I don't think that's representative of the general population.
Here's a breakdown of AI researchers: https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/ (median /mean of extinction is 5%/14%)
US Public: https://governanceai.github.io/US-Public-Opinion-Report-Jan-2019/general-attitudes-toward-ai.html (12% of americans think it will be "extremely bad i.e extinction)
Based on the very weak data above, it doesn't seem like a huge divergence of opinion specifially for x-risk