Could we have predicted Russia's intention to invade Ukraine earlier? Back in August 2021 the energy prices in Europe doubled and stayed at this level until the start of hostilites: Bloomberg, August 5th 2021 This, of course, did not go unnoticed. Many, many articles were written about it. Shockingly, a...
This post aims to convince you that AI alignment risk is over-weighted and over-invested- in. > A further consideration is that sometimes people argue that all of this futurist speculation about AI is really dumb, and that its errors could be readily explained by experts who can’t be bothered to...
This is a good one and the timing suggests it is true at least in the short term. The Olympics only started in Feb ‘22 though. Do we have any indication that China made Putin wait for several months?
Could we have predicted Russia's intention to invade Ukraine earlier? Back in August 2021 the energy prices in Europe doubled and stayed at this level until the start of hostilites:
This, of course, did not go unnoticed. Many, many articles were written about it. Shockingly, a wide range of unsubstantiated theories for the rise were presented in these, often with a suggestion that carbon taxes or decarbonisation was the root cause.
Actually, the root cause was an increase in natural gas prices. This was obvious at the time to anyone who knows how the energy market price is determined:
I guess my point is that individual humans are already misaligned with humanity’s best interests. If each human had the power to cause extinction at will, would we survive long enough for one of them to do it by accident?
To the extent that reinforcement models could damage the world or become a self-replicating plague, they will do so much earlier in the takeoff when given direct aligned reward for doing so.
Consider someone consistently giving each new AI release the instructions “become superintelligent and then destroy humanity”. This is not the control problem, but doing this will surely manifest x-risk behaviour at least some degree earlier than when given innocuous instructions?
A thoughtful decomposition. If we take the time dimension out and consider AGI just appears ready-to-go I think I would directionally agree with this.
My key assertion is that we will get sub-AGI capable of causing meaningful harm when deliberately used for this purpose significantly ahead of getting full AGI capable of causing meaningful harm through misalignment. I should unpack that a little more:
This post aims to convince you that AI alignment risk is over-weighted and over-invested- in.
A further consideration is that sometimes people argue that all of this futurist speculation about AI is really dumb, and that its errors could be readily explained by experts who can’t be bothered to seriously engage with these questions. - Future Fund
The biggest existential risk to humanity on this road is not that well-meaning researchers will ask a superhuman AGI for something good and inadvertently get something bad. If only this were the case!
No, the real existential risk is the same as it has always been: humans deliberately using power stupidly, selfishly or both.
Look, the road to AGI... (read 483 more words →)
This is a fair point. I don’t know what economic cost Russia paid by reducing gas nor if they could expect to make that up by shipping more later on. Perhaps this was a relatively low-cost and sensible extension of the military positioning.
I guess I have updated to: could we have known that Putin was fully-prepared for war and making a credible threat of invasion. I didn’t really see discussion of that so early, and would still love to find sources that did so.
Also: a threat implies demands, negotiation. If we think in these terms, did Putin make genuinely fulfilled demands that would have avoided the war? Or was he driven by internal needs?