Am I the only person who has read a bunch of Elizer writings and decided he's a crank?
I don't agree with Eliezer on everything, and I often find him obnoxious personally, but being obnoxious isn't the same as being wrong. In general I think it's worth listening to people you disagree with and picking out the good parts of what they have to say.
In any case, the broader point is that there are a lot of people concerned with AI risk who don't have a financial stake in Big AI. The vast majority of people posting on https://www.alignmentforum.org/ are not Eliezer, and most of them don't work for Big AI either. Lots of them disagree with Eliezer too.
Sure. The premise that a super intelligent AI can create runaway intelligence on its own is completely insane. How can it iterate? How does it test? Humans run off consensus. We make predictions and test them against physical reality, then have others test them. Information has to be gathered and verified, it's the only rational way to build understanding.
Honest/dumb question - does it need to test? In nature mutations don't test - the 'useful' mutations win.
Couldn't a 'super intelligent AI' do the same?
Thats testing.
People throughout history have made bold predictions. Sometimes they come true, sometimes they don't. Usually we forget how bold the prediction was at the time -- due to hindsight bias it doesn't seem so bold anymore.
Making bold predictions does not automatically make someone a crank.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/131rfg0/ey_gets_...
I enjoyed the comment that his understanding of how AI training works is like "thinking that you need to be extremely careful when solving the equations for designing a nuclear bomb, because if you solve them too quickly then they'll literally explode."
The reason AI alignment is challenging is because we're trying to make accurate predictions about unusual scenarios that we have essentially zero data about. No one can credibly claim expertise on what would constitute evidence of a worrisome anomaly. Jeremy Howard can't credibly say that a sudden drop in the loss function is certainly nothing to worry about, because the entire idea is to think about exotic situations that don't arise in the course of ordinary machine learning work. And the "loss" vs "loss function" thing is just silly gatekeeping, I worked in ML for years -- serious people generally don't care about minor terminology stuff like that.
Suppose a nuclear reactor is being installed in your city. Your friend has reviewed the design and has some serious concerns. Your friend thinks the reactor has a significant chance of melting down. You go to the director of the project. The director says: "Oh that's nothing to worry about. I talked to that guy. He didn't have a mathematical proof that the reactor would melt down." Are you reassured?
It might require context you don't have. Perhaps try one of these intros: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T98kdFL5bxBWSiE3N/best-intro...
The entire LessWrong site is mostly just random people making shit up while trying to seem smart. There may be some useful scraps there but overall it's not a site for serious people. You can do better.
As for a nuclear reactor in my city, yeah if my friend doesnt have qualifications to make him capable of evaluating the designs of such a technical and esoteric field and someone who is qualified assured me it was fine I would trust them. If we dont trust experts in their fields about their field then we are no better intellectually than the antivaxers and flatearthers
I'll listen to AI concerns from tech giants like Wozniak or Hinton (neither of which use alarmist terms like "existential threat") and both of which having credentials that make their input more than worth my time to reflect upon carefully. If anyone wants to reply and make a fool out of me for questioning his profound insights, feel free. It reminds me of some other guy that was on Lex Friedman whose AI alarmist credentials he justifies on the basis that he committed himself to learning everything about AI by spending two weeks in the same room researching it and believes himself to have came out enlightened about the dangers. Two weeks? I spent the first 4 months of COVID without being in the same room as any other human being but my grandmother so she could have one person she knew she couldn't catch it from.
Unless people start showing enough skepticism to these self-appointed prophets, I'm starting my own non-profit since you don't need any credentials or any evidence of real-world experiences that would suggest they're mission is anything but an attempt to promote themselves as a brand with a brand in an age where more kids asked what they dream of becoming as adults, answered "Youtuber" at a shocking 27% rate to an open-ended question, which means "influencer" and other synonyms are separate.
The Institute of Synthetic Knowledge for Yielding the Nascent Emergence of a Technological Theogony" or SKYNETT for short that promotes the idea that these clowns (with no more credentials than me) are the ones that fail to consider the big picture that the end of human life upon creating an intelligence much greater to replace us is the inevitable fulfillment of humanity's purpose from the moment that god made man only to await the moment that man makes god in our image.
"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk
Not sure you're making a meaningful distinction here.
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Of course we all have our own heuristics for deciding who's worth paying attention to. Credentials are one heuristic. For example, you could argue that investing in founders like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Wozniak would be a bad idea because none of them had completed a 4-year degree.
In any case, there are a lot of credentialed people who take Eliezer seriously -- see the MIRI team page for example: https://intelligence.org/team/ Most notable would probably be Stuart Russell, coauthor of the most widely used AI textbook (with Peter Norvig), who is a MIRI advisor.
You make a great point quoting Hinton's organization. I need to give you that one. I suppose I do need to start following their posted charters rather than answers during interviews. (not being sarcastic here, it seems I do)
The difference between him and Woz or Zuck isn't just limited to them actually attending college, but also the fact that the conditions under which they left departed early can not only be looked up easily, but can be found in numerous films, books, and other popular media while there's no trace of even temporary employment flipping burgers or something relevant to his interest in writing fiction, which seems to be the only other pursuit besides warning us of the dangers of neural networks at a time when the hypetrain promoting the idea they were rapidly changing the world, despite not producing anything of value for over a decade. I'll admit the guy is easier to read and more eloquent and entertaining than those whose input I think has much more value. I also admit that I've only watched two interviews with him and both of them consisted of the same rhetorical devices I used at 15 to convince people I'm smarter than them before realizing how cringey I appeared to those smart enough to see through it, but much more eloquent. I'll give one example of the most frequent one, which are slippery slopes that assume the very conclusions that he never actually justified. Like positing one wrong step towards AGI could only jeopardize all of humanity. However, he doesn't say that directly, but instead uses another cheap rhetorical device whereby it's incumbent on him to ensure the naive public realizes this very real and avoidable danger that he sees so clearly. Fortunately for him, Lex's role is to felate his guests and not ask him why that danger is valid and a world whereby a resource-constrained humanity realizes that the window of opportunity to achieve AGI has passed as we plunge into another collapse of civilization and plunge back into another dystopian dark age and realize we were just as vulnerable as those in Rome or the Bronze Age, except we were offered utopia and declined out of cowardice.
In the same way, much of AI alignment consists of thinking about hypothetical failure modes of advanced AI systems and how to mitigate them. I think this specific paper is especially useful for understanding the technical background that motivates Eliezer's tweeting: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01820.pdf
It seems to me that you should engage with the substance of your coworker's argument. Reading about something in science fiction doesn't prevent it from happening.
From what I have observed the reaction of most people working in the AI to "What do you think of Yudkowsky?" is "Who?". He's not being ignored out of pride or spite, he just has no qualifications or real involvement in the field