Except at the time “farmers will be broke” would have meant “everyone will be broke” because most of the labor force was farming. Instead, farmers became a tiny part of the economy while food became increasingly abundant. Tractors were a good thing, on balance. The commenter is saying that a similar shift will happen.
I tend to think that if alignment can be solved, AI will improve the wellbeing of humanity in a way nothing ever has. But I don’t know if we can solve alignment and it might kill us all.
I'm not entirely sure what we're supposed to take from this. Are you saying that they are not actually AI experts, and we're returning to the claim that only people who do not understand the tech are concerned about these risks? That's a stretch.
Or is it a new move:
- people with safety concerns just don’t understand the tech.
- “here’s a list of people with safety concerns who demonstrably do understand the tech very well”
- Those particular experts are bad people so we shouldn't listen to them.
I'm really not committed to a side of this debate, and if I check my own bias, it's probably on the Steven Pinker "progress is good" side of things. I just keep hearing bad arguments from the AI-optimist side, and your comment is just another example.
I was actually thinking of a podcast interview I just listened to that Sam Harris did with Marc Andreessen, so just one person over the course of a long conversation.
One of the guys who invented back propagation, Geoffrey Hinton, for one. Of the three people who won the Turing Award for AI research, two are sounding the alarm. Hinton said he’s most concerned about the existential risk.
About “pandering to authority”, I keep seeing this move in debates:
- people with safety concerns just don’t understand the tech.
- “here’s a list of people with safety concerns who demonstrably do understand the tech very well”
- you’re pandering to authority.
A related move:
- greater intelligence leads to greater concern for universal values.
- “here’s a list of very intelligent people who disagree”
- there are a lot of very intelligent people in cults too, you know.
I don’t think I’m a doomer but they do seem more coherent than the people saying there’s no cause for concern.
I think this comes down to how we're using the words "we". Galileo transformed how "we" see the world, but not a whole lot of people at the time appreciated the implications of what he was saying. I think we need to keep looking for ways to answer the big questions because it elevates us. But it's often unevenly distributed in space and time, unfortunately.
Basically, I'm saying that the search for alien life is just science, and if you believe in curiosity-motivated science, there's no reason to single that out. Unless you're worried about alien malware, which isn't a crazy thing to be worried about https://youtu.be/st9EJg_t6yc
Looking for aliens is worthwhile because discovering alien life would transform how we see the universe and ourselves, not because it’s easy. That’s like saying the more one looks for fundamental physics the less worthwhile it is. We would never have built a particle accelerator with that attitude. You can extend it to all of science. Why look for anything hard?
I vacillate between excitement for the future and fear that people like Kaczynski are right (not the violence, obviously). It often does feel as though the direction of technological progress is independent of what is best for the wellbeing of humanity.
Years of auto and oil industry propaganda has deluded people into equating freedom of movement with car ownership. My freedom of movement is violated when the subway isn’t moving. For people on a bus stuck in traffic, their freedom of movement is violated by a government that incentivizes car ownership and creates gridlock. As a cyclist, my freedom of movement is violated by reckless drivers putting my life at risk, supported by a government captured by the auto industry, failing to build real infrastructure that enables that freedom the way it does for car owners. Not only car owners pay taxes, by the way. Particularly in Manhattan.
This is the advantage of self driving. If there is an error it gets fixed for all cars in the fleet. Humans have bugs - we get bored, we get distracted, we get angry, we thrill seek, etc - and we’ll never fix our bugs. Nor should we. Any technology that requires humans to be perfect all the time to be safe is an inhuman technology. I think people will look back at fully human drive cars, and the death rate we tolerate from it, with disbelief.
The argument is: "we are intelligent and seem to be able to build new intelligences of a certain kind. If we are able to build a new intelligence that itself is able to self improve, and having improved be able to improve further, than an intelligence explosion is possible." That may or not be fallacious reasoning but I don't see how it's religious. As far as I can tell, the religious perspective would be the one that believes that there's something fundamentally special about the human brain so that it cannot be simulated.
You can also ask that question about the other side. I suppose we need to look closely at the arguments. I think we’re in a situation where we as a species don’t know the answer to this question. We go on the internet looking for an answer but some questions don’t yet have a definitive answer. So all we can do is follow the debate.
There are multiple risks that people talk about, the most interesting is the intelligence explosion. In that scenario we end up with a super intelligence. I don’t feel confident in my ability to asses the likelihood of that happening, but assuming it is possible, thinking through the consequences is a very interesting exercise. Imagining the capabilities of an alien super intelligence is like trying to imagine a 4th spatial dimension. It can only be approached with analogies. Can it be “switched off”. Maybe not, if it was motivated to prevent itself from being switched off. My dog seems to think she can control my behavior in various predictable ways, like sitting or putting her paw on my leg, and sometimes it works. But if I have other things I care about in that moment, things that she is completely incapable of understanding, then who is actually in control becomes very obvious.
I actually do hope you're right. I've been looking forward to an AI future my whole life and would prefer to not now be worrying about existential risk. It reminds me of when people started talking about how the LHC might create a blackhole and swallow the earth. But I have more confidence in the theories that convinced people it was nearly impossible to occur than what we're seeing now.
Everyone engages in motivated reasoning. The psychoanalysis you provide for Hinton could easily be spun in the opposite direction: a man who spent his entire adult life and will go down in history as "the godfather of" neural networks surely would prefer for that to have been a good thing. Which would then give him even more credibility. But these are just stories we tell about people. It's the arguments we should be focused on.
I don't think "how AI doom is supposed to happen" is all that big of a mystery. The question is simply: "is an intelligence explosion possible"? If the answer is no, then OK, let's move on. If the answer is "maybe", then all the chatter about AI alignment and safety should be taken seriously, because it's very difficult to know how safe a super intelligence would be.
I’ll have to dig it up but the last interview I saw with him, he was focused more on existential risk from the potential for super intelligence, not just misuse.
Hinton said that the ability to explain a joke was among the first things that made him reassess their capabilities. Not the only thing. You make it sound as though Hinton is obviously clueless yet there are few people with deeper knowledge and more experience working with neural networks. People told him he was crazy for thinking neural networks could do anything useful, now it seems people are calling his crazy for the reverse. I’m genuinely confused about this.
I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?
Curious, have you seen examples of someone convincing it of something clearly wrong? Think I’ve seen examples of that with gpt3 but not 4 that I can recall.
Chomsky's linguistics is a topic that I'm endlessly fascinated by and also too dumb to really grok (there are a lot of topics like that, it's kind of a curse). Love to get some good explanations/resources if anyone has any.
It's the maximum speed of causality, not the speed at which all things are caused. The speed limit of causality. If the rest of the theory of relativity was correct but there wasn't a maximum speed, then it would be possible for an effect to precede the cause. Relativity got rid of absolute simultaneity but some things still need to happen in a certain order. I think when people say "speed of causality" the "maximum" bit is implied.
I asked it what season of Community is referred to as “the year of the gas leak”. It answered season 2. I said “that’s incorrect”. It apologized and said that it’s really season 3. “Still wrong”. “I apologize, the year of the gas leak is season 4. Multiple episodes in season four refer to the gas leak”. I pointed out that it was part right, and it confidently corrected itself, now the year of the gas leak is season 5.
Fans of the show know that the correct answer is season 4, but it’s a joke starting in season 5 about Dan Harmon not being the show runner for a year and whatever happened in season 4 can be ignored. I’m pretty sure I found the Reddit thread that would have created the confusion.
I definitely don’t want to say that choosing family over work isn’t the optimal path to happiness. My point is that decisions are largely made on emotion, and we’re bad at remembering past emotion.
I suspect that a lot of deathbed regrets about not spending enough time with your kids is for the benefit of the kids. Who would say “I’m glad I didn’t spent all that much time with you and your siblings. Frankly. I had better things to do.”
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t spend more time with your family. I’m saying that we should give our past selves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their decision making, whatever your present self decides to do. It’s just an argument against regret.
I really like this, but to to add an alternate perspective: I’m skeptical of deathbed regrets, and regrets in general. I don’t think your present self actually knows what your past self went through. We remember events but are bad at remembering emotions except in very broad, general ways. You might say “I wish I had spent more time with my kids and less time at work”. But you won’t remember the feeling of dissatisfaction you had with your home life and the pride you felt when you delivered on a difficult project. You could say “I wish I was more satisfied with my home life” but how much control do you have over that, really?
I don’t remember where I heard this: “every person you see is fighting a battle that you know nothing about, so be kind, always”. I think we can extend that same kindness to ourselves.
Have you considered moving to a big city, even if it’s not in the US, which I know is your preference? It won’t fix all your problems but having more opportunities professionally and romantically might change your outlook somewhat. You’re in the prime years to catch all the people exiting their first marriage, but not if you’re in a town with a dozen people in it.
I also fall into patterns of depression even though I’m married and doing fine professionally. I know someone here said that therapy is a very “American answer” but the fact is that for most of us the depression comes first and the reasons come later. You very well could get everything you want and be worse off because now you have no answer for why you feel the way you do. At least now you have some goals to work towards.