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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   32007 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient.

Held by whom?

As someone directly involved in the design and development of ML algorithms, Yudkowsky's blind faith in the inevitability of omniscient/super-intelligent AI has always felt like the rationalist equivalent of "and then a miracle occurs". Sure, if A through E then possibly F, but that's all in theory, and even if we get to E, F is by no means a given.

Nah, the assumption here is "and then no miracle occurs".

If we're really improbably lucky, then we do get a miracle: the level of intelligence required for an ape to create civilization (i.e. the point we're basically still at, because the millennia of memetic evolution afterward has grossly outraced the eon of genetic evolution beforehand) turns out to be essentially the same as the maximum level of intelligence achievable by any technology. AI could pass the C3PO "somewhat annoying but helpful" level, but it couldn't possibly pass the Data "better at math but wouldn't clearly be better in command" level. All those log(N) curves turn out to actually be logistic(N) in the limit, and human thinking remains relevant indefinitely after all.

Even if we develop proper reasoning engines within the next 5-10 years, there is still a big leap to be made between basic reason and a truly general intelligence, much less general intelligence to super intelligence, and an even bigger jump from "super intelligence" to "omniscience".

And that's without considering Yudowsky and Altman's wider body of quasi-religious pronouncements.

There's a difference between this and "it becomes omniscient somehow" and other rationalist religious exclamations.

Could you cite "it becomes omniscient somehow" from a rationalist?

Does the OP count?

The one opposing "everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community"? The opposition itself isn't a deal-breaker (though it's clearly at least a non-central example), but the word choices to maximize emotional reaction at the expense of clarity are.

I was hoping someone would at least point out an interesting source being paraphrased. You see ML papers that talk about the infinite-width limit of neural networks, and sometimes that's just for a proof by contradiction (as OP appears to be attempting, to be fair), and sometimes it leads to math that applies asymptotically in finite-width networks ... but you can see how after a couple rounds of playing Telephone it might be read as "stupid ML cult thinks they're gonna have infinitely powerful computers!"

I quoted Scott below, but yes, everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community. My post is taking one of their tenets seriously and seeing the implications. My sense is that they won't be particularly happy with such implications. Of course, part of the bit is exposing that many many people don't believe their tenets, surfacing that disagreement, with a clear application of how it contrasts with their other claims.

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