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Have you read any yud or lesswrong writing on AI safety? They put a lot of effort into addressing the exact concerns you've laid out, in a way that you don't seem to acknowledge. But leaving that - why though? Why will the competent people find a solution? It's clear how we are able to find a solution to, e.g. nuclear weapons, religious conflict, etc. But AI will be - it's argued - not a simple mechanism we can intelligence and coordinate around, but smart on its own. As a random example - what is the political solution to "AIs now control the global economy"? The AIs are going to be the one "finding solutions", not "human politicians". You can't psychologize your way around a gun to your head, and no amount of "you're just scared its ok the grownups will handle it" will physically prevent the complexity of AI!
Yes, yes, very smart people disagree with me. Your argument is to handwave me at the vast canon of AI scribbling? I've read the big ones, and they are as unconvincing as they are hysterical. It's a very specific style, one I recognize well from my upbringing in a millennial faith-healing cult. It all sounds very convincing, if you haven't been down this road before.
What I mean is that ... questions like "we've solved lots of problems before, AI will be fine" and "there will be a disaster, we will notice it, and then politicans will solve it" are things that people have written dozens of essays debating. It's like talking to someone here about race and genetics here and just saying "races aren't real. it's a distribution, not a category. and stereotyping is bigoted". Everyone here has heard that before, and hundreds of people have written up hundreds of paragraphs about why it's false. Maybe it's still true in some way, but that point is best made by addressing those arguments in some way, not just saying them.
Yeah, how so precisely? Again, it'd be much more interesting to read about why yud's arguments are wrong than "hurr its a cult you are being manipulated accept my social pressure instead of theirs"
The big danger is not AI, it's people who want to use AI to make a shit-ton of profit. The flip-side of the Fairy Godmother AI that will be so smart it will solve all the intractable problems that unaided humanity could never solve, and provide Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism for all, is of course the Paperclip AI that will do away with us all (and that only if we're lucky, otherwise it's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream for all).
(Side note here: congratulations, rationalists, you have managed to re-invent God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell, all over again even while wondering how anybody can possibly believe in religion's view of the afterlife).
So people who desperately want Fairy Godmother AI have to grapple with the possibility of Paperclip AI.
I don't accept the problem in those terms. I don't think we're ever going to get superhumanly smart AI that can be its own agent with its own goals any time near, if at all.
What I do think we will get is 'good enough' AI that private enterprises and governments will try exploiting just for that tiny edge. If trading fortunes can be made and lost on microsecond decisions, why not use your patented money-tree AI to make nanosecond decisions? Why not use AI for the social welfare and health care problems of triage that currently are being tried out by insurance companies about "ring up our hotline and some half-trained person running off a script will decide if you qualify to go see a doctor"?
We'll hand over decision making powers to dumb machines in order to make money, and we'll fuck ourselves up in the process. That's the risk, not a god-level intelligence AI deciding it wants to get rid of its monkey masters and tile the universe with NFTs.
Now, if you can solve the problem of "humans: we're still greedy, dumb monkeys fighting each other over who gets the bananas", then we won't have the problem of "uh-oh, we fucked up how our civilisation works". That's why I think "we must solve the problem of getting AI aligned with our morals/values!" is the wrong track to take; humans won't even align with our own morals/values, and besides, "fuck over that guy so I can get more bananas" is completely compatible with how we act morally/express our values, so if the AI aligns with that, why be surprised what results?
Yes, and handing over all the levers of society to very intelligent machines is bad. Why will the machines be dumb forever? Even if they are dumb at first, they'll become smarter, and quickly, because - see DL progress and theory of computation.
Yeah, this is the main issue! Why? Even ignoring object-level arguments - look how rapidly technology has advanced over the past 200 years, does that just ... stop?
Yeah. I think there are hard limits in the physical universe. I have no freakin' idea how human consciousness arose, and there are plenty of people willing to argue that no such a thing exists. So "we will get AI being conscious because magic happens" is not sufficiently convincing to me.
... but there's clearly a lower-bound of humans, and the wide variation in human intelligence incredibly strongly suggests that we're not right up against a cap of any kind. And even without that, you haven't actually said anything beyond "physical limits exist". It's 1800 - "we will never make anything faster than horses. Physical Limits Exist!"
nobody said 'conscious', i have no idea what you mean by conscious, it's a term that, in this context, has 500 different meanings, most of which are only loosely related. just 'intelligent and capable'
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we literally do have jetpacks and flying cars lol. They're just not that useful in general use-cases relative to existing technology.
how is AI in a different situation from humans here, humans have 'enough data' as it is
if we accept all of this, it'll take ~ 200 years for superhuman AGI to happen though? That still has the same outcome!
human lives and writing? There are billions of them, and if it literally required a camera on a hundred million AR glasses, which it won't, that could easily happen.
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