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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   32188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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I don't think they actually have insight into what a more intelligent person would do, particularly in the context of greater intelligence leading to better decision making.

Ah yes, sorry, if you stick to intelligence as being more about "how well you perform on the SAT" then I tend to agree. But of course in real life that's only part of what effects outcomes, which curves back around to some of my perspective on AI.

I think that's more expertise than intelligence. Not always easy to disentangle, though.

Right. I mean, think about it from the AI perspective. The AI would have no intelligence without education, because being trained on data is all that it is. A computer chip isn't intelligent at all. I don't think that directly analogizes to humans, but you see my point.

the entire point of creating a superintelligent AI is that it's able to apply intelligence in a way that is otherwise impossible

I think in the popular discourse (not accusing you of this, although I think it rubs off a bit on all of us, me included) there's a bit of a motte-and-bailey here. Because AIs like this have already been built (decades ago) to do complex things like "missile interception" that would be impossible to do with manual human control. So the idea of what a superintelligence constitutes wobbles back and forth between a very literal deus ex machina and "something better performing than a human" - which of course we already have.

So I would say that it is possible to make a "superhuman AI" whose actions are predictable (generally). But I would agree with you that it is also possible to make a superhuman AI whose decisions are unpredictable. I just don't think "able to score on the SAT better than humans" or what have you necessarily translates out to unpredictability.

One is that humans don't seem to want to coordinate to increase the amount of uncertainty any AI would experience.

I mean I do think that humans are helpfully coordinating to increase the amount of uncertainty other humans experience, which rolls over to AI.

Perhaps our defenses against this superintelligent AI working around these barriers would be sufficient, perhaps not. It's intrinsically hard to predict when going up against something much more intelligent than you. And that's the problem.

Sure. I just tend to think in some ways it is easier to "keep the location of our SSBNs hidden" and "not put missile defenses around our AI superclusters" than it is to "correctly ensure that these billions of lines of code are all going to behave correctly," if that makes sense.

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