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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Pascal's Mugging is about a probability which is acknowledged to be negligible, which the mugger asserts should still be sufficient for you to pay up given expected value. I don't see how you're getting that out of any actual proponent of AI safety.

Are you just conflating "we don't understand what we're doing so we can't know that it won't kill us" to "we can't know that it won't kill us", analogous to "we can't know God doesn't exist"? Because the argument from Yudkowsky et al is more like "the default outcome is 'it kills us', as the default outcome for bridge-building is 'it falls down', and we have no idea what we're doing, ergo we're fucked".

As @Harlequin5942 points out below, this is what Scott Alexander calls the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy.

Now - did Scott just make this up yesterday to argue with Tyler Cowen? Perhaps….

Personally I agree with you, not because it’s a pascals mugging but because my intuition is that risks from AI are a safer bet than risks from our current path.

Scott implicitly admits to having named it for that piece (in the caption of the first image).

Pascal's Mugging is about a probability which is acknowledged to be negligible, which the mugger asserts should still be sufficient for you to pay up given expected value. I don't see how you're getting that out of any actual proponent of AI safety.

Are you just conflating "we don't understand what we're doing so we can't know that it won't kill us" to "we can't know that it won't kill us", analogous to "we can't know God doesn't exist"? Because the argument from Yudkowsky et al is more like "the default outcome is 'it kills us', as the default out

Additionally, human extinction is (presumably) towards the tail end of a spectrum of possible negative outcomes of unaligned AGI. Outcomes where AGIs cause massive economic/envirionment/biological/social damage are also possible. They also could be more likely: "Why don't we just turn it off?" is not a sensible question if the harmful AGI is the equivalent of crack (or the internet).

Additionally, human extinction is (presumably) towards the tail end of a spectrum of possible negative outcomes of unaligned AGI.

It's on said spectrum, and it's one of the more negative possibilities (the worst is S-risk i.e. "AI tortures everyone for a very long time"). I see no reason to think that implies it's low-probability (which is implicit in calling something a tail). Something can just be terrible, it doesn't have to be moderate most of the time.

The problem with your "everything is mildly shit and we can't co-ordinate to turn the AI off" scenario is that if the AI doesn't care about humans existing then this isn't an endpoint - it's an influence war that sooner or later ends with either the AI being turned off or the AI gaining sufficient control to murder us all.

I see no reason to think that implies it's low-probability (which is implicit in calling something a tail).

Sorry, I should have specified "tail end of the utility spectrum." As you suggest, a very negative utility event can be very likely. In the case of AI, I don't think that precise probability estimates (or even confidence about the sample space) is sensible, but my point was that there are a lot of bad things that can happen short of human extinction.

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