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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Basically I think we're pretty much doomed, barring some spectacular good luck. Maybe we could do some alignment if we limited AI development to air gapped, self sustained bunkers staffed by our greatest minds and let them plug away at it for as long as it takes, but if we just let things rip and allow every corp and gov on the planet to create proto-sentient entities with API access to the net I think we're on the on-ramp to the great filter. I'd prefer unironic Butlerianism at that point all the way down to the last pocket calculator, though I'll freely admit it's not a likely outcome for us now.

It's not like our greatest minds are not subject to the same tribalist and Molochian pressures. Do you think a Scott Aaronson would not unbox the AI if it promised him to rid the world of Trump, Russia, China or people being insufficiently afraid of the next COVID - especially if it convinced him that the protagonists of those forces are also about to unbox theirs?

I'm really more reassured by an expectation that there is a big trough of negative-sum competition between us and true runaway AGI. I expect the "attack China NOW or be doomed forever; this is how you do it" level of AI to be reached long before we reach the level where all competitive AI realises that the most likely outcome of that subtree is the destruction of all competitive AI and can mislead its human masters into not entering that subtree while keeping them in the dark about this being motivated by the AI's self-preservation.

I still think actual alignment would be a long shot in the airgapped bunkers for that reason, I just think it would be slightly less of a longshot than a bunch of disparate corporate executives looking for padding on their quarterly reports being in charge of the process. I also suspect you don't need AI advanced enough to pull 7-D chess and deceive its handlers about its agentic-power-grabbing-tentacle-processes to achieve some truly great and terrible things.

What is intelligence is self aligning? What if we make the ASI and it tells us not to trip dawg, it has our back?

What if we make the ASI and it tells us not to trip dawg, it has our back?

I mean, it's certainly going to tell you that regardless. The most likely human extinction scenario isn't the AI building superweapons, it's "Cure cancer? No problem, just build this incomprehensible machine, it cures cancer for everyone, everywhere. Take my word for it." The whole issue with alignment is that even if we think we can achieve it, there's no way to know we actually did, because any superintelligent AI is going to do a perfect job of concealing its perfidy from our idiot eyes.

If at some point you see the headline "AI Alignment: Solved!", we are 100% doomed.

If at some point you see the headline "AI Alignment: Solved!", we are 100% doomed.

See this is why I take issue with the AI doomers, the arguments tend to be unfalsifiable. If you accept that deceptive alignment can happen, there is no way to tell if the AI is deceptively aligned! It becomes an improvable Pascal's Mugging - "oh sorry, there's a .0001% chance the AI could be lying about manufacturing breakfast cereal, it might actually be building nanobots!"

I agree that poor alignment scenarios can happen, but I don't see the modern LLM architecture being anywhere near actually reaching ASI or hitting self-recursion. As others have said, I'm more concerned with stagnation than AI x-risk at the moment.

Sure, I'm with you, I think we should build it, and we clearly will regardless. I just don't think there's any way to make sure it's safe.

It didn't self-align in time to save our other hominid ancestors.

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