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Can you clarify your reasons for joining the doomer camp? To be honest, I've been immensely disappointed by both sides of the debate, it feels like only randos on Twitter are clear-headed about it. Hinton with the *shocked* realization that his algorithms do work better than their biological counterparts, ridiculous naysayers who rely on shallow zingers and psychologizing, policy suits squawking over their sinecures, and the confused, exploited mob in the middle.
I think my perspective is clear enough. I don't care about stuff like muh spear-phishing and faked voices because it's just noise. I don't buy technical doom narratives out of Yuddist camp because they're bad Sci-Fi and crumble under scrutiny. I don't feel fear from the technically semi-literate ones («optimality», «instrumental convergence» stuff) because dangerously diverging designs yet capability-preserving designs are speculative and don't really make economic sense even at early steps. I don't worry about hacking, bioweapons and other serious problems based on amplification of human malice because they ought to be trivially surmountable with tool AIs of comparable level. In general, all AI doom plots just keep reinventing Bostrom's idea of a Singleton arising in a technically primitive world which is, of course, defenseless against it, and this isn't how this is playing out so far.
But above all, I have faith in the human will to power. We are not economic agents, we are apes. We rise to the top driven by the desire to see tiny apes below. This is both a blessing and a curse: the Tech Lords (or the government that expropriates their genies) are not willing to cede power to a glorified Microsoft Clippy, no matter how much better it gets at doing their own jobs. It's a curse because the top apes may not see much point, long-term, to preserving the proles in their current numbers and standing. But handing these elites the power to regulate proles out of this technology doesn't solve that issue! Distributing it widely does! Indeed, even the politicians in this hearing are appreciative of the empowerment effect that AI can provide, or at least pay lip service to it.
Do you just mean that GPT-5 would give OAI/MSFT too much of an edge? Or do you mean this level of capability in principle?
randos have always had the best takes. people with large followings tend to be wrong more often because they have to play to a crowd or have financial incentives
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Thanks for asking. You're probably the person I see most eye-to-eye about this who disagrees with me.
I agree that regulating AI is a recipe for disaster, and centralized 1984 scenarios. Maybe I lack imagination about what sort of equilibrium we might reach under wide distribution, but my default outcome under competition is simply that I and my children eventually get marginalized by our own governments, then priced out of our habitats. I realize that that's also likely to happen under centralized control.
I think I might have linked this before, as a more detailed writeup of what I think competition will look like:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LpM3EAakwYdS6aRKf/what-multipolar-failure-looks-like-and-robust-agent-agnostic
I'd love to think more about other ways this could go, though, and I'm uncertain enough that I could plausibly change sides.
This level of capability in principle, almost no matter who controls it.
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