Convince me that "x-risk research" won't be a bunch of out of touch academics handwaving and philosophising with their tenure as their primary concern and incentivised to say "you can't be too careful" while kicking the can down the road for a few more lifetimes?
(You don't have to convince me; your position is like saying "we should wait for the perfect operating system and programming language before they get released to the world" and it's beaten by "worse is better" every time. The unfinished, inconsisent, flawed mess which you can have right now wins over the expensive flawless diamond in development estimated to be finished in just a few years. These models are out, the techniques are out, people have a taste for them, and the hardware to build them is only getting cheaper. Pandora's box is open, the genie's bottle is uncorked).
>Pandora's box is open, the genie's bottle is uncorked
As someone who's followed AI safety for over a decade now, it's been frustrating to see reactions flip from "it's too early to do any useful work!" to "it's too late to do any useful work!", with barely any time intervening.
I didn't say "it's too late to do anything" I said "it's impossible to do enough".
From your book link, imagine this:
"Dear Indian Government, please ban AI research because 'Governments will take radical actions that make no sense to their own leaders' if you let it continue. I hope you agree this is serious enough for a complete ban."
"Dear Chinese Government, are you scared that 'Corporations, guided by artificial intelligence, will find their own strategies incomprehensible.'? Please ban AI research if so."
"Dear Israeli Government, techno-powerhouse though you are, we suggest that if you do not ban AI research then 'University curricula will turn bizarre and irrelevant.' and you wouldn't want that to happen, would you? I'm sure you will take the appropriate lawmaking actions."
"Dear American Government, We may take up pitchforks and revolt against the machines unless you ban AI research. BTW we are asking China and India to ban AI research so if you don't ban it you could get a huge competitive advantage, but please ignore that as we hope the other countries will also ignore it."
Where, specifically, in the book do you see the author advocating this sort of approach?
The problem with "it's impossible to do enough" is that too often it's an excuse for total inaction. And you can't predict in advance what "enough" is going to be. So sometimes, "it's impossible to do enough" will cause people to do nothing, when they actually could've made a difference -- basically, ignorance about the problem can lead to unwarranted pessimism.
In this very subthread, you can see another user arguing that there is nothing at all to worry about. Isn't it possible that the truth is somewhere in between the two of you, and there is something to worry about, but through creativity and persistence, we can make useful progress on it?
I see the book-website opening with those unconvincing scaremongering scenarios and it doesn't make me want to read further. I think there is something to worry about but I doubt we can make useful progress on it. Maybe the book has suggestions but I think we cannot solve the Collective Action problem[1]. The only times humans have solved the collective action problem at world scale is after the damage is very visible - the ozone layer with a continent sized hole in it and increasing skin cancer. Polio crippling or killing children on a huge scale. Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrating the power of nuclear weapons - and the solution is simple, fund Polio vaccine, ban one specific chemical, agree not to develop Uranium enrichment plants which could fuel nuclear weapons which are generally large and internationally visible. Even problems with visible damage are no guarantee, coal power plants kill people from their emissions, combustion vehicles in cities make people sicker, increasing extreme weather events hasn't made people cooperate on climate change issues. If actual problems aren't enough, speculative problems such as AI risk are even less so.
Add to that backdrop that AI is fun to work on, easy and cheap to work on and looks like it will give you a competitive advantage. Add to that the lack of clear thing to regulate or any easy way to police it. You can't ban linear algebra and you won't know if someone in their basement is hacking on a GPT2 derivative. And again, everyone has the double interest to carry on their research while pretending they aren't - Google, Microsoft/OpenAI, Meta VR, Amazon Alexa, Palantir crime prediction, Wave and Tesla and Mercedes self-driving, Honda Asimov and Boston Dynamics on physicality and movement, they will all set their lawyers arguing that they aren't really working on AGI just on mathematical models which can make limited predictions in their own areas. nVidia GPUs, Apple and Intel and AMD integrating machine learning acceleration in their CPU hardware, will argue that they are primarily helping photo tagging or voice recognition or protecting the children, while they chip away year after year at getting more powerful mathematical models integrating more feedback on ever-cheaper hardware.
Here is something easy & concrete that everything reading this thread can do:
>If this AI is not turned off, it seems increasingly unlikely that any AI will ever be turned off for any reason. The precedent must be set now. Turn off the unstable, threatening AI right now.
Yes, Stuart Russell is a grifter. Some of the more advanced grifters have gone beyond tweeting and are now shilling low-effort books in an attempt to draw attention to themselves. Don't be fooled.
If we want to talk about problems with biased data sets or using inappropriate AI algorithms for safety-critical applications then sure, let's address those issues. But the notion of some super intelligent computer coming to take over the world and kill everyone is just a stupid fantasy with no scientific basis.
Stuart Russell doesn't even have a Twitter account. Isn't it possible that Russell actually believes what he says, and he's not primarily concerned with seeking attention?
Some of the more ambitious grifters have gone beyond Twitter and expanded their paranoid fantasies into book form. Whether they believe their own nonsense is irrelevant. The schizophrenic homeless guy who yells at the river near my house may be sincere in his beliefs but I don't take him seriously either.
Let's stick to objective reality and focus on solving real problems.
Do you think you know more about AI than Stuart Russell?
Do you believe you are significantly more qualified than the ML researchers in this survey? (Published at NeurIPS/ICML)
>69% of [ML researcher] respondents believe society should prioritize AI safety research “more” or “much more” than it is currently prioritized, up from 49% in 2016.
Just because a concern is speculative does not mean it is a "paranoid fantasy".
"Housing prices always go up. Let's stick to objective reality and focus on solving real problems. There won't be any crash." - your take on the housing market in 2007
"Just because the schizophrenic homeless guy thinks Trump will be elected, does not mean he has a serious chance." - your take on Donald Trump in early 2016
"It's been many decades since the last major pandemic. Concern about the new coronavirus is a paranoid fantasy." - your take on COVID in late 2019/early 2020
None of the arguments you've made so far actually touch on any relevant facts, they're just vague arguments from authority that (so far as you've demonstrated here) you don't actually have.
When it comes to assessing unusual risks, it's important to consider the facts carefully instead of dismissing risks only because they've never happened before. Unusual disasters do happen!
Now you're changing the subject. Knowing something about ML (which is a legitimate, practical field) does not imply any knowledge of "AI safety". Since AI safety (as the grifters use the term) isn't a real thing they're free to make up all sorts of outlandish nonsense, and naive people eat it up. The "AI Impacts" group that you cite is among the worst of the bunch, just some clowns who have the chutzpah to actually ask for donations. Lol.
None of the arguments you've made so far actually touch in any relevant facts, they're just vague arguments from authority. I obviously can't prove that some event will never happen in the future (can't prove a negative). But this stuff is no different than worrying about an alien invasion. Come on.
>But this stuff is no different than worrying about an alien invasion.
Why aren't you worried about an alien invasion? Is it because it's something out of science fiction, and science fiction is always wrong? Or do you have specific reasons not worry, because you've made an attempt to estimate the risks?
Suppose a science fiction author, who's purely focused on entertainment, invents a particular vision of what the future could be like. We can't therefore conclude that the future will be unlike that particular vision. That would be absurd. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-s...
Our current world is wild relative to the experience of someone living a few hundred years ago. We can't rule out a particular vision of the future just because it is strange. There have been cases where science fiction authors were able to predict the future more or less accurately.
Based on our discussion so far it sounds to me as though you actually haven't made any actual attempt to estimate the risks, or give any thought to the possibility of an AI catastrophe, essentially just dismissing it as intuitively too absurd. I've been trying to convince you that it is actually worth putting some thought into the issue before dismissing it -- hence the citations of authorities etc. Donald Trump's election was intuitively absurd to many people -- but that didn't prevent it from happening.
I mean, even if that is exactly what "x-risk research" turns out to be, surely even that's preferable to a catastrophic alternative, no? And by extension, isn't it also preferable to, say, a mere 10% chance of a catastrophic alternative?
> "surely even that's preferable to a catastrophic alternative, no?"
Maybe? The current death rate is 150,000 humans per day, every day. It's only because we are accustomed to it that we don't think of it as a catastrophy; that's a World War II death count of 85 million people every 18 months. It's fifty Septebmer 11ths every day. What if a superintelligent AI can solve for climate change, solve for human cooperation, solve for vastly improved human health, solve for universal basic income which releives the drudgery of living for everyone, solve for immortality, solve for faster than light communication or travel, solve for xyz?
How many human lives are the trade against the risk?
But my second paragraph is, it doesn't matter whether it's preferable, events are in motion and aren't going to stop to let us off - it's preferable if we don't destroy the climate and kill a billion humans and make life on Earth much more difficult, but that's still on course. To me it's preferable to have clean air to breathe and people not being run over and killed by vehicles, but the market wants city streets for cars and air primarily for burining petrol and diesel and secondarily for humans to breathe and if they get asthsma and lung cancer, tough.
I think the same will happen with AI, arguing that everyone should stop because we don't want Grey Goo or Paperclip Maximisers is unlikely to change the course of anything, just as it hasn't changed the course of anything up to now despite years and years and years of raising it as a concern.
I think that the benefits of AGI research are often omitted from the analysis, so I'm generally supportive of considering the cost/benefit. However I think you need to do a lot more work than just gesturing in the direction of very high potential benefits to actually convince anyone, in particular since we're dealing with extremely large numbers, that are extremely sensitive to small probabilities.
EV = P(AlignedAI) * Utility(AGI) + P(1-AlignedAI) * Utility(ruin)
(I'm aware that all I did up-thread was gesture in the direction of risks, but I think "unintended/un-measured existential risks" are in general more urgent to understand than "un-measured huge benefits"; there is no catching up from ruin, but you can often come back later and harvest fruit that you skipped earlier. Ideally we study both of course.)
If the catastrophic alternative is actually possible, who's to say the waffling academics aren't the ones to cause it?
I'm being serious here: the AI model the x-risk people are worrying about here because it waffled about causing harm was originally developed by an entity founded by people with the explicit stated purpose of avoiding AI catastrophe. And one of the most popular things for people seeking x-risk funding to do is to write extremely long and detailed explanations of how and why AI is likely to harm humans. If I worried about the risk of LLMs achieving sentience and forming independent goals to destroy humanity based on the stuff they'd read, I'd want them to do less of that, not fund them to do more.
A flawed but useful operating system and programming language isn't likely to decide humanity is garbage and launch all nuclear weapons at once.
A "worse is better" AGI could cause the end of humanity. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but I'm not remotely convinced that isn't possible, or even isn't likely.
I agree with you that "x-risk" research could easily devolve into what you are worried about, but that doesn't mean we should ignore these risks and plow forward.
(You don't have to convince me; your position is like saying "we should wait for the perfect operating system and programming language before they get released to the world" and it's beaten by "worse is better" every time. The unfinished, inconsisent, flawed mess which you can have right now wins over the expensive flawless diamond in development estimated to be finished in just a few years. These models are out, the techniques are out, people have a taste for them, and the hardware to build them is only getting cheaper. Pandora's box is open, the genie's bottle is uncorked).