In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed.
And contrary to what some people are implying he also proposes that everyone is subject to the same limitations, big players just like individuals. Because the big players haven't shown much of a sign of doing enough.
> In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed.
Good point. He was only (“only”) really calling for international cooperation and literal air strikes against big datacenters that weren’t cooperating. This would presumably be more of a no-knock raid, breaching your door with a battering ram and throwing tear gas at the wee hours of the morning ;) or maybe a small extraterritorial drone through your window
... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed. Which under the premise that AGI is an existential threat would be far more reasonable than many other reasons for raids.
If the premise is wrong we won't need it. If society coordinates to not do the dangerous thing we won't need it. The argument is that only in the case where we find ourselves in the situation where other measures have failed such uses of force would be the fallback option.
I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal. If bio research gets commodified and easy enough that every kid can build a new airborne virus in their basement we'd need raids on that too.
To be honest, I see summoning the threat of AGI to pose an existential threat to be on the level with lizard people on the moon. Great for sci-fi, bad distraction for policy making and addressing real problems.
The real war, if there is one, is about owning data and collecting data. And surprisingly many people fall for distractions while their LLM fails at basic math. Because it is a language model of course...
Freely flying through the sky on wings was scifi before the wright brothers. Something sounding like scifi is not a sound argument that it won't happen. And unlike lizard people we do have exponential curves to point at.
Something stronger than a vibes-based argument would be good.
I consider the burden of proof to fall on those proclaiming AGI to be an existential threat, and so far I have not seen any convincing arguments. Maybe at some point in the future we will have many anthropomorphic robots and an AGI could hack them all and orchestrate a robot uprising, but at that point the robots would be the actual problem. Similarly, if an AGI could blow up nuclear power plants, so could well-funded human attackers; we need to secure the plants, not the AGI.
It doesn't sound like you gave serious thought to the arguments. The AGI doesn't need to hack robots. It has superhuman persuasion, by definition; it can "hack" (enough of) the humans to achieve its goals.
Voldemort is fictional and so are bumbling wizard apprentices. Toy-level, not-yet-harmful AIs on the other hand are real. And so are efforts to make them more powerful. So the proposition that more powerful AIs will exist in the future is far more likely than an evil super wizard coming into existence.
And I don't think literal 5-word-magic-incantation mind control is essential for an AI to be dangerous. More subtle or elaborate manipulation will be sufficient. Employees already have been duped into financial transactions by faked video calls with what they assumed to be their CEOs[0], and this didn't require superhuman general intelligence, only one single superhuman capability (realtime video manipulation).
> Toy-level, not-yet-harmful AIs on the other hand are real.
A computer that can cause harm is much different than the absurd claims that I am disagreeing with.
The extraordinary claims that are equivalent to saying that the imperious curse exists would be the magic computers that create diamond nanobots and mind control humans.
> that more powerful AIs will exist in the future
Bad argument.
Non safe Boxes exist in real life. People are trying to make more and better boxes.
Therefore it is rational to be worried about Pandora's box being created and ending the world.
That is the equivalent argument to what you just made.
And it is absurd when talking about world ending box technology, even though Yes dangerous boxes exist, just as much as it is absurd to claim that world ending AI could exist.
Instead of gesturing at flawed analogies, let's return to the actual issue at hand. Do you think that agents more intelligent than humans are impossible or at least extremely unlikely to come into existence in the future? Or that such super-human intelligent agents are unlikely to have goals that are dangerous to humans? Or that they would be incapable of pursuing such goals?
Also, it seems obvious that the standard of evidence that "AI could cause extinction" can't be observing an extinction level event, because at that point it would be too late. Considering that preventive measures would take time and safety margin, which level of evidence would be sufficient to motivate serious countermeasures?
Less than a month ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14380 "We found that participants who debated GPT-4 with access to their personal information had 81.7% (p < 0.01; N=820 unique participants) higher odds of increased agreement with their opponents compared to participants who debated humans."
Yes, and I am sure that when people do a google search for "Good arguments in favor of X", that they are also sometimes convinced to be more in favor of X.
Perhaps they would be even more convinced by the google search than if a person argued with them about it.
That is still much different from "The AI mind controls people, hacks the nukes, and ends the world".
Its that second part that is the the fantasy land situation that requires extraordinary evidence.
But, this is how conversations about doomsday AI always go. People say "Well isn't AI kinda good at this extremely vague thing Y, sometimes? Imagine if AI was infinitely good at Y! That means that by extrapolation, the world ends!".
And that covers basically every single AI doom argument that anyone ever makes.
If the only evidence for AI doom you will accept is actual AI doom, you are asking for evidence that by definition will be too late.
"Show me the AI mindcontrolling people!" AI mindcontrolling people is what we're trying to avoid seeing.
The trick is, in the world in which AI doom is in the future, what would you expect to see now that is different from the world in which AI doom is not in the future?
> If the only evidence for AI doom you will accept is actual AI doom
No actually. This is another mistake that the AI doomers make. They pretend like a demand for evidence means that the world has to end first.
Instead, what would be perfectly good evidence, would be evidence of significant incremental harm that requires regulation on its own, independent of any doom argument.
In between "the world literally ends by magic diamond nanobots and mind controlling AI" and "where we are today" would be many many many situations of incrementally escalating and measurable harm that we would see in real life, decades before the world ending magic happens.
We can just treat this like any other technology, and regulate it when it causes real world harm. Because before the world ends by magic, there would be significant real world harm that is similar to any other problem in the world that we handle perfectly well.
Its funny because you committing the exact mistake that I was criticizing in my original post, where you did the absolutely massive jump and hand waved it away.
> what would you expect to see now that is different from the world in which AI doom is not in the future?
What I would expect is for the people who claim to care about AI doom to actually be trying to measure real world harm.
Ironically, I think the people who are coming up with increasingly thin excuses as for why they don't have to find evidence are increasing the likelyhood of such AI doom much more than anyone else because they are abandoning the most effective method of actually convincing the world of the real world damage that AI could cause.
Well, at least if you see escalating measurable harm you'll come around, I'm happy about that. You won't necessarily get the escalating harm even if AI doom is real though, so you should try to discover if it is real even in worlds where hard takeoff is a thing.
> What I would expect is for the people who claim to care about AI doom to actually be trying to measure real world harm.
Why bother? If escalating harm is a thing, everyone will notice. We don't need to bolster that, because ordinary society has it handled.
> You won't necessarily get the escalating harm even if AI doom is real though
Yes we would. Unless you are one of those people who think that the magic doom nanobots are going to be invented overnight.
My comparisions to someone who is worried about literal magic, from harry potter, is apt.
But at that point, if you are worried about magic showing up instantly, then your position is basically not falsifiable. You can always retreat to some untestable, unfalsifiable magic.
Like there is actually nothing I could say, no evidence I could show to ever convince someone out of that position.
On the other hand, my position is actually fasifiable. There is absolutely all sorts of non world ending evidence that could convince me to think that AI is dangerous.
But nobody on the doomer side seems to care about any of that. Instead they invent positions that seem almost tailor made to avoid being falsifiable or disprovable so that they can continue to believe them despite any evidence to the contrary.
As in, if I were to purposeful invent an idea or philosophy that is impossible to be disproved or convinced out of the "I can't show you evidence because the world will end" position is what I would invent.
> you'll come around,
Do you admit that you won't though? Do you admit that no matter what evidence is shown to you, that you can just retreat and say that the magic could happen at any time?
Or even if this isn't you literally, that someone in your position could dismiss all counter evidence, no matter what, and nobody could convince someone out of that with evidence?
I am not sure how someone could ever possibly engage with you seriously on any of this, if that is your position.
> Like there is actually nothing I could say, no evidence I could show to ever convince someone out of that position.
There is, it is just very hard to obtain. Various formal proofs would do. On upper bounds. On controllability. On scalability of safety techniques.
The manhattan project scientists did check whether they'd ignite the atmosphere before detonating their first prototype. Yes, that was much simpler task. But there's no rule in nature that says proving a system to be safe must be as easy as creating the system. Especially when the concern is that the system adaptive and adversarial.
Recursive self-improvement is a positive feedback loop, like nuclear chain reactions, like virus replication. So if we have an AI that can program then we better make sure that it either cannot sustain such a positive feedback loop or that it remains controllable beyond criticality.
Given the complexity of the task it appears unlikely that a simple ten-page paper proving this will show up on arxiv. But if one did that'd be great.
>> You won't necessarily get the escalating harm even if AI doom is real though
> Yes we would.
So what does guarantee a visible catastrophe that won't be attributed to human operators using a non-agentic AI incorrectly? We keep scaling and the systems will be treated as assistants/optimizers and it's always the operators fault. Until we roughly reach human-level on some relevant metrics. And at that point there's a very narrow complexity range from idiot to genius (human brains don't vary by orders of magnitude!). So as far as hardware goes this could be a very narrow range and we could shoot straight from "non-agentic sub-human AI" to "agentic superintelligence" in short timescales once the hardware has that latent capacity.
And up until that point it will always have been a human error, lax corporate policies, insufficient filtering of the training set or whatever.
And it's not that it must happen this way. Just that there doesn't seem anything ruling it and similar pathways out.
What do you think mind control is? Think President Trump but without the self-defeating flaws, with an ability to stick to plans, and most importantly the ability to pay personal attention to each follower to further increase the level of trust and commitment. Not Harry Potter.
People will do what the AI says because it is able to create personal trust relationships with them and they want to help it. (They may not even realize that they are helping an AI rather than a human who cares about them.)
The normal ways that trust is created, not magical ones.
The magic technology that is equivalent to the imperious curse from Harry Potter.
> The normal ways that trust is created, not magical ones.
Buildings as a technology are normal. They are constantly getting taller and we have better technology to make them taller.
But, even though buildings are a normal technology, I am not going to worry about buildings getting so tall soon that they hit the sun.
This is the same exact mistake that every single AI doomers makes. What they do is they take something normal, and then they infinitely extrapolate it out to an absurd degree, without admitting that this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
The central point of disagreement, that always gets glossed over, is that you can't make a vague claim about how AI is good at stuff, and then do your gigantic leap from here to over there which is "the world ends".
Yes that is the same as comparing these worries to those who worry about buildings hitting the sun or the imperious curse.
You say you have not seen any arguments that convince you. Is that just not having seen many arguments or having seen a lot of arguments where each chain contained some fatal flaw? Or something else?
> I see summoning the threat of AGI to pose an existential threat to be on the level with lizard people on the moon.
I mean to every other lifeform on the plant YOU are the AGI existential threat. You, and I mean homosapiens by that, have taken over the planet and have either enslaved and are breeding any other animals for food, or are driving them to extinction. In this light bringing another potential apex predator on to the scene seems rash.
>fall for distractions while their LLM fails at basic math
Correct, if we already had AGI/ASI this discussion would be moot because we'd already be in a world of trouble. The entire point is to slow stuff down before we have a major "oopsie whoopsie we can't take that back" issue with advanced AI, and the best time to set the rules is now.
>If the premise is wrong we won't need it. If society coordinates to not do the dangerous thing we won't need it.
But the idea that this use of force is okay itself increases danger. It creates the situation that actors in the field might realize that at some point they're in danger of this and decide to do a first strike to protect themselves.
I think this is why anti-nuclear policy is not "we will airstrike you if you build nukes" but rather "we will infiltrate your network and try to stop you like that".
> anti-nuclear policy is not "we will airstrike you if you build nukes"
Was that not the official policy during the Bush administration regarding weapons of mass destruction (which covers nuclear weapons in addition to chemical and biological weapons). That was pretty much the official premise of the second Gulf war
> ... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed
One question for you. In this hypothetical where AGI is truly considered such a grave threat, do you believe the reaction to this threat will be similar to, or substantially gentler than, the reaction to threats we face today like “terrorism” and “drugs”? And, if similar: do you believe suspected drug labs get a court order before the state resorts to a police raid?
> I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal.
Well, as regards EliY and airstrikes, I’m more projecting my internal attitude that it is utterly unserious, rather than seriously engaging with whether or not it is odious. But in earnest: if you are proposing a policy that involves air strikes on data centers, you should understand what countries have data centers, and you should understand that this policy risks escalation into a much broader conflict. And if you’re proposing a policy in which conflict between nuclear superpowers is a very plausible outcome — potentially incurring the loss of billions of lives and degradation of the earth’s environment — you really should be able to reason about why people might reasonably think that your proposal is deranged, even if you happen to think it justified by an even greater threat. Failure to understand these concerns will not aid you in overcoming deep skepticism.
> In this hypothetical where AGI is truly considered such a grave threat, do you believe the reaction to this threat will be similar to, or substantially gentler than, the reaction to threats we face today like “terrorism” and “drugs”?
"truly considered" does bear a lot of weight here. If policy-makers adopt the viewpoint wholesale, then yes, it follows that policy should also treat this more seriously than "mere" drug trade.
Whether that'll actually happen or the response will be inadequate compared to the threat (such as might be said about CO2 emissions) is a subtly different question.
> And, if similar: do you believe suspected drug labs get a court order before the state resorts to a police raid?
Without checking I do assume there'll have been mild cases where for example someone growing cannabis was reported and they got a court summons in the mail or two policemen actually knocking on the door and showing a warrant and giving the person time to call a lawyer rather than an armed, no-knock police raid, yes.
> And if you’re proposing a policy in which conflict between nuclear superpowers is a very plausible outcome — potentially incurring the loss of billions of lives and degradation of the earth’s environment — you really should be able to reason about why people might reasonably think that your proposal is deranged [...]
Said powers already engage in negotiations to limit the existential threats they themselves cause. They have some interest in their continued existence. If we get into a situation where there is another arms race between superpowers and is treated as a conflict rather than something that can be solved by cooperating on disarmament, then yes, obviously international policy will have failed too.
If you start from the position that any serious, globally coordinated regulation - where a few outliers will be brought to heel with sanctions and force - is ultimately doomed then you will of course conclude that anyone proposing regulation is deranged.
But that sounds like hoping that all problems forever can always be solved by locally implemented, partially-enforced, unilateral policies that aren't seen as threats by other players? That defense scales as well or better than offense? Technologies are force-multipliers, as it improves so does the harm that small groups can inflict at scale. If it's not AGI it might be bio-tech or asteroid mining. So eventually we will run into a problem of this type and we need to seriously discuss it without just going by gut reactions.
Just my (probably unpopular) opinion: True AI (what they are now calling AGI) may never exist. Even the AI models of today aren't far removed from the 'chatbots' of yesterday (more like an evolution rather than revolution)...
...for true AI to exist, it would need to be self aware. I don't see that happening in our lifetimes when we don't even know how our own brains work. (There is sooo much we don't know about the human brain.)
AI models today differ only in terms of technology compared to the 'chatbots' of yesterday. None are self aware, and none 'want' to learn because they have no 'wants' or 'needs' outside of their fixed programming. They are little more than glorified auto complete engines.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not insulting the tech. It will have it's place just like any other, but when this bubble pops it's going to ruin lives, and lots of them.
Shoot, maybe I'm wrong and AGI is around the corner, but I will continue to be pessimistic. I am old enough to have gone through numerous bubbles, and they never panned out the way people thought. They also nearly always end in some type of recession.
Bacteria doesn't "want" anything in the sense of active thinking like you do, and yet will render you dead quickly and efficiently while spreading at a near exponential rate. No self awareness necessary.
You keep drawing little circles based on your understanding of the world and going "it's inside this circle, therefore I don't need to worry about it", while ignoring 'semi-smart' optimization systems that can lead to dangerous outcomes.
>I am old enough to have gone through numerous bubbles,
And evidently not old enough to pay attention to the things that did pan out. But hey, those cellphone and that internet thing was just a fad right. We'll go back to land lines at any time now.
> I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal. If bio research gets commodified and easy enough that every kid can build a new airborne virus in their basement we'd need raids on that too.
Either you create even better bio research to neutralize said viruses... or you die trying...
Like if you go with the raid strategy and fail to raid just one terrorist that's it, game over.
Those arguments do not transfer well to the AGI topic. You can't create counter-AGI, since that's also an intelligent agent which would be just as dangerous. And chips are more bottlenecked than biologics (... though gene synthesizing machines could be a similar bottleneck and raiding vendors which illegally sell those might be viable in such a scenario).
And contrary to what some people are implying he also proposes that everyone is subject to the same limitations, big players just like individuals. Because the big players haven't shown much of a sign of doing enough.