Madhav—thanks for a very helpful summary of Max Tegmark’s remarks. I agree with most of your comments about his views.
His line that ‘this isn’t an arms race, it’s a suicide race’ seems pretty compelling as a counter-argument against the view—very commonly expressed on Twitter—that the US must ‘push ahead with AI, so we don’t fall behind China’.
Just listened to a podcast interview of yours, Geoffrey Miller (Manifold, with Steve Hsu). Do you really believe that it is viable to impose a very long pause (you mention ‘just a few centuries’). The likelihood of such a thing taking place seems to me more than extremely remote -at least until we get a pragmatic example of the harm AI can do, a Trinity test of sorts.
Manuel—it may not be likely that we can impose a very long pause (on the order of centuries).
My main goal in proposing that was to remind people that with AI, we’re talking about a ‘major evolutionary transition’ comparable to the evolution of multicellular life, or the evolution of human intelligence. Normally these take place on the time-span of hundreds of thousands of years to tens of millions of years.
If AI development holds all the potential upside that we hope for, but it also threatens some of the downside risks that we dread, it may be useful to be thinking on these evolutionary time scales. Rather than the ‘quarterly profit’ schedules that many Big Tech companies think about.
Madhav—thanks for a very helpful summary of Max Tegmark’s remarks. I agree with most of your comments about his views.
His line that ‘this isn’t an arms race, it’s a suicide race’ seems pretty compelling as a counter-argument against the view—very commonly expressed on Twitter—that the US must ‘push ahead with AI, so we don’t fall behind China’.
Just listened to a podcast interview of yours, Geoffrey Miller (Manifold, with Steve Hsu). Do you really believe that it is viable to impose a very long pause (you mention ‘just a few centuries’). The likelihood of such a thing taking place seems to me more than extremely remote -at least until we get a pragmatic example of the harm AI can do, a Trinity test of sorts.
Manuel—it may not be likely that we can impose a very long pause (on the order of centuries).
My main goal in proposing that was to remind people that with AI, we’re talking about a ‘major evolutionary transition’ comparable to the evolution of multicellular life, or the evolution of human intelligence. Normally these take place on the time-span of hundreds of thousands of years to tens of millions of years.
If AI development holds all the potential upside that we hope for, but it also threatens some of the downside risks that we dread, it may be useful to be thinking on these evolutionary time scales. Rather than the ‘quarterly profit’ schedules that many Big Tech companies think about.