Your analogy successfully motivates the “man, I’d really like more people to be thinking about the potentially looming Octopcracy” sentiment, and my intuitions here feel pretty similar to the AI case. I would expect the relevant systems (AIs, von-Neumann-Squidwards, etc) to inherit human-like properties wrt human cognition (including normative cognition, like plan search), and a small-but-non-negligible chance that we end up with extinction (or worse).
On maximizers: to me, the most plausible reason for believing that continued human survival would be unstable in Grace’s story either consists in the emergence of dangerous maximizers, or the emergence of related behaviors like rapacious influence-seeking (e.g., Part II of What Failure Looks Like). I agree that maximizers aren’t necessary for human extinction, but it does seem like the most plausible route to ‘human extinction’ rather than ‘something else weird and potentially not great’.
Nice. Well, I guess we just have different intuitions then—for me, the chance of extinction or worse in the Octopcracy case seems a lot bigger than “small but non-negligible” (though I also wouldn’t put it as high as 99%).
Human groups struggle against each other for influence/power/control constantly; why wouldn’t these octopi (or AIs) also seek influence? You don’t need to be an expected utility maximizer to instrumentally converge; humans instrumentally converge all the time.
thnx! : )
Your analogy successfully motivates the “man, I’d really like more people to be thinking about the potentially looming Octopcracy” sentiment, and my intuitions here feel pretty similar to the AI case. I would expect the relevant systems (AIs, von-Neumann-Squidwards, etc) to inherit human-like properties wrt human cognition (including normative cognition, like plan search), and a small-but-non-negligible chance that we end up with extinction (or worse).
On maximizers: to me, the most plausible reason for believing that continued human survival would be unstable in Grace’s story either consists in the emergence of dangerous maximizers, or the emergence of related behaviors like rapacious influence-seeking (e.g., Part II of What Failure Looks Like). I agree that maximizers aren’t necessary for human extinction, but it does seem like the most plausible route to ‘human extinction’ rather than ‘something else weird and potentially not great’.
Nice. Well, I guess we just have different intuitions then—for me, the chance of extinction or worse in the Octopcracy case seems a lot bigger than “small but non-negligible” (though I also wouldn’t put it as high as 99%).
Human groups struggle against each other for influence/power/control constantly; why wouldn’t these octopi (or AIs) also seek influence? You don’t need to be an expected utility maximizer to instrumentally converge; humans instrumentally converge all the time.