lilly comments on Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky

lilly 30 Mar 2023 3:07 UTC
36 points
17 ∶ 2
A couple of things make me inclined to disagree with you about whether this will alienate people, including:

1) The reaction on Twitter seems okay so far
2) Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a qualitative shift among non-EA friends/family regarding their concerns about AI; people seem worried
3) Some of the signatories of the FLI letter didn’t seem to be the usual suspects; I have heard one prominent signatory openly criticize EA, so that feels like a shift, too
4) I think smart, reasonable people who have been exposed to ChatGPT but don’t know much about AI—i.e., many TIME readers—intuitively get that “powerful thing we don’t really understand + very rapid progress + lack of regulation/coordination/good policy” is a very dangerous mix
I’d actually be eager to hear more EAs talk about how they became concerned about AI safety, because I was persuaded that this was something we should be paying close attention to over the course of one long conversation, and it would take less convincing today. Maybe we should send this article to a few non-EA friends/family members and see what their reaction is?
- jacquesthibs 31 Mar 2023 5:04 UTC
  20 points
  3 ∶ 0
  Parent
  So, things have blown up way more than I expected and things are chaotic. Still not sure what will happen or if a treaty is actually in the cards, but I’m beginning to see a path to tons of more investment in alignment potentially. One example why is that Jeff Bezos just followed Eliezer on Twitter and I think it may catch the attention of pretty powerful and rich people who want to see AI go well. We are so off-distribution, could go in any direction.
  - Will Aldred 31 Mar 2023 21:21 UTC
    24 points
    1 ∶ 0
    Parent
    Wow, Bezos has indeed just followed Eliezer:
    https://twitter.com/BigTechAlert/status/1641659849539833856
    @JeffBezos (Founder of @Amazon and @BlueOrigin) is now following @ESYudkowsky
    Related: “Amazon partners with startup Hugging Face for ChatGPT rival” (Los Angeles Times, Feb 21st 2023)
- jacquesthibs 30 Mar 2023 3:37 UTC
  20 points
  4 ∶ 2
  Parent
  In case we have very different feeds, here’s a set of tweets critical about the article:
  - lilly 30 Mar 2023 4:04 UTC
    13 points
    4 ∶ 1
    Parent
    Yeah, I’m definitely not disputing that some people will be alienated by this. My basic reaction is just: AI safety people are already familiar with EY’s takes; I suspect people like my parents will read this and be like “whoa, this makes some sense and is kind of scary.” (With regard to differing feeds, I just put the link to the article into the Twitter search bar and sorted by latest. I still think the negative responses are a minority.)
  - Eevee🔹 5 Apr 2023 5:10 UTC
    −6 points
    0 ∶ 0
    Parent
    Worth noting that Matt Parlmer has said:
    Since he has graduated from begging the question to openly stating that blowing things and people up is a reasonable thing to do I think we should dispense with the politeness that has been the norm around these discussions in the past