See explainer on why AGI could not be controlled enough to stay safe:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xp6n2MG5vQkPpFEBH/the-control-problem-unsolved-or-unsolvable
Note: I am no longer part of EA because of the community’s/philosophy’s overreaches. I still post here about AI safety.
I’m also feeling less “optimistic” about an AI crash given:
The election result involving a bunch of tech investors and execs pushing for influence through Trump’s campaign (with a stated intention to deregulate tech).
A military veteran saying that the military could be holding up the AI industry like “Atlas holding the globe”, and an AI PhD saying that hyperscaled data centers, deep learning, etc, could be super useful for war.
I will revise my previous forecast back to 80%+ chance.
Just found a podcast on OpenAI’s bad financial situation.
It’s hosted by someone in AI Safety (Jacob Haimes) and an AI post-doc (Igor Krawzcuk).
https://kairos.fm/posts/muckraiker-episodes/muckraiker-episode-004/
There are bunch of crucial considerations here. I’m afraid it would take too much time to unpack those.
Happy though to have had this chat!
As a 1st approximation, I assume humans will be selecting AIs which benefit them, not AIs which maximally increase economic growth.
The problem here is that AI corporations are increasingly making decisions for us.
See this chapter.
Corporations produce and market products to increase profit (including by replacing their fussy expensive human parts with cheaper faster machines that do good-enough work.)
To do that they have to promise buyers some benefits, but they can also manage to sell products by hiding the negative externalities. See cases Big Tobacco, Big Oil, etc.
I am open to a bet similar to this one.
I would bet on both, on your side.
Potentially relatedly, I think massive increases in unemployment are very unlikely.
I see you cite statistics of previous unemployment rates as an outside view, compensating against the inside view. Did you look into the underlying rate of job automation? I’d be curious about that. If that underlying rate has been trending up over time, then there is a concern that at some point the gap might not be filled with re-employment opportunities.
AI Safety inside views are wrong for various reasons in my opinion. I agree with many of Thorstad’s views you cited (eg. critiquing how fast take-off, orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence relies on overly simplistic toy models, missing the hard parts about machinery coherently navigating an environment that’s more complex than just the machinery itself).
There are arguments that you are still unaware of, which mostly come from outside of the community. They’re less flashy, involving longer timelines. For example, it considers why the standardisation of hardware and code allows for extractive corporate-automation feedback loops.
To learn about why superintelligent AI disempowering humanity would be the lead up to the extinction of all current living species, I suggest digging into substrate-needs convergence.
I gave a short summary in this post:
AGI is artificial. The reason why AGI would outperform humans at economically valuable work in the first place is because of how virtualisable its code is, which in turn derives from how standardisable its hardware is. Hardware parts can be standardised because their substrate stays relatively stable and compartmentalised. Hardware is made out of hard materials, like the silicon from rocks. Their molecular configurations are chemically inert and physically robust under human living temperatures and pressures. This allows hardware to keep operating the same way, and for interchangeable parts to be produced in different places. Meanwhile, human “wetware” operates much more messily. Inside each of us is a soup of bouncing and continuously reacting organic molecules. Our substrate is fundamentally different.
The population of artificial components that constitutes AGI implicitly has different needs than us (for maintaining components, producing components, and/or potentiating newly connected functionality for both). Extreme temperature ranges, diverse chemicals – and many other unknown/subtler/more complex conditions – are needed that happen to be lethal to humans. These conditions are in conflict with our needs for survival as more physically fragile humans.
These connected/nested components are in effect “variants” – varying code gets learned from inputs, that are copied over subtly varying hardware produced through noisy assembly processes (and redesigned using learned code).
Variants get evolutionarily selected for how they function across the various contexts they encounter over time. They are selected to express environmental effects that are needed for their own survival and production. The variants that replicate more, exist more. Their existence is selected for.
The artificial population therefore converges on fulfilling their own expanding needs. Since (by 4.) control mechanisms cannot contain this convergence on wide-ranging degrees and directivity in effects that are lethal to us, human extinction results.
Donation opportunities for restricting AI companies:
Pause AI: protests and lobbying
Stop AI: is barricading OpenAI
For Humanity: a podcast on risks.
FoxGlove: a legal non-profit targeting big tech scaling.
Disruption Network Institute: whistleblowers and researchers reporting on the AI military misuses.
Distributed AI Research Institute: AI ethics researchers giving general AI advocates hell and advocating for specialised models serving communities.
European Guild for AI Regulation: lobbying in the EU against the data scraping that makes large models possible.
Concept Art Association: lobbying in the EU against the data scraping that makes large models possible.
In my pipeline:
funding a ‘horror documentary’ against AI by an award-winning documentary maker (got a speculation grant of $50k)
funding lawyers in the EU for some high-profile lawsuits and targeted consultations with EU AI Office.
If you’re a donor, I can give you details on their current activities. I worked with staff in each of these organisations. DM me.
Hey, my apologies for taking even longer to reply (had family responsibilities this month).
I will read that article on why Chernobyl-style events are not possible with modern reactors. Respecting you for the amount of background research you must have done in this area, and would like to learn more.
Although I think the probability of human extinction over the next 10 years is lower than 10^-6.
You and I actually agree on this with respect to AI developments. I don’t think the narratives I read of a large model recursively self-improving itself internally make sense.
I wrote a book for educated laypeople explaining how AI corporations would cause increasing harms leading eventually to machine destruction of our society and ecosystem.
Curious for your own thoughts here.
Basically I’m upvoting what you’re doing here, which I think is more important than the text itself.
Thanks for recognising the importance of doing the work itself. We are still scrappy so we’ll find ways to improve over time.
especially that you should have run this past a bunch of media savvy people before releasing
If you know anyone with media experience who might be interested to review future drafts, please let me know.
I agree we need to improve on our messaging.
This is great! Appreciating your nitty-gritty considerations
(1) There’s a good chance the outcome will be some form of “catch and release”—it’s usually easier to deal with isolated protestors who do not cause violence or significantly damage property in this manner rather than by pursuing criminal charges to trial.
“Catch and release” is what’s happening right now. However, as we keep repeating the barricades, and as hopefully more and more protestors join us, it would highly surprise me if the police and court system just allow us to keep barricading OpenAI’s office entrances without pursuing criminal charges. If police would allow us to keep doing it with at most overnight time in jail, that would of course make doing the barricades easier.
(2) Generally, a trial court acquittal does not establish precedent binding as to future cases. And the California appellate courts are not generally known for being speedy.
This is insightful, thank you! I was personally skeptical that we could set a precedent that would give us a free pass every time. But I am not a lawyer.
Checking: Are you saying that the trial courts generally do not set a precedent (or more specifically do not set a precedent that allows “repeat offenses”)?
And would we only be able to take this up to the appellate court if the judge rules against us (the defendant), and we file an appeal?
[Asking for information only – whatever you share is not legal advice.]
(3) Even assuming there were some binding precedent establishing that you could not be criminally convicted for these actions, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the police or OpenAI could not physically remove you from the area
That is fine. Getting moved around by police is part of the process of doing the protests. As Sam said, when said the time comes, we’ll leave.
It also wouldn’t preclude OpenAI or others from filing a civil lawsuit against the protesters for damages or other relief.
I had not considered this! I’m not sure whether to see this as a serious personal risk to our organisers in the US (though Sam doesn’t have money to hand over anyway), and/or a great opportunity to publicly present arguments of OpenAI’s harmful/illegal activities.
many jurisdictions allow a property owner to use reasonable force to eject a trespasser—and it’s going to tough for a small group to blockade a company headquarters or data center without trespassing on the AI company’s property.
My impression is that the gates we are barricading of the office OpenAI co-rents are actually connected to the public side-walk. In that case we are sitting on the side-walk and not on private property (Sam can correct me here).
For the data centers, I’d expect us to be often be sitting on private property, and for private security to be present and ready to act.
Thanks for the kind words!
I personally think it would be helpful to put more emphasis on how OpenAI’s reckless scaling and releases of models is already concretely harming ordinary folks (even though no major single accident has shown up yet).
Eg.
training on personal/copyrighted data
job losses because of the shoddy replacement of creative workers (and how badly OpenAI has treated workers it paid)
school ‘plagiarism’, disinformation, and deepfakes
environmental harms of scaling compute.
Thank you for the specific feedback on the press release! I broadly agree with it, and I think it’s going to be useful for improving future texts.
To clarify for future reference, I do think it’s likely (80%+) that at some point over the next 5 years there will be a large reduction in investment in AI and a corresponding market crash in AI company stocks, etc, and that both will continue to be for at least three months.
Update: I now think this is 90%+ likely to happen (from original prediction date).
But it’s weird that I cannot find even a good written summary of Bret’s argument online (I do see lots of political podcasts).
I found an earlier scenario written by Bret that covers just one nuclear power plant failing and that does not discuss the risk of a weakening magnetic field.
The quotes from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s report were interesting.
moving nuclear fuel stored in pools into dry casket storage The extent to which we can do this is limited because spent fuel must be stored for one to ten years in spent fuel pools while the shorter-lived isotopes decay before it’s ready to be moved to dry cask storage.
I did not know this. I added an edit to the post: “nuclear waste already stored in pools for 5 years”.
I don’t think an environmental radioisotope release can realistically give people across the world acute radiation syndrome.
Can you cite evidence and/or reasoning? Considering intake of the radioactive isotopes (through skin contact, breathing, and water/food consumption) as well? This feels like the kinda thing where modelling error can happen easily. I share some of your skepticism here, but also am an amateur in this area.
Thanks, looking forward to reading your thoughts!
Regarding 1., I would value someone who has researched this give more insight into:
A. How long diesel generators could be expected to be supplied with diesel when there is some continental electricity outage of a year (or longer). This is hard to judge. My intuition is that society would be in chaos and that maintaining diesel supplies would be extremely tough to manage.
B. What is minimally required in the long process of shutting down a nuclear power plant? Including but not limited to diesel or other backup generator supplies.
Regarding 2., I do not see how a meltdown as happened with Chernobyl is not thought to be possible with current reactor designs. Even if current reactor designs have more safeguards, the fundamental problem still seems the same. You have constantly heating fissile materials that require cooling water to not overheat. And there are some potentially flammable substances in the area of the (used up) fuel rods too. Could you clarify more specifically what you think are important differences here?
~
I felt a little confused about why the summary sounded conspiratorial to you. The way I meant to write it is “a chain of plausible-seeming but neglected events happen, and lead to catastrophe”. At most this seems a story of humans not being incentivised to act to prevent tail risks? Am I missing something?
Now, Bret Weinstein does seem to have a leaning toward potentially falsely identifying conspiracies. While I agree COVID vaccine negative side-effects seem underreported (I’ve seen it with family), I am also skeptical of Bret’s coverage. I also think there is another perspective on the Evergreen College situation, which is that the college had been slow to implement thoughtful reforms (whatever that means) to address structural discrimination and that tensions boiled over.
At the same time, I want to be careful about not dismissing explained reasoning outright because the person seems on the face of it unreasonable. There are people outside EA whom I talked with who initially seemed in some ways very unreasonable, until I probed their perspective enough, found a more comprehensive way of looking at the problem, and surprisingly changed my mind.
Would also want to encourage maintaining some openness around looking for conflicting perspectives. You have been advising a climate strategy of a developing a mix of energy solutions, including nuclear energy. You would adjust your recommendations if you ever found rigorous reasoning for there being an unacceptable risk of nuclear meltdown, right?
Fixed it! You can use either link now to share with your friends.
Update: reverting my forecast back to 80% chance likelihood for these reasons.