Climate change derives from Stefhan-Boltzmann’s law together with the spectral dependence of the emissivity of various gasses. Stefhan-Boltzmann’s law has fundamental theoretical and experimental support.
This is the basis upon which climate models rest. This basis is unquestioned.
You appear to be claiming that climate change is not an existential risk? The term boogeyman includes the judgement that the fears were unfounded. Climate change is a demonstrable real problem, and consequently not a boogeyman.
For something to be a boogeyman, it has to be an imagined danger that captures the fears of a lot of otherwise rational people.
The linked nytimes article is on the Satanic Panic, the same as the linked wikipedia page. This generation’s Boogeyman is yet to be determined. People who harbor insecurities about their own causes will self-identify by downvoting this topic.
I tried to follow with a particular shut down mechanism in mind and this whole argument is just too abstract to see how it applies.
Yudkowsky gave us a shut down mechanism in his Time Magazine article. He said we could bomb* the data centers. Can you show how these theorems cast doubt on this shut down proposal?
*”destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.”—https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/
Your Tech Transfer office is a member of AUTM. AUTM encourages licenses that include altruistic clauses. For example, the license could waive royalties for sales in third world countries when the licensee is selling at cost.
Such a deal allows the licensee to make a profit on first world sales to recover development costs and also recognize the altruistic value. Most inventions require development money and if open sourced they die from lack of funding.
“when I know a bunch of excellent forecasters...”
Perhaps your sampling techniques are better than Tetlock’s then.
Pro: Willard Wells
Highly effective causes saturate, making it impossible to distribute large sums of money especially more effectively.
AGI is more likely to save us from all-cause existential risk than it is likely to kill us all.
@Linch Have you ever met any of these engineers who work on advancing AI in spite of thinking that the “most likely result … is that literally everyone on Earth will die.”
I have never met anyone so thoroughly depraved.
Mr. Yudkowsky and @RobBensinger think our field has many such people.
I wonder if there is a disconnect in the polls. I wonder if people at MIRI have actually talked to AI engineers who admit to this abomination. What do you even say to someone so contemptible? Perhaps there are no such people.
I think it is much more likely that these MIRI folks have worked themselves into a corner of an echo chamber than it is that our field has attracted so many low-lifes who would sooner kill every last human than walk away from a job.
I do not believe @RobBensinger ’s and Yudkowsky’s claim that “there are also lots of people in ML who do think AGI is likely to kill us all, and choose to work on advancing capabilities anyway.”
What experiences tell you there are also lots of people in ML who do think AGI is likely to kill us all, and choose to work on advancing capabilities anyway?
Yudkowsky claims that AI developers are plunging headlong into our research in spite of believing we are about to kill all of humanity. He says each of us continues this work because we believe the herd will just outrun us if any one of us were to stop.
The truth is nothing like this. The truth is that we do not subscribe to Yudkowsky’s doomsday predictions. We work on artificial intelligence because we believe it will have great benefits for humanity and we want to do good for humankind.
We are not the monsters that Yudkowsky makes us out to be.
Daylight Savings Time Fix: The real problem is losing the hour of sleep in the spring. The solution is to set clocks back an hour in Fall, and move them forward by 40 seconds everyday for 90 days in spring. No one is going to miss 40 seconds of sleep. Most clocks are digital and set themselves, so you don’t need adjust them and you won’t notice anything in spring.
You could substitute “work” where you write “fight”. The latter evokes violence.
In the analogies of types of washing we should include Altruism-Washing.
The ML engineer is developing an automation technology for coding and is aware of AI risks . The engineers polite acknowledgment of the concerns is met with your long derivation of how many current and future people she will kill with this.
Automating an aspect of coding is part of a long history of using computers to help design better computers, starting with Carver Mead’s realization that you don’t need humans to cut rubylith film to form each transistor.
You haven’t shown an argument that this project will accelerate the scenario you describe. Perhaps the engineer is brushing you off because your reasoning is broad enough to apply to all improvements in computing technology. You will get more traction if you can show more specifically how this project is “bad for the world”.
The difficulty is in the name “longtermist”. It asserts ownership over concern for the future.
People who disagree with the ideas that carry this banner are also concerned for the future.
The founding premise of EA was that you need to weigh evidence. This distinction is saying the longtermists have abandoned the founding premise of the movement.
The debate sets aside a founding principle of EA.
In the canonical story of the playpump, we had an inventor who imagined the future benefit of his dual use water-well playground. He failed. We learned that we waste money when we rely on how well we imagine our ideas will work. We learned that we need to build and measure the results.
Those of us who speculate on their efficacy of curbing extinction risk and those of us who speculate on their improvement of future well being are all in the same boat as the inventor of the playpump.