Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

XiXiDu

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

A while back I posted this minimalist account of Eliezer's case for the importance of FAI to human survival. (Claim B technically seems too specific if you want to talk about the existential risk as a whole, but I think it reflects his view.)

So far I can't tell if you agree that each claim has easily more than .5 probability given the evidence, nor if you share my view that Claim A as separate from the rest has P close to 1. In particular, you said here that you believe:

if you waste too much time with spatiotemporal bounded versions then someone who is ignorant of friendliness will launch one that isn't constrained that way.

By the same principle, the speed or slowness of FOOM doesn't matter in the long run unless some force with the power to stop it does so, and unless this happens every single time someone creates an unFriendly AI with the power to self-modify. I have almost no confidence that humanity in general will learn from past mistakes (and precious little confidence in the subset that could write the second or third AGI). So I think we need to look at the cumulative chance for Claim B, Claim C, and perhaps even D.

Even so, it seems possible that the actual risk stays within 5%. Maybe you think some form of FAI, such as Friendly uploads, will prove easy once we get the capacity for some form of AGI. Maybe you think we seem likely to kill ourselves with X before then. Maybe you think some other force(s) will stop each and every AGI. If so, I'd like to hear your reasoning.

And if not, if you want to argue against my claims in some other way, please do so without identifying them with a more specific storyline.

ETA: I apparently forgot how to use links. I believe this means I should go eat or sleep. Take that as you will.

So far I can't tell if you agree that each claim has easily more than .5 probability given the evidence, nor if you share my view that Claim A as separate from the rest has P close to 1.

The whole dispute is about your claim A. It gives lot of credence to Y's idea of where things are headed (someone is going to write a single AI that takes over the world) and none to H's (someone is going to upload some humans and make trillions of copies). Those are two very different possibilities with different consequences, and there's no reason to believe it's close to an exhaustive list of plausible scenarios.

1XiXiDu15y

That's one of the main problems I have with the whole existential risks prediction business. There is a specific storyline, it is comprised in the vagueness of your claims. If you tried to pin down a concept like 'recursive self-improvement' that supports the notion of an existential risk, you would end up with an argument that is strongly conjunctive. Most of the arguments in favor of risks from AI derive their appeal from vagueness, that doesn't mean that they are disjunctive.

1XiXiDu15y

Yes, I said that I believe that even sub-human level AI pose an existential risk. At the same time I am highly skeptical of FOOM. So why don't I agree with Eliezer outright anyway? Because the risks from AI that I perceive to be a possibility are not something you can solve by inventing provable "friendliness". How are you going to make a sophisticated monitoring system friendly? Why would people want to make it friendly? How are you going to make a virus with sub-human level general intelligence friendly? Why would one do that? Risks from AI are a broad category that need meta-solutions that involve preemptive political and security measures. You need to make sure that the first intelligent surveillance systems are employed transparently and democratically so that everyone can monitor the world for the various risks ahead. We need a global immune system that keeps care that nowhere someone gets ahead of everyone else.

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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