Hanson often takes his turn to speak this way: he summarizes Yudkowsky's last argument, in a way that at least superficially does not seem unfair or tendentious, then explains why he doesn't find it compelling, then explains why his own position is more compelling.
Yudkowsky seems to respond to Hanson's points without summarizing them first.
I find Hanson to be hugely more effective in the recording. Is it because of this? I was less sympathetic to Yudkowsky's point of view before I started listening, so it's hard for me to tell if this is an illusion.
Modifiers like "new" or "old" in titles or filenames quickly become unhelpful. It's generally better to use dates (in this case, something like "Jun 2011" would do the trick).
Can someone who agrees with Yudkowsky do an extended summary of Yudkowsky's position and arguments in text, the way Hanson summarized his position and arguments in text?
72:00 - Hanson cites the AAAI white paper which rails against alarmism.
That seems more likely to be a tussle over funding. If the panic-stricken screechers make enough noise, it might adversely affect their member's funding. Something rather like that has happened before:
...It was rumoured in some of the UK national press of the time that Margaret Thatcher watched Professor Fredkin being interviewed on a late night TV science programme. Fredkin explained that superintelligent machines were destined to surpass the human race in intelligence quite soon, and
In both of these debates, the change in "margin of victory" between people was smaller than the number of people who voted the first time but not the second. In the debate with Yudkowsky, Hanson's margin of victory went from -5 to 1, and 20 voters dropped out. In the debate with Caplan the margin went from 32 to 5--actually getting smaller--and 17 voters dropped out. I'm not sure if we can even determine a "winner" in terms of audience popularity, with that many disappearing votes. Is it normal in debates for large numbers of audience members to not vote at the end?
My two cents:
Legg's Is there an Elegant Universal Theory of Prediction? is somewhat relevant to parts of this discussion.
How about a LW poll regarding this issue?
(Is there some new way to make one, since the site redesign, or are we still at vote-up-down-karma-balance pattern?)
Hanson seems to agree that if we get human-level agents that are cheap to run, this gets us a local takeover. I don't think that having cheap chimp-level agents widely available at that time overturns the advantage of gaining access to cheap human-level agents. So if we grant that the capability of AIs gets increased gradually and publicly, all that a local group needs to take over the world is make the step from chimp-level state-of-the-art agents to human-level agents before any other group does that. If chimp-level agents are not that different from hum...
I don't have an intuition for what would happen if you ran a chimp-level intelligence very fast. The ratio Yudkowsky mentioned in the recording was 2500 years of human-in-skull thinking = 8 hours of human-in-laptop thinking. Is it completely obvious that 2500 years of chimp thinking would yield nothing interesting or dangerous?
Chimps haven't accomplished much in the last 2500 years but that's at least partly because they don't pass on insights between generations. Can we stipulate 2500 years of chimp memory, too?
Hanson has made a lot of comments recently about how intellligence is poorly defined and how we don't really know what it is - e.g. 77:30 and 83:00 minutes in. I think we do now have a pretty good idea about that - thanks to the Hutter/Legg work on universal intelligence. If Hanson was more familiar with this sort of material, I rather doubt he would say the kinds of things he is currently saying.
Whoever asked Robin about his opinion that social skills separated humans from chimpanzees "Can you envision a scenario where one of the computers acquired this 'Social Skill' then said to all the other computers "hey guys lets go have a revolution" " Love that comment
73:00 - this seems to be a mis-summary by Hanson. I am pretty sure that Norvig was saying that complex models were still useful - not that simpler ones didn't even exist.
The situation is similar to that with compression. If you can compress a bit that is still useful - and it is easier to do than compressing a lot.
It's not a brain in a box in a basement - and it's not one grand architectural insight - but I think the NSA shows how a secretive organisation can get ahead and stay ahead - if it is big and well funded enough. Otherwise, public collaboration tends to get ahead and stay ahead, along similar lines to those Robin mentions.
Google, Apple, Facebook etc. are less-extreme versions of this kind of thing, in that they keep trade secrets which give them advantages - and don't contribute all of these back to the global ecosystem. As a result they gradually stack u...
Hanson gets polite and respectful treatment for his emulation scenario. I am not convinced that is the right approach. Emulations first is a pretty crazy idea - and Hanson doesn't appear to have been advised about that a sufficiently large number of times yet.
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.
The thesis seems pretty obviously true to me, though there is some issue over how much is "much".
Google or Facebook control a much larger fraction the world compared to farmers or industy folk from decades ago. Essentially technological progress promotes wealth inequality by providing the powerful with technology for keeping control of their wealth and power. So, we have more wealth inequality than ever - and will most likely have even more wealth inequality in the future.
Hanson's debating success is all the more impressive given that he was fighting with a handicap. Imagine how potent his debating would be if he was actually arguing for a correct position!
Taking the last part first for context: this layman thinks that just simulating a conscious brain (experiencing something other than pure terror or slow insanity) would take a lot of resources using the copy-an-airplane-with-bullet-holes approach where you don't know what the parts actually do, at least not well enough to make a self-reflective programming AI from scratch.
As to the rest, I'm assuming my previous claims hold for the case of a single AGI because you seemed to argue that simply introducing a lot more AGIs changes the argument. ("Cooperating with us" therefore means not killing us all.) I started out by granting that the nature of the AIs could make a big difference. The number seems almost irrelevant. It seems like you're arguing for the possibility that no single em would have enough resources to produce super-intelligence (making assumptions about what that requires), since they might find themselves sharing a medium with trillions of competing ems before they get that far. But this appears to mean that giving more resources to any one of them (or any group with consistent goals) could easily produce super-intelligence. Someone would eventually do this. Indeed, Hanson seems to argue that a workforce of ems would help produce better technology and thus better ems.
I do have to address the possibility that the normal ems themselves could stop a self-modifying AI because they would think faster than ordinary humans. That situation would certainly decrease the risk of killing humanity. But again, for that to make sense you have to assume that effective self-modification requires vast resources (or you just get trillions of self-modifiers by assumption). You may also need to assume that a super-intelligence needs even more resources to work out a plan for killing us -- otherwise the rest of the ems would seemingly have no way to discover the plan before it went into motion, except by chance. (A superior intelligence would try to include their later actions in the plan.) Note that even these assumptions do not yield near-certainty of survival given uFAI, not with the observed stupidity of humanity. Seems like you'd at least need the additional assumption that no biological human who the uFAI can reach and fool has the power to trigger our demise.
And then of course we have the relative difficulty of emulation and new designs for reflective AI. It took no time at all to find someone arguing for the impossibility of the former, on the grounds that normal emulation requires knowing what the original does well enough to copy one part and not another. If we get that knowledge it increases the likelihood of new AGI -- indeed, it almost seems to require making 'narrow AIs' along the way, and by assumption this happens before we know what each one can do.
My main reason for doubting this part, however, lies in the fact that it suggests we can avoid otherwise difficult work, and the underlying belief seems to have grown in popularity along with our grasp of said difficulty.
Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html