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.
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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.
Yes I have done so. But I don't trust my ability to make correct probability estimates, don't trust the overall arguments and methods and don't know how to integrate that uncertainty into my estimates. It is all too vague.
There sure are a lot of convincing arguments in favor of risks from AI. But do arguments suffice? Nobody is an expert when it comes to intelligence. Even worse, I don't think anybody knows much about artificial general intelligence.
My problem is that I fear that some convincing blog posts are simply not enough. Just imagine all there was to climate change was someone with a blog who never studied the climate but instead wrote some essays about how it might be physical possible for humans to cause a global warming. Not enough, the same person then goes on to make further inferences based on the implications of those speculations. Am I going to tell everyone to stop emitting CO2 because of that? Hardly! Or imagine that all there was to the possibility of asteroid strikes was someone who argued that there might be big chunks of rocks out there which might fall down on our heads and kill us all, inductively based on the fact that the Earth and the moon are also a big rocks. Would I be willing to launch a billion dollar asteroid deflection program solely based on such speculations? I don't think so. Luckily, in both cases, we got a lot more than some convincing arguments in support of those risks.
Another example: If there were no studies about the safety of high energy physics experiments then I might assign a 20% chance of a powerful particle accelerator destroying the universe based on some convincing arguments put forth on a blog by someone who never studied high energy physics. We know that such an estimate would be wrong by many orders of magnitude. Yet the reason for being wrong would largely be a result of my inability to make correct probability estimates, the result of vagueness or a failure of the methods I employed. The reason for being wrong by many orders of magnitude would have nothing to do with the arguments in favor of the risks, as they might very well be sound given my epistemic sate and the prevalent uncertainty.
In summary: I believe that mere arguments in favor of one risk do not suffice to neglect other risks that are supported by other kinds of evidence. I believe that logical implications of sound arguments should not reach out indefinitely and thereby outweigh other risks whose implications are fortified by empirical evidence. Sound arguments, predictions, speculations and their logical implications are enough to demand further attention and research, but not much more.
If there was a risk that might kill us with a probability of .7 and another risk with .1 while our chance to solve the first one was .0001 and the second one .1, which one should we focus on?
Why do I feel like there's massively more evidence than "a few blog posts"? I must be counting information I've gained from other studies, like those on human history, and lumping it all under "what intelligent agents can accomplish". I'm likely counting fictional evidence, as well; I feel sort of like an early 20th century sci-fi buff must have felt about rockets to the moon. Another large part of being convinced falls under a lack of counterarguments - rather, there are plenty out there, just none that seem to have put thought into th... (read more)