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.
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 the matter.
At any rate, I'm not asking for the entire world to throw down their asteroid detection schemes or their climate mitigation strategies; that's not politically feasible, regardless of risk probabilities. I'm just asking them to increase the size of the pie by a few million, maybe as little as one billion total, to add research about AI, and to spend more money on the whole gamut of existential risk reduction as a cohesive topic of great importance.
What would you tell the first climate scientist to examine global warming, or the first to predict asteroid strikes, other than "do more research, and get others to do research as well"?
I have no problem with a billion dollars spend on friendly AI research. But that doesn't mean that I agree that the SIAI needs a billion dollars right now or that I agree that the current evidence is enough to tell people to stop researching cancer therapies or create educational videos about basic algebra. I don't think we know enough about risks from AI to ju... (read more)