Students asked to defend AGI danger update in favor of AGI riskiness

lukeprog

In the Spring semester of 2011, I decided to see how effectively I could communicate the idea of a threat from AGI to my undergraduate classes. I spent three sessions on this for each of my two classes. My goal was to convince my students that all of us are going to be killed by an artificial intelligence. My strategy was to induce the students to come up with the ideas themselves. I gave out a survey before and after. An analysis of the survey responses indicates that the students underwent a statistically significant shift in their reported attitudes. After the three sessions, students reported believing that AGI would have a larger impact1 and also a worse impact2 than they originally reported believing.

Not a surprising result, perhaps, but the details of how Geoff taught AGI danger and the reactions of his students are quite interesting.

From Geoff Anders of Leverage Research:

In the Spring semester of 2011, I decided to see how effectively I could communicate the idea of a threat from AGI to my undergraduate classes. I spent three sessions on this for each of my two classes. My goal was to convince my students that all of us are going to be killed by an artificial intelligence. My strategy was to induce the students to come up with the ideas themselves. I gave out a survey before and after. An analysis of the survey responses indicates that the students underwent a statistically significant shift in their reported attitudes. After the three sessions, students reported believing that AGI would have a larger impact1 and also a worse impact2 than they originally reported believing.

Not a surprising result, perhaps, but the details of how Geoff taught AGI danger and the reactions of his students are quite interesting.

It was pretty well accepted at MIT's Media Lab back when my orbit took me around there periodically, a decade or so ago, that there was a huge amount of low-hanging fruit in this area... not necessarily of academic interest, but damned useful (and commercial).

not necessarily of academic interest, but damned useful (and commercial).

Actually, I'm curious that isn't seen as an area of significan academic interest -- designing artificial systems around being efficient parsers of extraneous data. I recall that one of the major differences between Deep Blue and Deep Fritz in the Kasperov chess matches was precisely that Fritz was designed around not probing every last possible set of playable moves; that is, Deep Fritz was "learning to forget the right things".

It seems to me that understanding this mech... (read more)

2JoshuaZ15y

That's interesting since my impression if anything is the exact opposite. There seem to be a lot of people trying to apply Bayesian learning systems and expert learning systems to all sorts of different practical problems. I wonder if this is a new thing or whether I simply don't have a good view of the field.

7

Students asked to defend AGI danger update in favor of AGI riskiness

7

7

7

Students asked to defend AGI danger update in favor of AGI riskiness

7

7