One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
- Otherwise smart people say unreasonable things about AI safety.
- Many people who believed AI was around the corner didn't take safety very seriously.
- Elites have failed to navigate many important issues wisely (2008 financial crisis, climate change, Iraq War, etc.), for a variety of reasons.
- AI may arrive rather suddenly, leaving little time for preparation.
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
- If AI is preceded by visible signals, elites are likely to take safety measures. Effective measures were taken to address asteroid risk. Large resources are devoted to mitigating climate change risks. Personal and tribal selfishness align with AI risk-reduction in a way they may not align on climate change. Availability of information is increasing over time.
- AI is likely to be preceded by visible signals. Conceptual insights often take years of incremental tweaking. In vision, speech, games, compression, robotics, and other fields, performance curves are mostly smooth. "Human-level performance at X" benchmarks influence perceptions and should be more exhaustive and come more rapidly as AI approaches. Recursive self-improvement capabilities could be charted, and are likely to be AI-complete. If AI succeeds, it will likely succeed for reasons comprehensible by the AI researchers of the time.
- Therefore, safety measures will likely be taken.
- If safety measures are taken, then elites will navigate the creation of AI just fine. Corporate and government leaders can use simple heuristics (e.g. Nobel prizes) to access the upper end of expert opinion. AI designs with easily tailored tendency to act may be the easiest to build. The use of early AIs to solve AI safety problems creates an attractor for "safe, powerful AI." Arms races not insurmountable.
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
- Elites often fail to take effective action despite plenty of warning.
- I think there's a >10% chance AI will not be preceded by visible signals.
- I think the elites' safety measures will likely be insufficient.
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know:
- Which historical events are analogous to AI risk in some important ways? Possibilities include: nuclear weapons, climate change, recombinant DNA, nanotechnology, chloroflourocarbons, asteroids, cyberterrorism, Spanish flu, the 2008 financial crisis, and large wars.
- What are some good resources (e.g. books) for investigating the relevance of these analogies to AI risk (for the purposes of illuminating elites' likely response to AI risk)?
- What are some good studies on elites' decision-making abilities in general?
- Has the increasing availability of information in the past century noticeably improved elite decision-making?
And I have the impression that relatively low-ranking people helped produce this outcome by keeping information from their superiors. Petrov chose not to report a malfunction of the early warning system until he could prove it was a malfunction. People during the Korean war and possibly Vietnam seem not to have passed on the fact that pilots from Russia or America were cursing in their native languages over the radio (and the other side was hearing them).
This in fact is part of why I don't think we 'survived' through the anthropic principle. Someone born after the end of the Cold War could look back at the apparent causes of our survival. And rather than seeing random events, or no causes at all, they would see a pattern that someone might have predicted beforehand, given more information.
This pattern seems vanishingly unlikely to save us from unFriendly AI. It would take, at the very least, a much more effective education/propaganda campaign.
As I remark elsewhere in this thread, the point is that I would have expected substantially more nuclear exchange by now than actually happened, and in view of this, I updated in the direction of things being more likely to go well than I would have thought. I'm not saying "the fact that there haven't been nuclear exchanges means that destructive things can't happen."
I was using the nucle... (read more)