pslunch comments on MIRI strategy - Less Wrong

5 Post author: ColonelMustard 28 October 2013 03:33PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 28 October 2013 06:24:28PM *  36 points [-]
  • Pamphlets work for wells in Africa. They don't work for MIRI's mission. The inferential distance is too great, the ideas are too Far, the impact is too far away.
  • Eliezer spent SIAI's early years appealing directly to people about AI. Some good people found him, but the people were being filtered for "interest in future technology" rather than "able to think," and thus when Eliezer would make basic arguments about e.g. the orthogonality thesis or basic AI drives, the responses he would get were basically random (except for the few good people). So Eliezer wrote The Sequences and HPMoR and now the filter is "able to think" or at least "interest in improving one's thinking," and these people, in our experience, are much more likely to do useful things when we present the case for EA, for x-risk reduction, for FAI research, etc.
  • Still, we keep trying direct mission appeals, to some extent. I've given my standard talk, currently titled "Effective Altruism and Machine Intelligence," at Quixey, Facebook, and Heroku. This talk explains effective altruism, astronomical stakes, the x-risk landscape, and the challenge of FAI, all in 25 minutes. I don't know yet how much good effect this talk will have. There's Facing the Intelligence Explosion and the forthcoming Smarter Than Us. I've spent a fair amount of time promoting Our Final Invention.
  • I don't think we can get much of anywhere with a 1-page pamphlet, though. We tried a 4-page pamphlet once; it accomplished nothing.
Comment author: pslunch 29 October 2013 03:43:33AM 6 points [-]

I would hesitate to use failure during "SIAI's early years" to justify the ease or difficulty of the task. First, the organization seems far more capable now than it was at the time. Second, the landscape has shifted dramatically even in the last few years. Limited AI is continuing to expand and with it discussion of the potential impacts (most of it ill-informed, but still).

While I share your skepticism about pamphlets as such, I do tend to think that MIRI has a greater chance of shifting the odds away from UFAI with persuasion/education rather than trying to build an FAI or doing mathematical research.

Comment author: ColonelMustard 29 October 2013 12:46:55PM 2 points [-]

I agree and would also add that "Eliezer failed in 2001 to convince many people" does not imply "Eliezer in 2013 is incapable of persuading people". From his writings, I understand he has changed his views considerably in the last dozen years.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 November 2013 02:49:15PM 0 points [-]

Who says the speculation of potential impacts is damagingly ill-informed? Just because people think of "AI" and then jump to "robots" and then "robots who are used to replace workers, destroy all our jobs, and then rise up in revolution as a robotic resurrection of Communism" doesn't mean they're not correctly reasoning that the creation of AI is dangerous.

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