New article in Time Ideas by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Here’s some selected quotes.
In reference to the letter that just came out (discussion here):
We are not going to bridge that gap in six months.
It took more than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to reach today’s capabilities. Solving safety of superhuman intelligence—not perfect safety, safety in the sense of “not killing literally everyone”—could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we’ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.
…
Some of my friends have recently reported to me that when people outside the AI industry hear about extinction risk from Artificial General Intelligence for the first time, their reaction is “maybe we should not build AGI, then.”
Hearing this gave me a tiny flash of hope, because it’s a simpler, more sensible, and frankly saner reaction than I’ve been hearing over the last 20 years of trying to get anyone in the industry to take things seriously. Anyone talking that sanely deserves to hear how bad the situation actually is, and not be told that a six-month moratorium is going to fix it.
Here’s what would actually need to be done:
The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.
Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for anyone, including governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.
Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.
That’s the kind of policy change that would cause my partner and I to hold each other, and say to each other that a miracle happened, and now there’s a chance that maybe Nina will live. The sane people hearing about this for the first time and sensibly saying “maybe we should not” deserve to hear, honestly, what it would take to have that happen. And when your policy ask is that large, the only way it goes through is if policymakers realize that if they conduct business as usual, and do what’s politically easy, that means their own kids are going to die too.
Shut it all down.
We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.
Shut it down.
But it does risk giving up something. Even the average tech person on a forum like Hacker News still thinks the risk of an AI apocalypse is so remote that only a crackpot would take it seriously. Their priors regarding the idea that anyone of sense could take it seriously are so low that any mention of safety seems to them a fig-leaf excuse to monopolize control for financial gain; as believable as Putin's claims that he's liberating the Ukraine from Nazis. (See my recent attempt to introduce the idea here .) The average person on the street is even further away from this I think.
The risk then of giving up "optics" is that you lose whatever influence you may have had entirely; you're labelled a crackpot and nobody takes you seriously. You also risk damaging the influence of other people who are trying to be more conservative. (NB I'm not saying this will happen, but it's a risk you have to consider.)
For instance, personally I think the reason so few people take AI alignment seriously is that we haven't actually seen anything all that scary yet. If there were demonstrations of GPT-4, in simulation, murdering people due to mis-alignment, then this sort of a pause would be a much easier sell. Going full-bore "international treaty to control access to GPUs" now introduces the risk that, when GPT-6 is shown to murder people due to mis-alignment, people take it less seriously, because they've already decided AI alignment people are all crackpots.
I think the chances of an international treaty to control GPUs at this point is basically zero. I think our best bet for actually getting people to take an AI apocalypse seriously is to demonstrate an un-aligned system harming people (hopefully only in simulation), in a way that people can immediately see could extend to destroying the whole human race if the AI were more capable. (It would also give all those AI researchers something more concrete to do: figure out how to prevent this AI from doing this sort of thing; figure out other ways to get this AI to do something destructive.) Arguing to slow down AI research for other reasons -- for instance, to allow society to adapt to the changes we've already seen -- will give people more time to develop techniques for probing (and perhaps demonstrating) catastrophic alignment failures.