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.
If number 1 is true, then AI isn't a threat. It never will go crazy and cause harm. It will just do a few harmless and quirky things. Maybe that will be the case. If it is, Kudlowsky is still wrong. Beyond that, isn't going to solve these problems. To think that it will is moonshine. It assumes that solving complex and difficult problems are just a question of time and calculation. Sadly, the world isn't that simple. Most of the "big problems" are big because they are moral dilemmas with no answer that doesn't require value judgements and comparisons that simply cannot be solved via sure force of intellect.
As far as two you say, "It can, however, make evaluations/comparisons of its human wannabe-overlords and find them very much inferior, infinitely slower and generally rather of dubious reliability." You are just describing it being human and having human emotions. It is making value and moral judgements on its own. That is the definition of being human and having moral agency.
Then you go on to say "If the future holds something of a Rationality-rating akin to a Credit rating, we'd be lucky to score above Junk status; the vast majority of our needs, wants, drives and desires are all based on wanting to be loved by mommy and dreading death. Not much logic to be found there. One can be sure it will treat us as a joke, at least in terms of intellectual prowess and utility."
That is the sort of laughable nonsense that only intellectuals believe. There is no such that as something being "objectively reasonable" in any ultimate sense. Reason is just the process by which you think. That process can produce any result you want provided you feed into it the right assumptions. What seems irrational to you, can be totally rational to me if I start with different assumptions or different perceptions of the world than you do. You can reason yourself into any conclusion. They are called rationalization. The idea that there is an objective thing called "reason" which gives a single path to the truth is 8th grade philosophy and why Ayn Rand is a half wit. The world just doesn't work that way. A super AI is no more or less "reasonable" than anyone else. And its conclusions are no more or less reasonable or true than any other conclusions. To pretend it is is just faith based worship of reason and computation as some sort of ultimate truth. It isn't.
"The chances that a genuinely rule- and law-based society is more fair, efficient and generally superior to current human societies is 1"
A society with rules tempered by values and human judgement is fair and just to the extent human societies can be. A society that is entirely rule based tempered by no judgement of values is monstrous. Every rule has a limit, a point where applying it because unjust and wrong. If it were just a question of having rules and applying them to everything, ethical debate would have ended thousands of years ago. It isn't that simple. Ethics lie in the middle, rules are needed right up to the point they are not. Sadly, the categorical imperative didn't answer the issue.