Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

XiXiDu

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

Well, if we understand A to include ems, then your B, C and D are misleadingly worded. They all speak of a single AI. If you reworded them to allow for ems, then I guess I would agree that the dispute is located there. But I would be interested to see such a rewording--I think it would be favorable to Hanson's point of view.

It's also not clear to me that "single powerful AI or trillions of uploads" together add up to p > .5! But that might be off-topic.

Favorable? I don't know why you'd think that. Seems to me the charitable interpretation of Hanson's view has him thinking of ems as naturally Friendly, or near-Friendly. (My analysis didn't mention the chance of us getting FAI without working for it.)

If we get two unFriendly AIs that individually have the power to kill humanity, and if acting quickly means they don't have to negotiate with anyone else from this planet, they'll divide Earth between them. If we somehow get trillions of uFAIs with practically different goals, then of course the expected value... (read more)

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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