Richard Hollerith. 15 miles north of San Francisco. hruvulum@gmail.com
My probability that AI research will end all human life is .92. It went up drastically when Eliezer started going public with his pessimistic assessment in April 2022. Till then my confidence in MIRI (and knowing that MIRI has enough funding to employ many researchers) was keeping my probability down to about .4. (I am glad I found out about Eliezer's assessment.)
Currently I am willing to meet with almost anyone on the subject of AI extinction risk.
Last updated 26 Sep 2023.
Any computer program can be presented in the form of an equation. Specifically, you define a function named step
such that step (s, input) = (s2, output) where s and s2 are "states", i.e., mathematical representations of the RAM, cache and registers.
To run the computer program, you apply step
to some starting state, yielding (s2, output), then you apply step to s2, yielding (s3, output2), then apply step to s3, and so on for billions of repetitions.
Another reply to your question asserts that equations cannot handle non-determinism. Untrue. To handle it, all we need to do is add another argument to step, rand
say, that describes the non-deterministic influences on the program. This is routinely done in formalisms for modelling causality, e.g., the structural equation models used in economics.
So, in summary, your question has some implicit assumptions that would need to be made explicit before I can answer.
One of the reasons I think demographic factors aren't as important over the long term as some say they are is that an estimated 50% of the population of Europe died (from the plague) from 1346 to 1353 and yet not long afterwards Europe started pulling ahead the rest of the world, with Gutenberg inventing movable type in 1450 and the Renaissance having spread throughout Europe by 1500. Admittedly the Renaissance's beginning (in Italy) predate the plague, but the point is that the loss of about 50% of the population did not prevent those beginnings from spreading to the rest of the Europe and did not prevent Europe from becoming the most influential region of the world (with the European discovery of the New World in 1492, with the European Magellan making the first circumnavigation of the globe between 1519 and 1522 and with the scientific and political advances, e.g., the empirical method and liberalism, of the European Renaissance having tremendous global influence to the present day).
And even if I were not able to cite the example I just cited, the track record of the class of experts (geographers, political scientists) who maintain that demographics is national destiny is that they are often wrong. Less Wrong does well in general, but could do better at resisting false information and information of unknown truth value that gets repeated over and over on by the internet.
My guess is that banning birth control is not in the Overton window in Russia.
You make a good point. I think however that these demographic factors aren't as important to a country's long-term fate as many recent commentators say it is.
Probably the only feasible way of fixing the demography is mass immigration.
Banning birth control would be another feasible way in my estimation for any government that can survive the resentment caused by the ban -- and the Kremlin probably could survive it.
My $300 against your $30 that OpenAI's next round of funding raises less than $40 billion of investor money. In case OpenAI raises no investment money in the next 36 months, the bet expires. Any takers?
I make the same offer with "OpenAI" replaced with "any startup with Sam Altman as a founder".
I'm retracting this comment and these 2 offers. I still think it is very unlikely, but realized that I would be betting against people who are vastly more efficient than I am at using the internet to access timely information and might even be betting against people with private information from Altman or OpenAI.
Someone should publicly bet like I did as an act of altruism to discourage this unprofitable line of inquiry, but I'm not feeling that altruistic today.
Reading this makes me suspect that increasing the scope (range of applicability) of insurance or of “derivative” contracts (e.g., options and futures) is a more potent way to improve the world than promoting prediction markets.
The statement does not mention existential risk, but rather "the risk of extinction from AI".