It has been 5.5 days since the MIRI Expansion party. Could someone, anyone who attended please describe briefly what was announced? (I attempted unsuccessfully to satisfy my curiosity by reading around all occurrences of "expansion" and "one medical" in /r/all/comments and scanning all the titles in /r/all/recentposts.)
It has been 5.5 days since the MIRI Expansion party. Could someone, anyone who attended please describe briefly what was announced? (I attempted unsuccessfully to satisfy my curiosity by reading around all occurrences of "expansion" and "one medical" in /r/all/comments and scanning all the titles in /r/all/recentposts.)
IMHO there is little chance that an online-only community could replicate the successes (many friendships among the members, very high levels of enjoyment, motivation and engagement) of LW NYC. Why not? Well, at the risk of putting off those readers who dislike explanations from evolutionary psychology, friendship relies on complex...
The following excerpt from a recent post, Recursively Self-Improving Human Intelligence, suggests to me that it is time for a reminder of the reason LW was started. "[C]an anyone think of specific ways in which we can improve ourselves via iterative cycles? Is there a limit to how far we...
Suppose AI assistants similar to Claude transform the economy. Now what? How is the risk of human extinction reduced?
Yes, alignment researchers have become more capable, and yes, the people trying to effect an end or a long pause of AI "progress" have become more capable, but so have those trying to effect more AI "progress".
Also, rapid economic change entails rapid changes in most human interpersonal relationships, which is hard on people and according to some is the main underlying cause of addictions. Addicts aren't likely to come to understand that AI "progress" is very dangerous even if they are empowered by AI assistants.
Your argument supports the assertion that if AI "progress" stopped now then we'd be better off then we would've been without any AI progress (in the past), but of course that is very different than being optimistic about the outcome of AI tech's continuing to "progress".
My worry is one or two people loyal to the red team leave the site, which makes people on the blue team feel more free to use the site to criticize the red team, causing more red teamers to leave (and attracting blue-team zealots who filter everything through an ideological lens) in a positive feedback loop ending in a site with the same problem as Bluesky already has and many subreddits already have, namely, the zealots produce large quantities of low-quality writing, which drowns out the high-quality contributions and discourages many who can make high-quality contributions from even starting to contribute.
ADDED. Since LW is currently very far from Bluesky, perhaps it would've been more persuasive for me to argue that if LW were to start to have even half as many low-effort political comments as Hacker News, many would probably stop reading LW, or at least that is my worry.
you used the word "government" but to be clear, the supreme court and the states are also the government!
In British English, "the government" means the executive branch, and the entire thing (including the judiciary and the legislature) is called the state.
And while I have your attention allow me to echo the person you are replying to, namely, it would be ideal if a reader could not even tell from your comments which party you prefer (since you run the site) and great grandparent is pretty strong evidence for which one.
I made the same prediction a month ago:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tsconpYZiPAQc7CHQ/?commentId=QzWaC7Efejzu29b4h
Maybe I failed to write something that reasonable people could parse.
"The prediction market"? I am confused what you mean by that.
I mean a technology and its implementations similar to how "the telephone" refers to a technology.
I should have written, "I wouldn't be surprised if prediction markets start growing much faster than they have been growing over the last 3 decades or so", to avoid taking a position on whether they are not currently important.
For decades, people have been saying that the prediction market has the potential to become economically important, yet it remains unimportant. I would not be surprised if it becomes important over the next 4 years thanks to broadly-available AI technology.
Let's define "economically important" as a state of affairs in which there continues to be at least $50 billion riding on predictions at every instant in time.
First of all, AI tech might make prediction markets better by helping with market-making and arbitrage. Second, a sufficiently robust prediction market might turn out to be the most cost-effective way for an owner of an AI service like ChatGPT to make certain kinds of improvements to the AI service with the result that owners of AI services become a major source of investment in and of revenue for the prediction markets.
This soldier spent 2 years fighting for Ukraine, including 6 months recently as an operator of FPV drones, and he is also skeptical that drones will revolutionize military affairs during the next few years. I don't recall anything about his arguments, but my recollection is he does provide some argumentation in this interview.
Many believe that one hope for our future is that the AI labs will makes some mistake that will kill many people, but not all of us, resulting in the survivors finally realizing how dangerous AI is. I wish people would refer to that as a "near miss", not a "warning shot". A warning shot is when the danger (originally a warship) actually cares about you but cares about its mission more, with the result that it complicates its plans and policies to try to keep you alive.
There's a good chance that "postpone the intelligence explosion for a few centuries" is a better motto than "stop AI" or "pause AI".
Someone should do some "market research" on this question.
I appreciate it when people repost here things Eliezer has written on Twitter or Facebook because it makes it easier for me to stay away from Twitter and Facebook.
(OTOH, I'm grateful to Eliezer for participating on Twitter because posting on Twitter has much higher impact than posting here does.)
The utility function is an abstraction that does not capture the richness of the behavior of agents in the real world, but the better an agent is at rationality, the more accurate (and comprehensive) the abstraction of the utility function becomes IMHO at describing the agent. I suspect that it never makes sense to model a utility function as changing over time.
Or maybe it makes sense only as a mental shortcut to be used only when we do not have time to make a proper analysis. People of course discover new wants and new preferences as they go through life, but this can be taken into account by saying (or noticing) that the person does not know what their (unchanging) utility function is in every detail, and every now and then he or she learn a previously-unknown detail (or fact) about their utility function.
I'm tired of the AI-generated art that writers here put in their posts and comments. Some might not be able to relate, but the way my brain works, I have to exert focus for a few seconds to suppress the effects of having seen the image before I can continue to engage with the writer's words. It is quite mentally effortful.
We will soon learn how to make machines that are better at planning and better at reality than we are. That is a big problem.
Now that the risks of AI are getting mainstream traction, we can expect the people who want to rush forward with AI research to increase their efforts to influence public opinion. In particular, most people will come to rely heavily on large language models to get information much like they rely heavily on search engines today, and the most popular large language models (LLMs) will probably be tuned so as to downplay the risks of AI research (particularly the argument that AI research is so dangerous that it should be halted for a few decades). It is not too early to think about how to counter that.
Here are all the letters of the (English) alphabet: hrtmbvyxfoiazkpnqldjucsweg
It has been 5.5 days since the MIRI Expansion party. Could someone, anyone who attended please describe briefly what was announced?
(I attempted unsuccessfully to satisfy my curiosity by reading around all occurrences of "expansion" and "one medical" in /r/all/comments and scanning all the titles in /r/all/recentposts.)
IMHO there is little chance that an online-only community could replicate the successes (many friendships among the members, very high levels of enjoyment, motivation and engagement) of LW NYC.
Why not? Well, at the risk of putting off those readers who dislike explanations from evolutionary psychology, friendship relies on complex functional adaptations that were "tuned" or "designed" by natural selection for an environment in which every friendship has significant costs. By "costs" I mean that either the friends had to pay the social cost (which was significant in the ancestral environment) of being seen to be talking to each other or they had to go to significant trouble to talk without being observed.... (read 208 more words →)
The following excerpt from a recent post, Recursively Self-Improving Human Intelligence, suggests to me that it is time for a reminder of the reason LW was started.
"[C]an anyone think of specific ways in which we can improve ourselves via iterative cycles? Is there a limit to how far we can currently improve our abilities by improving our abilities to improve our abilities? Or are these not the right questions; the concept a mere semantic illusion[?]"
These are not the right questions -- not because the concept is a semantic illusion, but rather because the questions are a little too selfish. I hope the author of the above words does not mind my saying... (read 463 more words →)
Increasing the volume of alignment research helps only if alignment research does not help capabilities researchers, but my impression is that most alignment research that has been done so far has helped capabilities researchers approximately as much as it has helped alignment researchers. Just because a line of research is described as "alignmnent research" does not automatically cause it to help alignment researchers more than capability researchers.
In summary, I don't consider your (a) a cause for hope because the main problem is that increasing capabilities to the point of disaster (extinction or such) is easier than solving the alignment problem and your (a) does not ameliorate the main problem much if at all for the reason I just explained.