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It’s sort of easy to forget how close Bernie Sanders was to becoming the most powerful person in the world. The world we live in feels so much not like that place. I’m in Washington DC for the next week, and I’ve just finished a public appearance with Senator Sanders (should I call him Bernie? Or Sanders? or…) You won’t often see me so dressed up and polished. But this is important! There are politicians who have principles and character, who really believe in doing what’s right. I think you have to respect them whether you agree with their views or not, and I think Senator Bernie Sanders is one of them. Never has my belief been so validated as when I saw him start to speak, loudly, CLEARLY, publicly about the risk of human extinction from AI. It’s the latest in a long line of “well, I’m clearly living in a simulation” moments. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that Sanders would take a stance here. You don’t have to be an expert to understand the risk from AI. You just need to care enough to spend the time looking into it, and to speak out even if it feels risky. But somehow it wasn’t in my bingo card that he would become THE most outspoken advocate on this issue. I hope this makes an impact on the parts of the left-wing that still think AI is all hype. I’m also not giving up on Trump getting worried about AI. There’s a way in which Trump and Sanders are similar -- they’re both sort of populists, they’re not political establishment candidates. Again, to realize we’re taking an insane gamble with AI, you just need to care enough to look at it. Well, maybe you need some streak of independent thinking, as well. Trump still probably has the power to make the AI nightmare go away, if he decides to. It’s hard to know how long that will last, though. There’s a turning point after which the US government can no longer rein in the AI companies. I often tell people “the future is not written”, and I think it’s hard for that lesson to really sink in. I’ve personally e
If you’ve been wondering why I’m suddenly blogging every day… well, it’s about to stop! I decided last minute to join InkHaven, i.e. commit to blogging every day for the month of April. This was a somewhat questionable decision because I have a lot of other shit going on. For...
It’s sort of easy to forget how close Bernie Sanders was to becoming the most powerful person in the world. The world we live in feels so much not like that place. I’m in Washington DC for the next week, and I’ve just finished a public appearance with Senator Sanders...
We need a way to stop AI developers from building AIs that might go rogue and kill us all. This is obviously something for the government to do. It could pass new laws prohibiting this and/or establishing an AI regulatory body. But do we need new laws? Isn’t it already...
A common thought pattern people seem to fall into when thinking about AI x-risk is approaching the problem as if the risk isn’t real, substantial, and imminent even if they think it is. When thinking this way, it becomes impossible to imagine the natural responses of people to the horror...
If a superintelligent AI suddenly “goes rogue”, it might take over the world and kill everyone. It matters a lot whether this happens to a single copy of an AI, or to every copy at the same time. Let’s consider the “every copy at the same time” case. I’ll discuss...
Part 3 of a series. Here are part 1 and part 2. One of the things that always surprised me is how few people in AI were interested in AI safety and alignment purely out of intellectual curiosity. These topics raise the kind of novel, foundational problems that scientists typically...
Other people have written about reasons why we should trust AIs; the main one in my mind is that it’s possible to look at the computations they perform when producing an output (even if we struggle to understand them). I’m going to write about reasons why we shouldn’t trust AIs,...