All of irving's Comments + Replies

I honestly can't say. I wish I could.

Hmm, not necessarily the researchers, but the founders undoubtedly. OpenAI was specifically formed to increase AI safety.

I've seen the latter but much more of the former.

This post was meant as a summary of common rebuttals. I haven't actually heard much questioning of motivation, as instrumental convergence seems fairly intuitive. The more common question asked is how an AI could actually physically achieve the destruction.

I just started a writing contest for detailed scenarios on how we get from our current scenario to AI ending the world. I want to compile the results on a website so we have an easily shareable link with more scenarios than can be ad hoc dismissed, because individual scenarios taken from a huge list are easy to argue against and thus discredit the list, but a critical mass of them presented at once defeats this effect. If anyone has good examples I'll add them to the website.

Yes, I should have been more clear that I was addressing people who have very high p(doom). The prisoner/bomb is indeed somewhat of a simplification, but I do think there's a valid connection in the form of half-heartedly attempting to get the assistance of people more powerful than you and prematurely giving it up as hopeless.

Thank you for your kind words! I was expecting most reactions to be fairly anti-"we should", but I figured it was worth a try.

Most common antisafety arguments I see in the wild, not steel-manned but also not straw-manned:

  • There’s no evidence of a malign superintelligence existing currently, therefore it can be dismissed without evidence
  • We're faking being worried because if we truly were, we would use violence
  • Yudkowsky is calling for violence
  • Saying something as important as the end of the world could happen could influence people to commit violence, therefore warning about the end of the world is bad
  • Doomers can’t provide the exact steps a superintelligence would take to eliminate h
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1TAG
Currently, they seem to have a lot of trouble explaining the motivation. The "How" steps are a lot easier.

Hardcore agree. I'm planning a documentary and trying to find interested parties.

Honestly I don't think fake stories are even necessary, and becoming associated with fake news could be very bad for us. I don't think we've seriously tried to convince people of the real big bad AI. What, two podcasts and an opinion piece in Time? We've never done a real media push but all indications are that people are ready to hear it. "AI researchers believe there's a 10% chance they'll end life" is all the headline you need.

1TinkerBird
Like I say, not something I'd normally advocate, but no media stations have picked it up yet, and we might as well try whatever we can if we're desperate enough.  I say we make a start on this ASAP. 

The discussion in the comments is extremely useful and we've sorely needed much more of it. I think we need a separate place purely for sharing and debating our thoughts about strategies like this, and ideally also working on actual praxis based on these strategies. The ideal solution for me would be a separate "strategy" section on LessWrong or at least a tag, with much weaker moderation to encourage out-of-the-box ideas. So as not to pass the buck I'm in the process of building my own forum in the absence of anything better.

Some ideas for praxis I had, t... (read more)

It might be almost literally impossible for any issue at all to not get politicized right down the middle when it gets big, but if any issue could avoid that fate one would expect it to be the imminent extinction of life. If it's not possible, I tend to think the left side would be preferable since they pretty much get everything they ever want. I tentatively lean towards just focusing on getting the left and letting the right be reactionary, but this is a question that deserves a ton of discussion.

This is exactly the kind of praxis we need to see more of.

There are three possible futures: 1) nobody ever cares and nothing happens until AI ruin, 2) the public is finally spooked by capabilities advancement and the government acts, but out of ignorance does something like building a literal box, and 3) the public and the government gain an appreciation of the reality of the situation and take actually useful actions. What I was trying to convey is that Future 3 surely has a higher probability in a universe where we decide to think about how to increase its probability, relative to a universe in which we don't t... (read more)

Any feedback is of course welcomed.

2the gears to ascension
Hmm. Sent a DM.

For the people disagreeing, I'm curious what part you're disagreeing with.

I have been shocked by the lack of effort put into social technology to lengthen timelines. As I see it one of the only chances we have is increasing the number of people (specifically normies, as that is the group with true scale) who understand and care about the risk arguments, but almost nobody seems to be trying to achieve this. Am I missing something?

1Seth Herd
I think there's a delay in outreach for three reasons. 1. There's substantial conflict within the community about the effect of doing that outreach. Trying to sound the alarm might just convince the whole world that AGI is imminent, and the first one there controls the world. That would accelerate progress dramatically. For some reason, normies do not seem to understand this. But the compelling logic would convince many if there were efforts to get everyone to think about it. This is why I've kept my mouth largely closed, and probably why many others have as well. 2. We as a community strongly believe it won't work. We assume that the coordination problems are too large. But we don't think about it a ton, for multiple reasons including 1 and 3 here. There are strong arguments that we should at least think about it more. 3. The types of people who tend to take abstract arguments, like AGI risk, seriously are typically not the types of people who want to take on massive social projects. There are many exceptions, like Rob Miles, but I think the averages make a difference in our approach as a community. I do think the community is moving toward focusing more on this angle. And that we probably should.
3Nathan Helm-Burger
No, I think outreach is a neglected cause area because AGI seemed implausible 10 or even 5 years ago. I think it is now much easier for people to imagine us getting there, and thus the time is ripe.