I think it's unlikely we get there in the foreseeable future, with the current paradigms
It would be nice if you could define “foreseeable future”. 3 years? 10 years? 30? 100? 1000? What?
And I’m not sure why “with the current paradigms” is in that sentence. The post you’re responding to is “Ten arguments that AI is an existential risk”, not “Ten arguments that Multimodal Large Language Models are an existential risk”, right?
If your assumption is that “the current paradigms” will remain the current paradigms for the “foreseeable future”, then you should say that, and explain why you think so. It seems to me that the paradigm in AI has had quite a bit of change in the last 6 years (i.e. since 2018, before GPT-2, i.e. a time when few had heard of LLMs), and has had complete wrenching change in the last 20 years (i.e. since 2004, many years before AlexNet, and a time when deep learning as a whole was still an obscure backwater, if I understand correctly). So by the same token, it’s plausible that the field of AI might have quite a bit of change in the next 6 years, and complete wrenching change in the next 20 years, right?
why would something that you admit that is temporary (for now) matter in an exponential curve? It's like saying it's ok to go out for drinks on March 5 2020. Ok sure but 10 days after it wasn't. The argument must stand for a very long period of time or it's better not said. And that is the best argument for why we should be cautious, because a) we don't know for sure and b) things change extremely fast.
Because you could make the same argument could be made earlier in the "exponential curve". I don't think we should have paused AI (or more broadly CS) in the 50's, and I don't think we should do it now.
but you are comparing epochs before and after Turing test passed. Isnt' that relevant? The Turing test unanimously was/is an inflection point and arguably most experts think we have already passed it in 2023.
- Thus most decisions will probably be allocated to AI systems
- If AI systems make most decisions, humans will lose control of the future
- If humans have no control of the future, the future will probably be bad for humans
- Sure - at some point in the future, maybe.
- Maybe, maybe not. Humans tend to have a bit of an ego when it comes to letting a filthy machine make decisions for them. But I'll bite the bullet.
- There's several levels on which I disagree here. Firstly, we're assuming that "humans" have control of the future in the first place. It's hard to assign coherent agency to humanity as a whole, it's more of a weird mess of conflicting incentives, and nobody really controls it. Secondly, if those AI systems are designed in the right way, the might just become the tools for humanity to sorta steer the future the way we want it.
I agree with your framing here that systems made up of rules + humans + various technological infrastructure are the actual things that control the future. But I think the key is that the systems themselves would begin to favour more non-human decision making because of incentive structures.
Eg, corporate entities have a profit incentive to have the most efficient decision maker in charge of the company, and maybe that includes a CEO but the board might insist on the use of an AI assistant for that CEO, and if the CEO makes a decision that goes against the AI and it turns out to be wrong shareholders in that company will come to trust the AI system more and more of the time. They don't necessarily care about the ego of the CEO they just care about the outcomes, within the competitive market.
In this way, more and more decision making gets turned over to non-human systems because of the competitive structures which are very difficult to escape from. As this transition continues it becomes very hard to control the unseen externalities from these decisions.
I suppose this doesn't seem too catastrophic in its fundamental form, but I think the outcomes of playing it forward essentially seem to be a significant potential for harm from these externalities, without much of a mechanism for recourse.
This is a polemic to the ten arguments post. I'm not a regular LW poster, but I'm an AI researcher and mild-AI-worrier.
I believe that AI progress, and the risks associated with it, is one of the most important things to figure out as humanity in the current year. And yet, in most discussions about x-risk, I find myself unaligned with either side.
My overall thesis about AI x-risk is that it's absolutely real, but also far enough into the future that at this moment, we should simply continue progress on both capabilities and safety. I'm not trying to argue that sufficiently powerful AI could never pose an x-risk, this belief seems rather silly.
Disclaimers:
Competent non-aligned agents
Overall this is the core x-risk argument that I completely agree with - but I think it's unlikely we get there in the foreseeable future, with the current paradigms.
Second species argument
Not a fan of this argument. Might be effective as an intuition pump if someone can't even conceive of how a powerful AI could lead to x-risk, but I don't take it too seriously.
Loss of control via inferiority
This largely sounds like a rehash of the previous argument. AI will become more powerful, we can't control it, we're screwed. The argument has a different coat of paint, so my response is different, but ultimately the point is that an AI will take over the world with us as an under-species.
Loss of control via speed
In one sense, this argument is obviously true - if we get an AI that's superintelligent, super-quickly, and misaligned, then we're probably screwed because we won't react in time. But it's a spectrum, and the real x-risk is only on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Human non-alignment
Here we go, full agreement. This really is an issue with any sufficiently powerful technology. If only one person/country had nukes, we'd probably be worse off than in the current multipolar situation. Can the same multipolar approach help in the specific case of AI? Maybe - that's why I tend to favor open-source approaches, at least as of 2024 with the current state of capabilities. So far, for other technologies, we're somehow handling things through governance, so we should keep doing this with AI - and everything else.
Catastrophic tools
Most technologies have good and bad uses. AI will be a force multiplier, but if we can't handle Nukes 2.0 obtained via AI, we probably can't handle Nukes 2.0 obtained via good ol' human effort. This is fundamentally an argument against technological progress in general, which could be a significantly larger argument. My overall stance is that technological progress is generally good.
Powerful black boxes
I was always a little bit anti-interpretability. Sure, it's better if a model is more interpretable than less interpretable, but at the same time, we don't need it to be fully interpretable to be powerful and aligned.
The core argument here seems to be that if the black boxes remain forever pitch black, and we multiply their potential side effects by a gazillion (in the limit of a "powerful" AI), then the consequences will be terrible. Which... sure, I guess. If it actually remains entirely inscrutable, and it becomes super powerful, then bad outcomes are more likely. But not by much in my opinion.
Multi-agent dynamics
This feels like a fairly generic "force multiplier" argument. AI, just like any technology, will amplify everything that humans do. So if you take any human-caused risk, you can amplify it in the "powerful AI" limit to infinity and get an x-risk.
This goes back to technological progress in general. The same argument can be made for electricity, so while I agree in principle that it's a risk, it's not an extraordinary risk.
Large impacts
Once again, take AI as a mysterious multiplier for everything that we do. Take something bad that we (may) do, multiply it by AI, and you get an x-risk.
Expert opinion
Closing thoughts
I liked that post. It's a coherent summary of the main AI x-risks that I can address. I largely agree with them in principle, but I'm still not convinced that any threat is imminent. Most discussions that I tried to have in the past usually started from step zero ("Let me explain why AI could even be a risk"), which is just boring and unproductive. Perhaps this will lead to something beyond that.