90% of the content of this post is to endorse, in the strongest terms, Schelling's Lecture [transcript], and to note its clear and direct implications for AI coöperation. When you read arguments about our inability to stop AGI, they sound like arguments about inability to stop nuclear war. Even Von...
Most concerns about AI tend to boil down to: 1. Loss of control to AI systems - What if AI were smarter than us and took over the world? 2. Concentration of power - What if AI gave too much power to someone bad? I'm surprised I haven't heard consideration...
I'm not sure there's a single bad thing that is analogous, like unemployment. I think the bigger point is, it's scary, and especially AI is volatile, and it's very unclear whether technologies are good in retrospect, for many reasons other than "they centralize power".
A more direct analogy might be, suppose AI does what people hope it does. What happens next? It's unfair to say about the cotton gin, "Imagine the manual labor were replace with a machine" and stop there. Specifically, prices will move and people will respond to those price changes. Generally, the environment will change, but people will adapt their own behavior to those changes.
It's not clear there aren't general... (read more)
90% of the content of this post is to endorse, in the strongest terms, Schelling's Lecture [transcript], and to note its clear and direct implications for AI coöperation.
When you read arguments about our inability to stop AGI, they sound like arguments about inability to stop nuclear war.
Even Von Neumann believed war was inevitable for game-theoretic reasons—the first to strike suffered less, and the probability of a strike increased to 1 as time went on. How could war not happen—and soon?[1]
AI is expensive
Nuclear weapons are like AI: they are both expensive and this limits the number of actors that can build them. The actors—states, large companies—usually need buy-in, implicit or explicit, and are... (read 327 more words →)
Most concerns about AI tend to boil down to:
I'm surprised I haven't heard consideration of a third, more basic risk.
Will this technology be good?
Suppose you're in the Southern United States in 1793 and you believe that an important moral question—perhaps the most important moral question—is labor ethics of how cotton is processed. I suspect I don't need to go into detail about why you might think this.
Proceeding directly from this belief, an obviously good thing is, what if a machine could... (read 366 more words →)
For anyone who works in architecture, balsa wood is what you use to prototype ideas.
It is also one of the weakest, most breakable woods.