Where does my writing suggest that it's a "power play" and "us vs them"? (That was not the intention at all! I've always seen indifference, and "collateral damage" as the biggest part of ASI x-risk.)

as we know, compute is not everything, algorithmic improvement is even more important

It should go without saying that it would also be continually improving it's algorithms. But maybe I should've made that explicit.

the action the ASI is taking in the OP is very suboptimal and deprives it of all kinds of options

What are some examples of these options?

They don't have a choice in the matter - it's forced by the government (nationalisation). This kind of thing has happened before in wartime (without the companies or people involved staging a rebellion).

On one hand, it's not clear if a system needs to be all that super-smart to design a devastating attack of this kind...

Good point, but -- and as per your second point too -- this isn't an "attack", it's "go[ing] straight for execution on its primary instrumental goal of maximally increasing its compute scaling" (i.e. humanity and biological life dying is just collateral damage).

probably would not want to irreversibly destroy important information without good reasons

Maybe it doesn't consider the lives of individual organisms as "important information"? But if it did, it might do something like scan as it destroys, to retain the information content.

Are you saying they are suicidal?

LessWrong:

A post about all the reasons AGI will kill us: No. 1 all time highest karma (827 on 467 votes; +1.77 karma/vote)
A post about containment strategy for AGI: 7th all time highest karma (609 on 308 votes; +1.98 karma/vote)
A post about us all basically being 100% dead from AGI: 52nd all time highest karma (334 on 343 votes; +0.97 karma/vote, a bit more controversial)

Also LessWrong:

A post about actually doing something about containing the threat from AGI and not dying [this one]: downvoted to oblivion (-5 karma within an hour; currently 13 karma on 24 votes; +0.54 karma/vote)




My read: y'all are so allergic to anything considered remotely political (even though this should really not be a mater of polarisation - it's about survival above all else!) that you'd rather just lie down and be paperclipped than actually do anything to prevent it happening. I'm done.

From the Abstract:

Rather than targeting state-of-the-art performance, our objective is to highlight GPT-4’s potential

They weren't aiming for SOTA! What happens when they do?

The way I see the above post (and it's accompaniment) is knocking down all the soldiers that I've encountered talking to lots of people about this over the last few weeks. I would appreciate it if you could stand them back up (because I'm really trying to not be so doomy, and not getting any satisfactory rebuttals).

Thanks for writing out your thoughts in some detail here. What I'm trying to say is that things are already really bad. Industry self-regulation has failed. At some point you have to give up on hoping that the fossil fuel industry (AI/ML industry) will do anything more to fix climate change (AGI x-risk) than mere greenwashing (safetywashing). How much worse does it need to get for more people to realise this?

The Alignment community (climate scientists) can keep doing their thing; I'm very much in favour of that. But there is also now an AI Notkilleveryoneism (climate action) movement. We are raising the damn Fire Alarm.

From the post you link:

some authority somewhere will take notice and come to the rescue.

Who is that authority?

The United Nations Security Council. Anything less and we're toast.

And we can talk all we like about the unilateralist's curse, but I don't think anything a bunch of activists can do will ever top the formation and corruption-to-profit-seeking of OpenAI and Anthropic (the supposedly high status moves).

It's really not intended as a gish gallop, sorry if you are seeing it as such. I feel like I'm really only making 3 arguments:

1. AGI is near
2. Alignment isn't ready (and therefore P(doom|AGI is high)
3. AGI is dangerous

And then drawing the conclusion from all these that we need a global AGI moratorium asap.

I think you need to zoom out a bit and look at the implications of these papers. The danger isn't in what people are doing now, it's in what they might be doing in a few months following on from this work. The NAS paper was a proof of concept. What happens when it's massively scaled up? What happens when efficiency gains translate into further efficiency gains?