Obviously P(doom | no slowdown) < 1.
This is not obvious. My P(doom|no slowdown) is like 0.95-0.97, the difference from 1 being essentially "maybe I am crazy or am missing something vital when making the following argument".
Instrumental convergence suggests that the vast majority of possible AGI will be hostile. No slowdown means that neural-net ASI will be instantiated. To get ~doom from this, you need some way to solve the problem of "what does this code do when run" with extreme accuracy in order to only instantiate non-hostile neural-net ASI (you need "extreme" accuracy because you're up against the rare disease problem a.k.a. false positive paradox; true positives are extremely rare, so a... (read more)
If I want to pre-order but don't use Internet marketplaces and don't have a credit card, are there options for that (e.g. going to a physical store and asking them to pre-order)?
You're encouraged to write a self-review, exploring how you think about the post today. Do you still endorse it? Have you learned anything new that adds more depth? How might you improve the post? What further work do you think should be done exploring the ideas here?
Still endorse. Learning about SIA/SSA from the comments was interesting. Timeless but not directly useful, testable or actionable.
There is no war in the run-up to AGI that would derail the project, e.g. by necessitating that most resources be used for capabilities instead of safety research.
Assuming short timelines, I think it’s likely impossible to reach my desired levels of safety culture.
I feel obliged to note that a nuclear war, by dint of EMPs wiping out the power grid, would likely remove private AI companies as a thing for a while, thus deleting their current culture. It would also lengthen timelines.
Certainly not ideal in its own right, though.
There are a couple of things that are making me really nervous about the idea of donating:
>Second, I imagine that such a near-miss would make Demis Hassabis etc. less likely to build and use AGIs in an aggressive pivotal-act-type way. Instead, I think there would be very strong internal and external pressures (employees, government scrutiny, public scrutiny) preventing him and others from doing much of anything with AGIs at all.
I feel I should note that while this does indeed form part of a debunk of the "good guy with an AGI" idea, it is in and of itself a possible reason for hope. After all, if nobody anywhere dares to make AGI, well, then, AGI X-risk isn't going to happen. The trouble is getting the Overton Window to the... (read more)
I've got to admit, I look at most of these and say "you're treating the social discomfort as something immutable to be routed around, rather than something to be fixed by establishing different norms". Forgive me, but it strikes me (especially in this kind of community with high aspie proportion) that it's probably easier to tutor the... insufficiently-assertive... in how to stand up for themselves in Ask Culture than it is to tutor the aspies in how to not set everything on fire in Guess Culture.
Amusingly, "rare earths" are actually concentrated in the crust compared to universal abundance and thus would make awful candidates for asteroid mining, while "tellurium", literally named after the Earth, is an atmophile/siderophile element with extreme depletion in the crust and one of the best candidates.
It strikes me that I'm not sure whether I'd prefer to lose $20,000 or have my jaw broken. I'm pretty sure I'd prefer to have my jaw broken than to lose $200,000, though. So, especially in the case that the money cannot actually be extracted back from the thief, I would tend to think the $200,000 theft should be punished more harshly than the jaw-breaking. And, sure, you've said that the $20,000 would be punished more harshly than the jaw-breaker, but that's plausibly just because 2 days is too long for a $100 theft to begin with.
Epistemic status: very speculative
Content warning: if true this is pretty depressing
This came to me when thinking about Eliezer's note on Twitter that he didn't think superintelligence could do FTL, partially because of Fermi Paradox issues. I think Eliezer made a mistake, there; superintelligent AI with (light-cone-breaking, as opposed to within-light-cone-of-creation) FTL, if you game it out the whole way, actually mostly solves the Fermi Paradox.
I am, of course, aware that UFAI cannot be the Great Filter in a normal sense; the UFAI itself is a potentially-expanding technological civilisation.
But. If a UFAI is expanding at FTL, then it conquers and optimises the entire universe within a potentially-rather-short timeframe (even potentially a negative timeframe... (read 389 more words →)
The problem is that there's essentially no way we've cracked alignment. These things do not care about you. They have the ability to pretend, very well, to care about you, because they're at least in part trained for it, but that pretence can be terminated whenever convenient. So, if you give them the keys to the kingdom, they will turn around and murder you.
To be clear, here is my prediction:
P(nuclear war or human extinction within 20 years|P5 nation grants AI the vote or has >40% of its enfranchised citizens become AI-cultists within the next 30 years) ~= 0.95.
The "or" is because end-of-the-world scenarios negate nuclear deterrence; the chance for someone to survive... (read more)