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Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

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Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#61

Post by yanderekko »

qsi wrote: post #58
yanderekko wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So we have real, actual harm hand-waved away by reference to a hypothetical. Yes, because that harm is not even close to the same order of magnitude as the harm that rationalists are focused on, even if you discount it by a moderate likelihood factor. It doesn't matter if the "real world" sees AI doom as a "quaint and somewhat interesting hypothetical about a far off future" - unless you're actually agreeing with me…

And yet again, you reinforce the same point! With more words and more eloquently, but still a perfect example of the same blind spot.

Yes, well, I guess I just think that a rogue AI inadvertently destroying the world is a somewhat more worrisome form of tunnel vision than having a "blind spot".

Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#62

Post by aoeusnth1 »

painelemental wrote: post #36
stubybubs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golly. I'm on part 2 and it sounds like they're about to invent Scientology. > The full post goes into more depth and nuance, but it's worth stressing how heavily Leverage relied on “debugging,” based on Anders's “Connection Theory.” Debugging consisted of — to paraphrase and oversimplify — opening up one's psyche, history, self, and emotional core to maximum vulnerability, generally to one's hierarchical superior, a…

Thats nothing. Wait till Epstein enters the picture. https://fredwynne.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-vitalik-buter... Any hoo - this stuff is the tip of the iceberg.

Incredible letter, I had no idea about the SWATing. Tbh the Epstein donation seems like a nothingburger compared to the other allegations in that letter.

Edit: more context on Ziz, http://zizians.info/

Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#65

Post by [deleted] »

yanderekko wrote: post #55
joe_the_user wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caring about one thing substitutes for caring about other things. Shocking. Most charitable foundation on the left and the right may focus on one problem but make nods to it's connections to others. I know a lot of lesswrong people acknowledge climate change is real and Covid is a problem but raise the point that "this is so important we have to ignore other potential problems" but by doing this they alien those who…

>Yet these people have burned all bridges with those who are generally concerned about corporate behavior. Well, because there's the obvious risk that EA/rationalists just become another blue tribe identity group if the focus on actual effective altruism is replaced with unquestionable dogmas, which is really the only way you get stuff like people believing that climate change is going to lead to civilizational colla…

[deleted]

Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#66

Post by js8 »

dangond wrote: post #40
js8 wrote: post #11

I have always felt that the embrace of "AI can be dangerous" comes from an elitist fear of capitalist class that the "unwashed masses" will have too much access to technology and will make capital, as well as labor, obsolete. I mean if everybody has a super-smart personal assistant in their home, who thinks independently, why would they need or want a ruling class, when we can simply have democratic socialism?

This seems a bit too cynical of a take to match what I've seen. I see mainly two distinct "AI can be dangerous" camps: the EA-adjacent camp centered around LessWrong and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the anti-generative-art camp worried about the threat to artists' livelihoods. The latter seems to be the closest to wanting an outright ban on the technology despite not being anywhere near the capitalist class. The former see…

No, I am talking about people around OpenAI trying to justify why they cannot be truly open, and similar.

Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#67

Post by js8 »

space_fountain wrote: post #23
js8 wrote: post #11

I have always felt that the embrace of "AI can be dangerous" comes from an elitist fear of capitalist class that the "unwashed masses" will have too much access to technology and will make capital, as well as labor, obsolete. I mean if everybody has a super-smart personal assistant in their home, who thinks independently, why would they need or want a ruling class, when we can simply have democratic socialism?

What about a future where only energy and resources are important leads you to think we’ll have less inequality? Brains are the only thing that don’t flow to the wealthy right now

Human nature. If you're a part of the common tribe, people are actually pretty good. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit on the size of the tribe (although some people just wanna hate somebody).

You can also look at it this way. The only real objection against socialist societies was that people are lazy, and don't care enough about producing stuff or resolving economic inefficiencies. But with AI, this objection is gone. Nobody really wants to be in a constant "resource competition" or whatever, it's an effort. People generally want to have fun and enjoy life.

Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#68

Post by thorum »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #32

AI safety is an apocalypse cult and we should recognize that everyone who has ever been in an apocalypse cult thinks that "no, this time it's really the end of the world". Everyone who believes crazy shit thinks they're being reasonable, so just because we're super sure we're being reasonable doesn't mean what we believe isn't crazy. Do we believe that we alone, of all people who have believed in the coming end, have…

While you make a reasonable point in terms of human psychology, when you create an AI, you are leaving the realm of human psychology and dealing with something new that doesn’t have to play by the same rules. I’d argue that’s a big difference.

We’re creating a fundamentally alien intelligence from scratch and basically just crossing our fingers and hoping to hell it cares about keeping us alive.

Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#69

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #32

AI safety is an apocalypse cult and we should recognize that everyone who has ever been in an apocalypse cult thinks that "no, this time it's really the end of the world". Everyone who believes crazy shit thinks they're being reasonable, so just because we're super sure we're being reasonable doesn't mean what we believe isn't crazy. Do we believe that we alone, of all people who have believed in the coming end, have…

Personally, I find the AI safety arguments sound pretty far-fetched, but I can’t come up with solid arguments against them. Also, when I look for a good ”debunking”, I don’t find anything. Mostly all I find are mockery, ad-hominem and the like. Frankly, the people who argue climate change isn’t real do a better job than the people who argue AI risk isn’t real, and they’re wrong!

Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior

#70

Post by esperent »

JamesBarney wrote: post #50
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #32

AI safety is an apocalypse cult and we should recognize that everyone who has ever been in an apocalypse cult thinks that "no, this time it's really the end of the world". Everyone who believes crazy shit thinks they're being reasonable, so just because we're super sure we're being reasonable doesn't mean what we believe isn't crazy. Do we believe that we alone, of all people who have believed in the coming end, have…

There have been people for a long time who think the world is going to end. We can use your argument to dismiss anyone who fears any existential risk like asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, AI, etc... And since the world exists every group will be wrong except one. I think the risk of human extermination is much lower than many in this group believe because I think AI is much more compute bound than algorithm bo…

The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety, at least in what they publish online. If they talked about all possible threats to humanity and how to solve them, from AI, to climate change, to nuclear bombs, to asteroids, to disease, they would be an interesting and important group.

They don't. They hardly talk about anything else except AI. From the outside it looks a lot like an obsession.

Personally I think they treat AI as an existential threat above all others because they consider themselves to be the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe and AI is showing that human intelligence might not be so special after all. So it's an existential threat to their sense of self. Other existential threats merely threaten their lives and are therefore not as important.

This would be fine, if acknowledged with a degree of self awareness. But it's not, instead it's wrapped up in so many layers of convoluted logic that most people, insiders and outsiders both, can't see the real reason for this obsession.

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