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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

#121

Post by arisAlexis »

esperent wrote: post #70
JamesBarney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

they do. One of the most famous EA books is the precipice and it talks about all existential risks. Also most of the funding gets dispersed.

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

#122

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

akvadrako wrote: post #90
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

My argument against is that we can't do much about it. We can't predict how machines will interpret our rules if they are smarter than us. Nor do we have a shared set of values we can articulate. Nor can we control rogue users making rogue AI. So unless one is proposing a global crackdown on AI research, AI safety is a lost cause.

That doesn't mean it should just be ignored though. Alignment and safety is important and a real problem even for non-general AI.

There are lots of solvable problems that will never be solved if we just throw up our hands and say "we'll never get it right, might as well not try".

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

#123

Post by louwrentius »

It’s interesting to me that the comments of the HN crowd seem to focus on Effective Altuism and AI safety.

A ton of the article is about immoral behavior of men in positions of power towards women. And the misogyny.

> The underlying ideology valorizes extremes: seeking rational truth above all else, donating the most money and doing the utmost good for the most important reason. This way of thinking can lend an attractive clarity, but it can also provide cover for destructive or despicable behavior.

I think this quote really sums things up for me.

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

#124

Post by arisAlexis »

whatshisface wrote: post #85
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I don't think it's impossible to come up with arguments against them. For one thing, extrapolating the current gradual rate of progress forwards means that we will get to see several minor "intelligence spills" before the hypothetical big and last one, and by observing what went wrong, humanity will have the opportunity to come up with solutions. Since very smart human beings have in history done a lot of damage, but…

something never happening before == can't happen is extremely dangerous attittude. I suggest you read Taleb and his duck example.

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

#126

Post by bagels »

arisAlexis wrote: post #120

Top level scientistis warning of this apocalypse. Sam Altman which was the CEO of the very site you are posting and the CEO of OpenAI has warned starkly that there is a probability that humanity will go extinct from AI in his latest interview. Have you seen it? You think he is somehow bluffing or is he part of the same cult?

What scientists?

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

#127

Post by consilient »

esperent wrote: post #70
JamesBarney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety, at least in what they publish online.

Just looking at the topics section of the EA forums (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/all), we've got

- 466 posts in AI safety

- 1060 posts in existential risk (seems like a roughly even mix of pandemics, nuclear war, and AI)

- 816 posts in global health

- 193 posts in animal welfare

- 42 posts in biosecurity & pandemics

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

#128

Post by shapefrog »

kelnage wrote: post #96
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…

Absolutely agree. My biggest problem with AI safety is that, simply, the problem they envisage doesn't exist yet (generally, at a minimum, relying on the existence of "AGI"). Hence discussions about it have to make a huge amount of assumptions about a whole range of aspects of what the AI threat will be - what the AI will be capable of, what it's impact will be - before getting on to what possible solutions might be…

For the freseable future the real danger I see from AI is inferior basic statistical models being jammed into production pretending to be some sort of all seeing all knowing AGI - a class of product we are not really that close to.

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

#129

Post by Sol- »

TheDong wrote: post #112
puzzledobserver wrote: post #106

I had previously heard of EA, and knew about paperclip maximizers, trolley problems, unintended consequences, and other risks associated with unregulated AI. But I wasn't aware of the connections between the two communities / families of ideas until recently. Because I don't consider myself sufficiently educated in these matters, I default to using GiveWell and their mosquito net recommendations as an effective low-e…

EAs premise includes basically "all human lives are equal. Saving one stranger's life is just as valuable as saving your father's life (more valuable actually if the stranger has more years left than your dad), so you should donate your kidney to a stranger, not your father" "All human lives are equal" then expands to "and there are more unborn lives than there are currently living lives, so it's more important to sa…

How they value unborn future lives also veers into absurdity when you realize that the logical goal from a utilitarian perspective then is to populate the universe with trillions upon trillions of humans, just as long as each human at least has some infinitesimally small net happiness. You don't need them to be particularly happy, just happy enough to barely not want to kill themselves.

I think I'd rather prioritize making the billions on earth we have right now very happy instead.

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

#130

Post by lame-robot-hoax »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #69
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!

Most of the people that could have better things to do than to respond and give it more credibility.

As well, while the arguments are logical, most of them rely upon large assumptions to move between steps. If any of these assumptions fail, the entire thing fails. Especially the hard take off assumption.

As well, the assumption that AGI is happening in the next 3-10 years. I’d say most prominent people in the AI research space don’t think we’re much, if any, closer to AGI. Yet you have Yud and LW screaming that we will all be dead in a few years and AGI is right around the corner.

When people like Chollet and Ng say we aren’t close to AGI, I’m more likely to believe they’re right, vs. Yud who hasn’t contributed to any actual developments within the field besides theorizing about alignment and how AGI can go wrong.

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