Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first few chapters have a song scene parodying ghostbusters and a joke about the protagonist biting a teacher in a tantrum as a young kid. There's plenty of elements of crackfic parody in it.
> a joke about the protagonist biting a teacher in a tantrum as a young kid. wasn't that literally Yudkowsky, tho
Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
191–200 of 329 posts
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#193Several of the accounts turned out to concern the same person, Michael Vassar, who was central ~10y ago but kicked out for this and other harmful behavior, and now describes himself as anti-EA.
On the other hand, the comment treats the cases they can't identify as not concerning from a community perspective ("it's very unclear from this what actions anyone could or should have taken") and I don't endorse that.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
People in EA donate lots of money to causes that help people today. AI is just one of the more interesting subjects they often talk about. AI safety isn't about Roko's basilisk, or the idea that AI will take revenge on us for our moral choices. It's about the risk that an AI smarter than us will be made and built to pursue some goal without caring about our well-being.
> It's about the risk that an AI smarter than us will be made and built to pursue some goal without caring about our well-being. We already have those and they're called corporations. They've done significant real damage to the world already and they are still working hard to do more damage. It makes little sense to me to focus on this potential future problem when we haven't even agreed to deal with the ones that we…
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#195AI 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…
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
>assuming it is aligned with us If we don't figure out alignment, we can't make this assumption. This is the part that AI safety people are concerned with making reality.
I don't see how alignment is a different problem from making an AI do what we want.
A task such as "bring me a cup of tea" has lots of implied information such as not making it too hot to burn the person, not breaking anything in the process, not harming other people in the process and so on.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you back up those claims? I don't believe all of the nuance is contained in your comment. I'm looking into MIRI, if that's not "the AI safety community" please do correct me. I've become very aware ever since ChatGPT started saying inaccurate things confidently that humans have a much worse hit rate. Seriously, keep an eye out for it, you'll see it everywhere. At least ChatGPT will double check if you ask if it's…
Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong forum popularized AI safety/alignment ideas. (The Effective Altruism community was originally mostly populated by people from LessWrong.) I think this article is a little awkwardly infatuated with LessWrong, I say even as a fan, but it does fit this discussion conveniently well about where they're coming at the subject from: https://unherd.com/2020/12/how-rational-have-you-been-thi…
I remember feeling like this (brain CPUs pegged at 100%) trying to slog through HPMOR the first time too in fairness, it's just too many concepts to take in in one sitting. I'll get there eventually if I keep at it but not on my first read.
I'll consider my opinions on AI safety void due to lack of knowledge for now, always try to jump over the first stage of competence. I'll start with the Wikipedia page for AI alignment, haha.
Thank you for your responses in any case, I'll dig into this further!
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ai safety arguments rely on something called the “orthoganality thesis” which is a huge, unintuitive assumption. In real life, intelligence is associated with picking better goals. Generally, an entity with higher intelligence will pick different goals than a being with lower intelligence. The orthoganility thesis is an unproven assumption that intelligence and goals are not corellated, meaning an intelligent bei…
No goals are intrinsically stupid. The only reason that you might think some particular goal is stupid is that it goes against your goals. You could conceive of a super intelligent AI that came into existence with the goal of terminating itself. That would be an "stupid goal" from our perspective, since we have the goal of self-preservation really ingrained in our brains. But for a being that self-termination is the…
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
>assuming it is aligned with us If we don't figure out alignment, we can't make this assumption. This is the part that AI safety people are concerned with making reality.
I don't see how alignment is a different problem from making an AI do what we want.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#200AI 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…