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The contagion of fear

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Re: The contagion of fear

#111

Post by cowthulhu »

timr wrote: post #108
cowthulhu wrote: post #106

Everyone writing off AI-related risk in this thread should think about what would need to happen for them to consider AI a serious existential risk. It can be outlandish and unlikely (close call with a bioweapon? unsupervised persistence in a data center?) but people should honestly call their shots and then stick with them.

No. The person making the improbable argument is required to provide an affirmative case for that argument. It's not my job to make the argument for them. For what it's worth, I have done your suggested exercise, and I find every causal link (including the ones brought up by luminaries like Amodei) to be outrageous and poorly argued. But it's not my job expend effort to make their outrageous arguments better.

I'm not making an affirmative case - I'm looking for others to introspect about this, and anchor their expectations.

If we have a bioweapon close call, would you consider AI an existential risk at that point? If not, how close would we need to get?

You don't need to answer here, or disclose anything publicly - just think and remember.

Re: The contagion of fear

#112

Post by shimman »

foobarian wrote: post #99
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #27

Like (I assume) most of you, I have been struggling with this. And where I currently come down is that 1) I am very worried, but 2) I am more worried about human actors. "AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots…

> Of course, we've had the ability to extinct ourselves for decades This gets mentioned often in various doomer narratives, but I question how true it is. A global thermonuclear war would be terrible and would bring us back to the stone age, but I reckon it would come far far short of causing mankind to go extinct.

I mean it's likely a nuclear war would probably be a species extinction level event at the least, humans would definitely be reduced by 99%. We don't know how bad the resulting nuclear cooling would be, but we do know how humans act under extreme desperation. They lash out and attack, when was the last time a majority of human settles were truly under desperate acts of survival simultaneously?

Maybe what ~74,000 years ago (Toba eruption)? Okay, now how would this look in the age of industrial societies and modern nation states? I don't think it would fare well at all.

Probably the only realistic "modern" idea we have is the novel "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Although maybe this is too bleak, even under extreme duress humans still show resilience + compassion toward others even while enduring human horrors.

Re: The contagion of fear

#113

Post by cowthulhu »

dullcrisp wrote: post #110
cowthulhu wrote: post #106

Everyone writing off AI-related risk in this thread should think about what would need to happen for them to consider AI a serious existential risk. It can be outlandish and unlikely (close call with a bioweapon? unsupervised persistence in a data center?) but people should honestly call their shots and then stick with them.

No. Why? If you want to convince people something is true you need to actually convince them it’s true. They don’t need to justify not believing you.

I'm not asking for justification, just for people to introspect about what, if anything, it would take for them to consider AI a serious threat. No justification needed, and really no need to post it here, just think about it and remember it in the future.

Re: The contagion of fear

#114

Post by dullcrisp »

cowthulhu wrote: post #111
timr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The person making the improbable argument is required to provide an affirmative case for that argument. It's not my job to make the argument for them. For what it's worth, I have done your suggested exercise, and I find every causal link (including the ones brought up by luminaries like Amodei) to be outrageous and poorly argued. But it's not my job expend effort to make their outrageous arguments better.

I'm not making an affirmative case - I'm looking for others to introspect about this, and anchor their expectations. If we have a bioweapon close call, would you consider AI an existential risk at that point? If not, how close would we need to get? You don't need to answer here, or disclose anything publicly - just think and remember.

I don’t really understand this exercise of predicting what I’ll be thinking in the future.

Re: The contagion of fear

#115

Post by cowthulhu »

dullcrisp wrote: post #114
cowthulhu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making an affirmative case - I'm looking for others to introspect about this, and anchor their expectations. If we have a bioweapon close call, would you consider AI an existential risk at that point? If not, how close would we need to get? You don't need to answer here, or disclose anything publicly - just think and remember.

I don’t really understand this exercise of predicting what I’ll be thinking in the future.

To avoid shifting goalposts

Re: The contagion of fear

#116

Post by [deleted] »

JackFr wrote: post #103
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #27

Like (I assume) most of you, I have been struggling with this. And where I currently come down is that 1) I am very worried, but 2) I am more worried about human actors. "AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots…

I don’t struggle. I find Dario and Sam disingenuous. “Frontier models are so dangerous we need to slow down.” Ok. Slow down. You’re the CEO, just do it. Oh, wait what you really want is a gov’t mandated oligopoly. Because there’s no moat you can find. If you’re truly afraid, and want regulation, support nationalization. It’s the only way we can be safe.

[deleted]

Re: The contagion of fear

#118

Post by cowthulhu »

dullcrisp wrote: post #117
cowthulhu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To avoid shifting goalposts

There are no goalposts. No one is trying to score points except you.

I think I'm coming across as confrontational, which is genuinely not my intention - sorry about that. Not trying to score points or anything, just encourage people to introspect a bit :)

I think your viewpoint is totally valid, and I'm not trying to argue against it.

Re: The contagion of fear

#119

Post by dullcrisp »

cowthulhu wrote: post #118
dullcrisp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no goalposts. No one is trying to score points except you.

I think I'm coming across as confrontational, which is genuinely not my intention - sorry about that. Not trying to score points or anything, just encourage people to introspect a bit :) I think your viewpoint is totally valid, and I'm not trying to argue against it.

Not confrontational, but proselytizing.

Re: The contagion of fear

#120

Post by voidhorse »

rcr-anti wrote: post #105

I tend to believe what people actually do over what that say. If you earnestly believe over 10 percent chance, or say minus 1 billion human lives expected value, well I struggle to understand how they'd rationalize their current course of action of business as usual. Terminator 2's depiction of Sarah Connor comes to mind for what I'd expect, a logical consequence if you seriously believe and internalize the consequen…

This. If you truly believe the thing you are building is going to kill you and your family, your decision is not "let's keep going" unless you are a complete nihilist. The fact that people buy the whole "well we have to because if we don't someone else will" argument shows just how pervasive and complete irrationality has become. People eat up content and do not even apply a microsecond's wort of critical thought to what they're being told. Internet media has created a perfect storm of complete gullibility. Funnily enough, "normal" people are currently more rational than most so-called "technologists" who are completely giving themselves over to hysteria while they simultaneously offload all of their critical thinking to a stateless word completion engine running on servers somewhere in Texas.
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