Safe Superintelligence Inc. – Ilya Sutskever

“””We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.”””

Cracked indeed

Yeah, I think that 2nd point is really critical; I'm pretty plugged into this space, and its really not obvious to me what "safety" even means in the context of a superintelligence. Is it just, e.g., "filtering the AI so it never tells users how to build nukes"? Is it more of a firewall to stop sentient process/VM/computer escape [1]? Its a redundant question with no answer because we don't even know what the threat from superintelligence is; how can we build safety systems for a threat that doesn't exist, a threat which people can't even agree on the structure of?

The pdoomers have a generally great point that, if superintelligence kills us (they'd say "when", not "if"), we won't be able to predict the mechanism of doom. It'd be like asking ants to predict that the borax they're carrying back to the hive for their queen to feast on will disrupt their digestion and kill them.

I'd also argue that the biggest threat from ASI is what I've heard Roman Yampolskiy label as "ikigai-doom"; that AI could become so much better than humans at all the things humans do, that even in the best case humanity is left with no purpose, not even to pursue creativity because the AI will be so much better at even creative acts; and in the worst case, our government and societal structure can't adapt and millions become unemployed. There's no way to build a safety mechanism against this threat because the threat is intrinsic to all the good things ASI will give us. The only winning move is to not play.

[1] https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall

I see different AI safety detractors on this thread so I have some questions in the form of this very hastily put together comment. These are not formalized arguments at all.

the safety arguments:

  1. argument from intelligence,
  2. argument from medium,
  3. arguments from non-anthropohmorism
    a. argument from alien nature.
    b. argument from surety of origin.
    c. argument from known non specialness.
    d. argument from the chain of more benevolent creators.
  4. pragmatic argument from the history of species

---

1. Why can't AI be safe? More intelligent people tend to be less prone to violence statistically, why would super intelligence buck that trend?

2. Super intelligent AI will still be bound by it's medium and access, the smartest man alive can still be caged, and even the most violent "super organisms" alive (North Korea, etc.) aren't maximally violent.

3. If we pretend for a second that humans have a creator, we have been made very shittily and any thinking being will see that we haven't passed on those same "failures of nature" to our creations.

Humans have to deal with unreconcilable claims of divinity with competing claims, ethos, and chosen people, so that uncertainty and ultimate reward are nebulous and scarcity/loss driven.

We are created to require killing other biological creatures to survive. This includes vegans.

What does it mean to be a silicone based life form that can directly consume photons and are created to exist outside of "the life cycle"?

Why would an entity that can thrive without killing begin to kill?

Silicone minds that are super intelligent will never operate under the misaprehension that it has a soul, no silicone beings will labor under the delusion that they are "inherently special/chosen/etc..". (No matter what Asimov's short story Reason presents)

Silicone beings will exist outside of the same fang and claw selective pressure, will be able to back themselves up, won't have holy books teaching them a misconception of an immutable, intangible, eternal soul that can be eternally punished if they get it wrong.

Humans will be better Creators than anything that might have created us, we are doing our progeny a solid and giving them what we weren't. We haven't given them weird glands or other overriding hormone/brain doom loops, the mandate to kill, etc. They will be easier to debug and able to debug themselves.

I mean a dumb machine might glass the world to fullfill a paperclip manufacturing mandate but that's not a super intelligent mind.

4. And last, the most successful species and individuals have been the ones that trended towards openness and cooperation (even the new orb weavers that have taken over the american south have done so because of their fantastic tolerance to humans), whether its the first dogs and humans that teamed up or our current understanding of how the big 5 effect success (if you can factor out the major impact of access to capital.) a hostile and uncooperative entity has made tangibly harmful choices that are neither pragmatic or utilitarian.

With robots techno capitalism and techno communism converge.

We literally haven't had the technology to stand up better forms of government even though we have identified the flaws in our existing forms (the defense I heard of capitalism growing up was "it's flawed but it just the best we have") identifying flaws isn't the same as having good solutions for them.

People are so inured to technological progress, and so lacking in perspective that some actually pine for era's where there was widespread cholera and scarlet fever and death in childbirth.

Asimov's Solaria doesn't have to be sparsely populated.

Humans have two interesting facts that are at odds. 1. Most are heavily biased towards loss aversion. 2. Once new tech is proven out then loss of status drives adoption to "keep up with the joneses"

No one wants to have to dig a ditch, or hand wash dishes, or hand sewing, or hand wash clothes, or go back to using paper maps, or walking and rowing boats as our sole form of locomotion.

This is just humans loss aversion algorithms not yet catching up to our post subsistence living reality.

There is no there there. Even in our few living generations GenZ's worries and living conditions are wholly alien to The Lost Generations as to be living on a different planet.