Machine intelligence, part 2

It is arrogant to make sweeping statements wherein one presumes to be an arbiter of competence. If you think their arguments aren't sufficiently cogent or articulated, then suggest a counterargument rather than dismissing them on the basis of something other than their words.

Unlike climatology, superintelligence is not yet an established scientific field. It does not currently exist to study. There are no experts. There is no consensus to be had. Everyone is technically unqualified to speak on the subject.

Artificial intelligence experts today may be able to render guesses more accurate than most as to the arrival of superintelligence via the AGI path. However, this does not confer upon them any sort of authoritative high ground on the matter, nor does it place the issue squarely in their domain.

Doing so would be analogous to trusting a group of explosives experts circa 1944 in saying that we have nothing to fear from atomic weapons, because such devices are to utilize conventional explosive mechanisms in their operation.

If we a seriously believe AI is an extinction level risk, and getting there more slowly might improve our chances, then it seems like we should try anything with a good chance of working. I think this has a better chance of working than regulating AI research itself, since chip manufacturing is centralized and highly visible, whereas AI research could be advanced in secret by a few people in a room. Much easier to successfully regulate the former than the latter.

Close, but a more accurate generalization might read: "Nobody is an expert. Therefore everyone can add to the debate, provided their argument has merit."

>There are actually people who are studying AGI full time and have made it their life work, regardless of whether you know about it or not.

You mean like the people at MIRI? In a previous post, you suggest that most of them don't deserve any play at all on the topic.

>How do you figure? There are AGI journals[1], conferences[2], speaker circuits, hackathons etc...So I think you just don't know about them.

Oh but I do, and my statement still stands regardless. AGI does not yet exist. The field itself is in its infancy, and hardly established relative to other fields. As such, there are no experts, nor any consensus, at least not in any authoritative sense.

If you insist upon dismissing the input of select people entirely, then the bar for such a decision should be that they are authoritatively incorrect, or that they are authoritatively unqualified to speak. The problem is that there is nothing to derive such authority from yet, precisely because the field is in its infancy.

>The problem however with your analogy is that the current experts aren't analogous to explosives experts, they are more analogous to Szilárd/Einstein.

Unlike atomic weapons prior to the first test shot (or even prior to Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 experiment), AGI does not yet have a solid theoretical underpinning, let alone a proof of concept. Perhaps the best analogy lies somewhere in between our interpretations.

>This is why I advocate for an AGI Manhattan project.

Funny enough we're in total agreement here. I was even advocating for the same thing via another post in this thread.

>Not thinking about it, building towards it.

There is the question of timing. If the Manhattan Project itself was initiated earlier than it had been, there may not have been enough time for the aforementioned theoretical underpinnings to have been reasoned about to the level they were.

>... the MIRI people are thinking about AI, not working on it.

While they're not building AGI, I would argue that their thinking constitutes not only work, but progress. MIRI is attempting to flesh out the murky, abstract nature of the control problem and translate it into something more concrete, specifically mathematical models that may one day evolve into provably-sound foundations for future work.

>Once it does, the field (in theory) doesn't really exist anymore really. So there can only be a research into it before it is complete.

It is possible and perhaps even likely that the first AGI we create will be contained, but otherwise unsatisfactory to release or utilize without further iteration and study of the design. After all, it's probably a bad idea (in most cases) to leverage its superhuman intelligence if you believe the thing is malicious or otherwise has motives that do not align with human interests.

That said, I cannot imagine research proceeding in any sort of public fashion once that threshold has been passed, so in a way you're likely correct.

>Arguing about safety is totally a worthless effort, and harmful in my opinion, when we have no idea what the foundations are or the paths to it.

While I agree regulation is premature, prominent people like Musk advocating for AGI safety, if only in a general sense, strikes me as a positive thing due to the cultural effects.

Prior to Musk, Hawking, et al., if you mentioned the prospect of unsafe AI, you'd be laughed at in all but the most niche communities. The notion was clearly just something confined to the realm of science fiction movies. Nothing with similarly catastrophic ramifications could ever happen in real life, or otherwise such things were indefinitely far off in the future.

I'm not advocating fear mongering, just saying that when AGI actually does become a serious safety concern, it's better to have the cultural climate already primed and receptive to addressing the problem. On the other hand, if the safety angle is pushed too hard now, it may backfire and have the opposite effect later, and that would be unfortunate.

>There are no rules stating that a project has to be turnkey to realize a goal.

No, but in practice there are political and financial constraints that can sometimes have a similar effect. If a project isn't properly aligned with those constraints, then it becomes more likely to fail. The longer and more expensive a project is, the harder it is to justify or continue to justify in such climates.