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

Post by jefftk » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

consilient wrote: post #127

esperent wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 welfar…

Post by esperent » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

dotsam wrote: post #158

pksebben wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

didn't really have much of a dog in this fight, but looking at that breakdown I wonder which oil company is bankrolling them. I know I'm jumping the gun just a little, but c'mon. An apocalypse list without climate?

Climate change is unlikely to kill everyone on earth. Other risks, such as an engineered pandemic, asteroid impact, or an AI apocalypse have the possibility of killing ~everyone. This is not saying that climate change is not a real issue.

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 3:20 PM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #194

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not sure these issues are in conflict. Corporations cause lots of harm despite being held back by their dependence on people who control them, who can occasionally put the brakes on some of their worst excesses, and by their inability to recursively self-improve their intelligence. Removing these two handicaps on corporations would allow them to do significantly more damage, so preventing this from happening is i…

Post by YellOh » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

Sol- wrote: post #129

TheDong wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #215

LatteLazy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a survey 700 ML researchers, we should throw money at their subject or we might all die...

With great power comes great responsibility. If we start plugging ML everywhere - which we are currently doing - we better be sure that it is behaving as expected.