531–540 of 873 posts
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> If they are, it'll almost certainly[1] be climate change or nuclear war, it won't be AI. If we go extinct in the next 100 years, it's not going to be from climate change. How would that even work?
Human extinction is not on the table. Societal collapse could be.
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All this is demagoguery. If a bank denies you credit, it has to explain why. Not "AI told us so". If police arrests you, they have to explain why, not "AI told us so". If your job fires you, it has to explain why, not "AI told us so". etc.
I'm totally lost as to how any of that is relevant to anything I've said. The claim I am rebutting is that we can't expect to say anything about AI causality because we can't even say anything about human causality.
"When AI is used, its decisions must be explicable in human terms. No 'AI said so, so it's true'". Somehow the whole discussion is about how human mind cannot be explained either.
Yea, the decisions made by the human mind can be explained in human terms for the vast majority of relevant cases.
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I don't disagree with that, but then the risk is nuclear war. It could be triggered by global warming conflicts or by something else. Still, like I said somewhere else, even all out nuclear war is unlikely to lead to human extinction . It could push us back to the neolithic in some scenarios, but even then there is some disagreement about what would happen. Of course, even in the most optimistic scenario it would be…
Then, actually, the risk is the root cause: climate change, not nuclear war. The global war could be conventional, too. Or chemical, or biological, or genetically engineered. No matter the tool used, the risk is why they would use it vs. not using it now. In any case, besides addressing the root cause vs. proximal cause, you couldn't even address the proximal cause anyways: it's more likely that the world could do so…
My take is that if you remove nuclear/biological war out of the picture somehow, climate change is not an existential risk. If you remove the latter then the former is still an existential risk (and there are unfortunately a lot of other possible sources of geopolitical instability). So the fundamental source of risk if the former. But it's a matter of opinion.
Conventional or chemical warfare, even on a global scale, are definitely not existential risks though. And like I said, probably not even nuclear. Biological... that I could see leading to extinction.
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Nukes don't have a mind of their own. They're operated by people, who fortunately turned out sane enough that they can successfully threaten each other into a stable state (MAD doctrine). Still, adding more groups to the mix increases risk, which is why non-proliferation treaties are a thing, and are taken seriously. Powerful enough AI creates whole new classes of risks, but it also magnifies all the current ones. E.…
AI could pose those risks, but it also could not - that is the difference to nuclear weapons.
"I'm going to build a more powerful AI; don't worry, it could end the world, but it also could not."
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> how to kill everyone and it patiently and expertly walks them through how to create a global pandemic. There are thousands of people around the globe working in labs every day that can do this.
How does that number compare to the number of people (experts and laypeople) who have access to the mentioned AI models? Risk = severity x likelihood I think the OP's point was that AI increases the likelihood by dramatically increasing the access to that level of knowledge.
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If humans go extinct it sure as hell won't be AI that does it, but rather good old human ignorance and aggression.
I think the probability of humans eventually going extinct is 1. Avoiding it requires almost unimaginable levels of cooperation and technical advances.
The sun is eventually going to explode rendering our solar system uninhabitable though that is a long time away from now and we have many other massive risks to humanity in the meantime.
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> I think the core is not to agree with the existential risk scenario in the first place. I mean, that's motivated reasoning right there, right? "Agreeing that existential risk is there would lead to complex intractable problems we don't want to tackle, so let's agree there's no existential risk". This isn't a novel idea, it's why we started climate change mitigations 20 years too late.
No, I meant it as in: there is no reason to agree with that scenario. Stacking a lot of hypotheses on top of each other as to get to something dangerous isn't necessarily something that is convincing.
When you see a gun on the table, what do you do? You assume its loaded until proven otherwise. For some reason, those who imagine AI will usher in some tech-utopia not only assume the gun is empty, but that pulling the trigger will bring forth endless prosperity. It's rather insane actually.
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He actually doesn't think it's viable, but thinks its the only card left to play. He's pretty sure that human civilization will be extinct this century.
He's actually suggested it may happen within 10 years. Which makes it hard to take him seriously in general. (I do personally take his overall concerns seriously, but I don't trust his timeline predictions at all, and many of his other statements.)
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Who are the "humanity is a cancer" folk? I thought this was a trope used to discredit environmentalists?
Most people think continued existence of humanity is good, which includes environmentalists. But there are some people who either think (a) avoiding suffering is overwhelmingly important, to the extent that a universe without life is ideal or (b) the world would be better off without humans because of the vast destruction we cause. I'm not claiming this is a common view, but it doesn't have to be a common view to res…
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The fact that anyone may be taking Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously on this topic is mind-blowing to me. Simply mind-blowing. To imagine that anybody, including the UN, would have any power to collective put a stop to the development of AI globally is a laughable idea. The UN cannot agree to release a letter on Israel-Hamas, imagine policing the ENTIRE WORLD and shutting down AI development when necessary. We can't stop c…
One good way of staying to a prudent course / halting haphazard - winner takes all progress is to use social tech for it. In particular, there is an interesting possibility: the top researchers who drive the AI scenario all kind of know each other, and can self-organize in an international union, with pooled resources for strikes. AI revolution is dependent on simultaneous progress and cross capitalization of good id…