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

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

#81

Post by yanderekko »

esperent wrote: post #70
JamesBarney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been people for a long time who think the world is going to end. We can use your argument to dismiss anyone who fears any existential risk like asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, AI, etc... And since the world exists every group will be wrong except one. I think the risk of human extermination is much lower than many in this group believe because I think AI is much more compute bound than algorithm bo…

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.

That's really not true. There's a huge overlap in these groups, but the top EA charities are not shoveling all their money at AI alignment orgs... even if one can argue that they should.

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

#82

Post by j_crick »

painelemental wrote: post #36
stubybubs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golly. I'm on part 2 and it sounds like they're about to invent Scientology. > The full post goes into more depth and nuance, but it's worth stressing how heavily Leverage relied on “debugging,” based on Anders's “Connection Theory.” Debugging consisted of — to paraphrase and oversimplify — opening up one's psyche, history, self, and emotional core to maximum vulnerability, generally to one's hierarchical superior, a…

Thats nothing. Wait till Epstein enters the picture. https://fredwynne.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-vitalik-buter... Any hoo - this stuff is the tip of the iceberg.

Admittedly I don’t follow this rationalist thing on the internet at all, so I don’t know what’s going on with them. But that was hell of a read. I am no stranger to people being dicks, but still, that all is just sick.

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

#83

Post by Natsu »

esperent wrote: post #70
JamesBarney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been people for a long time who think the world is going to end. We can use your argument to dismiss anyone who fears any existential risk like asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, AI, etc... And since the world exists every group will be wrong except one. I think the risk of human extermination is much lower than many in this group believe because I think AI is much more compute bound than algorithm bo…

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.

How many EA people do you know?

That seems to get the most clicks, but I usually associate them with things like mosquito bed nets to help prevent malaria, because that's a far more common topic in my experience.

I'm sure you can find particular people who are all about the AI risk stuff that seems pretty wild to me, too.

But when you say "focused exclusively" I feel like you may have mostly seen news articles about wild AI stuff and not the average EA enthusiast who spends their time talking about picking efficient charities.

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

#84

Post by precompute »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #32

AI safety is an apocalypse cult and we should recognize that everyone who has ever been in an apocalypse cult thinks that "no, this time it's really the end of the world". Everyone who believes crazy shit thinks they're being reasonable, so just because we're super sure we're being reasonable doesn't mean what we believe isn't crazy. Do we believe that we alone, of all people who have believed in the coming end, have…

IMO AI Safety is to AI as HR is to Employees. You can't just learn it out of a book and even then it's a pretty bad experience for everyone involved. The world is not a corporation and the existence of "AI Safety" just guarantees that no "mere mortals" will ever get to touch AI.

Waiting for the day our Overlords make Graphic Card 2.0 and refuse to sell any to the plebs 'cause the overlords "know better"

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

#85

Post by whatshisface »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #69
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #32

AI safety is an apocalypse cult and we should recognize that everyone who has ever been in an apocalypse cult thinks that "no, this time it's really the end of the world". Everyone who believes crazy shit thinks they're being reasonable, so just because we're super sure we're being reasonable doesn't mean what we believe isn't crazy. Do we believe that we alone, of all people who have believed in the coming end, have…

Personally, I find the AI safety arguments sound pretty far-fetched, but I can’t come up with solid arguments against them. Also, when I look for a good ”debunking”, I don’t find anything. Mostly all I find are mockery, ad-hominem and the like. Frankly, the people who argue climate change isn’t real do a better job than the people who argue AI risk isn’t real, and they’re wrong!

I don't think it's impossible to come up with arguments against them. For one thing, extrapolating the current gradual rate of progress forwards means that we will get to see several minor "intelligence spills" before the hypothetical big and last one, and by observing what went wrong, humanity will have the opportunity to come up with solutions.

Since very smart human beings have in history done a lot of damage, but never ended the species or anything, we can conclude that the world has an "intelligence safety margin" that extends up to Alexander the Great or Napoleon. There have been some incredibly smart people in human history and none of them have ruined everything, a few countries at most.

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

#86

Post by yanderekko »

Animats wrote: post #45

Some of that is just typical cult behavior. Scientology and Ayn Rand followers have had similar problems. Drugs usually make it worse. AI safety is a real issue, but look at what it looks like so far. - "Machines should think, people should work". That's Marshall Brain's "Manna". It's also working at an an Amazon fulfillment center, where the computers tell the humans what to do. - "Paperclip maximizer". A corporatio…

>- "Paperclip maximizer". A corporation is a paperclip maximizer. If you take Milton Friedman seriously, that's what a corporation is supposed to do. As I point out occasionally, most of the ethical problems foreseen for AIs are known ethical problems with corporations.

Corporations are not capable of having the "fast takeoff" which is an integral part of the doomer narrative here. Furthermore, a corporation being a paperclip maximizer is an abstraction that obviously falls apart in the extremes, if for no other reason than because at some point destroying the world for the sake of more paperclips is going to have a negative ROI....

Meanwhile, the (AI) paperclip maximizer is actually trying to maximize paperclips and does not have the sort of internal checks that would apply to real-world orgs. That is the crux of the problem.

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

#87

Post by space_fountain »

js8 wrote: post #67
space_fountain wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a future where only energy and resources are important leads you to think we’ll have less inequality? Brains are the only thing that don’t flow to the wealthy right now

Human nature. If you're a part of the common tribe, people are actually pretty good. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit on the size of the tribe (although some people just wanna hate somebody). You can also look at it this way. The only real objection against socialist societies was that people are lazy, and don't care enough about producing stuff or resolving economic inefficiencies. But with AI, this objection…

Humans ability to push others out of the circle of concern is near limitless. We literally bought and sold people. I think there is reason for hope. We stopped doing some of those terrible things and only partially for economic reasons, but ai still fills me with some great fear. It shrinks the circle that the wealthy absolutely must keep in their circle, in their tribe, to go on and live happy lives and people of the past have been uncomfortably good at excluding people from the circle in the past. Basically it might not destroy us, but I certainly don’t see it as inevitable that it will bring us to utopia

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

#88

Post by precompute »

idlewords wrote: post #78
braingenious wrote: post #3

I was not aware that there is an Atlas Shrugged-length Harry Potter fanfiction about rationality. Learn something new every day!

It's not just Atlas Shrugged-length, but Atlas Shrugged-quality!

I disagree, Atlas Shrugged was much better, used an original premise and had an interesting phrase throughout ("Who is John Galt?").

HPMOR is really garbage-tier. It's parasitic on another series, doesn't have much in the way of a good story, and quite legitimately makes shit up. There are much better HP fanfics (and indeed books) written by people that are not as "smart" as Yudkowsky and also didn't have an agenda to push.

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

#89

Post by yanderekko »

Barrin92 wrote: post #80
vishal0123 wrote: post #10

This article is such a mess. If you are alleging something, then say it clearly. Judging by my participation in lesswrong and others, there are both feminists and sexist people, just like all other online forums. People are more free to be sexist online and every close knit online community has fair share of sexists.

The EA people seem to have more than a spurious relationship with polygamy, drugs, orgies and odd-ball ascetic leader figures, doomsday prophecies and psychotic behavior. Taken from the article " MIRI employee Jessica Taylor had a job that sometimes involved “imagining extreme AI torture scenarios,” as she described it in a post on LessWrong—the worst possible suffering AI might be able to inflict on people. At work,…

>This is like what, one bad week away from AI Jonestown?

Look at the Ziz story - we're already there. (https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-zi...)

However, this should not severely impugn the community as a whole.

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

#90

Post by akvadrako »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #69
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #32

AI safety is an apocalypse cult and we should recognize that everyone who has ever been in an apocalypse cult thinks that "no, this time it's really the end of the world". Everyone who believes crazy shit thinks they're being reasonable, so just because we're super sure we're being reasonable doesn't mean what we believe isn't crazy. Do we believe that we alone, of all people who have believed in the coming end, have…

Personally, I find the AI safety arguments sound pretty far-fetched, but I can’t come up with solid arguments against them. Also, when I look for a good ”debunking”, I don’t find anything. Mostly all I find are mockery, ad-hominem and the like. Frankly, the people who argue climate change isn’t real do a better job than the people who argue AI risk isn’t real, and they’re wrong!

My argument against is that we can't do much about it. We can't predict how machines will interpret our rules if they are smarter than us. Nor do we have a shared set of values we can articulate. Nor can we control rogue users making rogue AI.

So unless one is proposing a global crackdown on AI research, AI safety is a lost cause.

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