Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
openphilanthropy.org
openphilanthropy.org
This page details how their main goal with the $30M isn't to increase OpenAI's pledged funds by 3%, thereby reducing the marginal "AI Risk" by less than 3%. The goal is to have a seat on the board (basically -- they use a lot more words to say this in the announcement). What on earth is going on where a charitable organization with Open in its name feels it needs to buy its way onto the board of a prominent non-profit in order to:
"Improve our understanding of the field of AI research"
"[get] opportunities to become closely involved with any of the small number of existing organizations in “industry”"
and "Better position us to generally promote the ideas and goals that we prioritize"
Isn't the whole point of "open philanthropy" that you can direct funds to organizations more open about what's going on?!
Unbelievable.
/s
How is this controversial? Just because some people know each other?
>OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in the same house as Holden. In addition, Holden is engaged to Dario’s sister Daniela.
His roommates/sister's fiancé work there. That's all.
Relationship disclosures
OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are
both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in
the same house as Holden. In addition, Holden is engaged to
Dario’s sister Daniela.You're saying that the Open Philanthropy Fund - which is funded by an $8.3 billion grant from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, also close associates - is funneling $30M money to an organization that pays below market rates (https://www.quora.com/What-is-compensation-like-at-the-non-p...), run by people who have dedicated their professional careers and millions of dollars to philanthropic causes despite being surrounded by way more lucrative opportunities for anyone with their skillsets.
If this were the scheme, there are countless better ways to do it.
They could just give them the money without any pretense. Dustin and Cari didn't have to tie up this money in OPP. They could have skipped the years of working with Holden and others for years to identify the best giving opportunities, avoided any blowback, and just used their money the way every other billionaire does. Or, instead of just giving it away, they could have made him an absurdly compensated CEO of a new startup.
And none of that would have attracted any attention, no sneering condemnation, just business as usual.
But that's not what they did.
They've spent years painstakingly identifying the best causes they could find - anti-malarial nets, poverty relief via direct cash transfers, biosecurity, intestinal work treatment, Schistosomiasis, prison reform, and yes, AI safety. They've oriented their entire lives around this project, so of course many of the people they're close to are working on similar projects. So it really, really shouldn't be a shocking twist that one of the people they're close to might be in a position to use a small fraction of their available funds for a lot of potential good. There are fewer than 100 people working full-time on AI safety today. If you've concluded that it's an important cause area, there really aren't many options.
And even then, they didn't have to disclose their personal connection. They really could have just left well enough alone. But because they're dedicated to transparency even in the face of stupidity, they made their personal connection prominent and obvious. So now anyone on the Internet can cruise on by and - ignoring the millions donated to third-world poverty and health causes, ignoring the multitude of ways the money could have been quietly and selfishly used, ignoring the fact that non-profits invariably pay below-market rates, ignoring the copious public writing and research that's gone into these decisions - can simply gawk and say "unbelievable".
When people say "No good deed goes unpunished", this is what they're talking about.
The likelihood that this $30m is the best possible use of that money? It just happens to be that this personal connection occurs by chance? Pretty much zero. Of course all opportunities in life are down to your network, but this is pretty cut-and-dry nepotism.
If this were a totally unrelated personal investment by Dustin in a friend, it would not be seen as problematic. By investing through these supposedly impartial organisations that aim to influence everyone's behaviour, their credibility in this mission is clearly harmed.
(At least this my initial response, while allowing that this may change if a more detailed analysis shows this to be misplaced. But without this expression of mistrust, such an analysis is highly unlikely to take place, and I do not immediately see how it could fully alleviate this concern)
Go to OPP's (or Good Ventures') site and notice the glaring lack of a donate button.
edit: I cannot reply to the below, so I will edit my comment.
I am aware that GiveWell does not invest money. Instead it provides impartial analysis of investment impact. My contention is that this was not impartial. Dustin can handle his own money, but:
People using GiveWell to decide their own investments should now think twice in my view. Which kind of defeats the whole point.
> The Open Philanthropy Project typically recommends grants to the Open Philanthropy Project fund, a donor advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Support for the Open Philanthropy Project fund comes primarily from Good Ventures, though other donors have contributed as well. In some cases, the Open Philanthropy Project makes grant recommendations directly to Good Ventures.
It's basically all GV money - that is to say, Dustin and Cari's money.
Otherwise a large percentage of Hacker News should now be expecting similar investments to pursue research projects.
Look, I do not really care if somebody rich invests in somebody they know. But I do now doubt GiveWell's impartiality of analysis in other instances, and general good judgement. I will not be using their judgement to inform my charitable giving.
It would be difficult to imagine that two people with very close relationships to him working for OpenAI haven't influenced his apparent change of heart; whether they've converted him to the cause by sheer force of intellectual argument or not it doesn't look great.
So I believe the source you cited indicates the opposite of what you claim it does.
(In case anyone is curious, I don't know anything about the story; I just saw it on HN.)
The connection is not direct. There may be more direct connections between YC and OPP, but I am not aware of any.
So, it's natural that I'd be expecting there's a high chance I'd want to give to the organization they work at later on.
Just because someone has a personal connection doesn't mean it's a bad use of money – it indicates it's worth asking the question, but just because there's personal connection doesn't make it "unbelievable."
Also - not just his roommate and future brother-in-law. Also a project funded by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, etc. Seems pretty damn reasonable to think they would've evaluated OpenAI for a grant regardless of the personal relationships.
Hater News at its best.
In their relationship disclosure:
> OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in the same house as Holden. In addition, Holden is engaged to Dario’s sister Daniela.
This is so tangled. I don't mean it as a criticism as I'm sure a lot of SV investments would have a much longer Relationship Disclosure sections. So props to them for including this.
Some people conflate this with Effective Altruism, which I think sucks. Compared to the rigorous work done by GiveWell, there's no way to tell if this is effective, or even altruistic.
It's just people assuming that the world will be a better place if more people who think like them have money, an assumption held by basically everyone everywhere.
And I won't give people a pass because of the thing they co-founded and then forked. I can appreciate Wikipedia and believe that Larry Sanger's fork of it was dumb. I can appreciate GiveWell and think that Open Philantropy is corrupt.
Who is corrupt? The guy giving away $8 billion or the one who founded GiveWell? And one of their focuses is criminal justice reform and trying to improve prison conditions.
If you want to look at something truly corrupt, look at the criminal justice system in the U.S.
"I disagree with the arguments presented, for these reasons" - cool. If you think the grant isn't a good idea, make an argument for that.
"This person who has dedicated their life to doing as much good as possible is close to other people who also want to do as much good as possible, and their work has led to convergent viewpoints, therefore this isn't altruism" is cheap character assassination.
So, you obviously feel strongly about this, but let me explain why your comments are less persuasive for those of us outside this subculture:
The non-profit they donated to is (by any reading of their mission statement) an organization designed to create new technology that "will be the most significant technology ever created by humans" according to their own statements. It doesn't disburse cash or benefits to _anyone_, and actually pledges to keep some of the research secret, and "we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns" -- a situation the organization claims will happen, presumably regularly!
Creating influential technology is typically done for-profit, and research is typically funded in ways much less open to individual favoritism (review boards are a great anti-corruption tool), and the results of that research are typically available to (among others) the people that fund it. There is a lot about this situation that a reasonable person would describe as unusual.
In addition, all of these changes -- introducing more direct funding with less oversight, lack of access to results, lack of expectation of benefit to the targets of the charity -- all lend themselves to obscuring a fraud. That doesn't mean a fraud is present, but I'd be extremely aggressive about oversight.
What kind of oversight are we getting? Well, right now they list one of their major goals as the "tricky" goal of figuring out of they're making any progress at all.
I would not give this organization money. Dismissing these critiques as "character assassination" ignores the fact that I've only described aspects of the organization, not of the people involved, whom I have little information about.
Again, OpenAI isn't Open.
That context makes advising a donor to direct an "unusually large" sum to an organisation with an extremely vague goal and no tangible measure of progress towards it, little of the transparency demanded of other charities and existing funding commitments well in excess of their spending plans look like an extremely strange decision long before you read the disclosure statement.
This isn't quite true; SCI, a charity that treats parasitic disease in the third world, is the subject of massive uncertainty and conflicting reports of effectiveness. It might turn out that it has very little impact at all. But it's still a recommended EA charity because it looks like there's a decent chance they're doing a ton of good. GW has written extensively about this.
Smart people are great at rationalizing, including to themselves.
"Open to many possibilities ... instead of starting with a predefined set of focus areas, we’re considering a wide variety of causes where our philanthropy could help to improve others’ lives." and "Open about our work ... Very often, key discussions and decisions happen behind closed doors, and it’s difficult for outsiders to learn from and critique philanthropists’ work. We envision a world in which philanthropists increasingly document and share their research, reasoning, results and mistakes to help each other learn more quickly and serve others more effectively."
This all seems pretty useful so I don't get what your criticism is.
OpenAI hasn't released any open code or anything open.
And is OpenAI even about A.I.? (as several other here mentioned it's not AI)
1 mil / year per expert * 10 experts per year = 30 Mil in 3 years
Maybe $30 mil isn't as much as we think it is in AI business?
Is this realistic?
I don't think it's impossible for a dev to be pulling $1M/yr in total comp, but it seemed more likely happen at Google or FB rather than AI.
I feel like this number would make more sense for a pool of researchers with a strong lead than a single person.
[source : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directeur_de_recherche_au_CNRS ]
That hypothetical could very well be the reality on the horizon.
What of Safety/Control research that has fundamentally nothing to do with such a system or even its philosophy that the broad majority of these institutions or ventures are centered on? What of deep learning centric methodologies that are incompatible?
Safety/control software and systems development isn't a research topic. It's an engineering practice that is most suited for well qualified and practiced engineers who design safety critical systems that are present all around you.
Safety/Control Engineering isn't a 'lab experiment'. If one were aiming to secure, control and ensure the safety of a system, they'd likely hire a grey bearded team of engineers who are experts and have proven careers doing so. A particular systems design can be imparted on well qualified engineers. This happens everyday.
Without a systems design or even a systems philosophy these efforts are just intellectual shots in the dark. Furthermore, has anyone even stopped to consider that these problems would get worked out naturally during the development of such a technology?
Modern day AI algorithms and solutions center on mathematical optimization.
AGI centers are far deeper and elusive constructs. One can ignore this all to clear truth all they like.
So... If one's real concern is about the development of AGI and understanding therein, I think its fine time to admit that it might not come from the race horses everybody's betting on. As such, it is much more worth one's penny to start funding a diverse range of people and groups pursuing it who have sound ideas and solid approaches.
This advice can continue to be ignored such as it currently is and has been for a number of years. It can persist across rather narrow hiring practices....
The closed/open door will or wont swing both ways.
I will love to be proven wrong though.
Really, really happy to see this being carefully considered. Good job to the Open Philanthropy folks!
EDIT: That Slate Star link is amazing: "Both sides here keep talking about who is going to “use” the superhuman intelligence a billion times more powerful than humanity, as if it were a microwave or something."
Then again, the money could be used to buy politicians' votes in favor of environment-friendly policies. It's so blatant in the U.S. these days.
Yet somehow we think it's important to fund all these things, and articles announcing new NSF grants for math research are not typically met with this kind of whatabout-ism.
Openai will probably use the money to hire world class researchers and give them tools necessary to advance AI in a meaningful way that benefits humanity.
The other big labs from Google, Facebook and MS seems to be driven by gathering as much data as possible from users, learning from it and presenting click bait ads to make more money.
Do you feel we've done 30% of the work towards human level AI between 2014 and 2017, given a target of 2024?
We have just become better at some tasks that we knew how to automate for a long time, albeit badly. We don't have a clue on how human intelligence is supposed to work.
Or as someone else quipped, the moment a human steps foot on Mars, Mars has become overpopulated.
Nothing they're writing about addresses any of the real world problems with how AI can or might be applied in society. They're a non-profit research lab with no clear agenda and no clear connection to how they plan to interrogate the world which seems like an important part of the equation if you care about outcomes.
So, irrespective of subjective judgements, please explain to me how any of this is supposed to help anyone?
Or, alternatively, how isn't this just free R&D for industry unshackled and unconnected to ethics or society?
I'm not sure I buy it, but that's what I think it is.
If the intelligence explosion hypothesis proves true even 100 years from now, it will have the potential to decide the fate of humanity.
Given the stakes, beginning foundational research as early as possible is prudent. $30M in the grand scheme of things isn't much at all. If you were to express that amount as a fraction of the planet's total wealth, it would amount to something utterly infinitesimal. Yet, the potential payoffs are immeasurable.
Philanthropy and research isn't some crude single-threaded triage process. The timescales involved, combined with the fact you can't just throw money at some problems demands a diverse approach that pursues many ends in parallel.
What makes you think that OpenAI is doing anything that has any meaningful impact on AGI? We have no idea what AGI looks like.
Yeah but there isn't a calculation of the risk/probability of AGI there's just the appeal to the idea.
Sure, they're the closest thing we have to "experts", but there's not just one, but likely 5 or 10 more field, if not world-changing leaps we need to make before the technologies we have will resemble anything like AGI.
And that's ignoring the people who ascribe diety-like powers to some potential AGI. Air gap the computer and control the inputs and outputs. We can formally prove what a system is capable of. That fixes the problem.
Yes, there's some additional uncertainty about whether you're even asking the right people. But you can take account of that uncertainty, both by widening your error bars and by asking people from other fields as well (including philosophers, e.g. Bostrom). What you can't do is just throw up your hands and say "it's unknowable".
This is all beside the original point, which is that these arguments are much more rigorously grounded than just a wave in the direction of AGI. Could they be better? Sure, and there are a lot of people who'd be interested in seeing some better estimates. But for now, they're the best we have, and they're a completely reasonable thing to base decisions on.
> We can formally prove what a system is capable of. That fixes the problem.
That's exactly what some of the people working on this problem are trying to do, but it's a hell of a lot harder than you make it sound. Formal methods have come a really long way, but they're not even remotely close to being able to prove that an AGI system is safe (yet).
And I think you and I have very different definitions of Rigorous. Like I said, unless you'd take Wilbur Wright's thoughts on a mars mission seriously, I don't think you should give much thought to Geoff Hinton's thoughts about when we'll get AGI, and I say that having enormous respect for him and his achievements. (and using him as a simple example)
Its pseudoscience. We're notoriously bad about predicting the future. I don't see any reason to trust people going on about the dangers of AGI any more than the futurologists of my parents generation, who predicted flying cars and interstellar travel, but missed smartphones.
But then you can't benefit from it, or you can only benefit from it except in narrowly predefined ways.
However, I believe that the ones who say sensational things about AI doomsday are the ones who are disproportionately quoted by the media.
On the other hand, I don't actually know Hinton's opinion on these things, and he might agree with me (in which case, you absolutely should listen to him!). But instead the loudest voices are perhaps the most ridiculous.
That said, I do think that if I asked you to make a bet with me on when we would approach with even 50% confidence, your error bars would be on the order of a century.
Debates about superhuman AI have focused quite a lot on what it would mean to "control the inputs and outputs" while still being able to get some kind of benefit from the AI.
You can indeed formally prove that a computer will or won't do certain things, so you could use that for isolation purposes. But in order to be useful, the AI needs to interact with people and/or the world in some way. Otherwise it might as well be switched off or never have been built in the first place.
If it's really a superhuman intelligence with superhuman knowledge about the world, then interacting with people is where the risk creeps back in, because the AI could make suggestions, recommendations, requests, offers, promises, or threats. Although there are plenty of ideas about limiting the nature of questions and answers, having some kind of separate person or machine judge whether information from the AI's communications should be used or how, or limiting what the AI is programmed to attempt to do or how, none of these measures are straightforward to formally prove correct in the way that simpler isolation properties are.
If we made contact with intelligent aliens, would formal proofs of correctness of the computers through which we (say, exclusively) communicate with them guarantee that they couldn't massively disrupt our society by means of what they had to say?
This is not true. By Rice's theorem, either the system is too dumb to be useful, or we can't prove what it can do.
Further, Turing completeness is not required to be "useful". You can get to the moon without Turing completeness.
You're again using terms incorrectly. A "side channel" implies that someone is listening to information that is unintentionally leaked. Unless your expectation is that this CPU is going to start side channeling our minds with the EM waves its emitting (which again, "deity-like attributes"), we'd need to be specifically listening to whatever "side channel" it uses, and it would require knowledge of and access to that side channel.
Something being able to send additional information over a side channel doesn't help unless that information is received, and so realistically, unless your hypothesis is "mind control/hacking the airwaves/whatever via sound waves the chip emanates" or similar, which are preposterous, it'll always be just as easy for the thing to transmit information via the normal channels.
The thing about all of these is that they generally allow you to get a small amount of data out that can sometimes help you with things. But again, without ascribing magic powers to the system, all the stuff that it can directly affect: power draw, temperature, disk spin speeds, monitoring LED blink speeds, noises, even the relatively insane things like EM frequency emissions can all be controlled relatively easily, and no matter how smart it is, I don't see an AGI violating physics.
And that's not even going into things the AI might say that'll convince the gatekeepers to just voluntarily let it out.
Rice's theorem says that no program can correctly decide what an arbitrary program will do, not that no properties of programs can be proven. There are useful programs about which non-trivial properties can be, and have been, proven, and Rice's theorem is no limit on the complexity of an individual program about which a property may be proven, or the complexity of a property which an individual program may be proven to exhibit.
Usually programs with provable properties have been intentionally constructed to make it possible to prove those properties, rather than having someone come along and prove a property after-the-fact.
* Building AI is a race against time, and in such races, victory is most easily achieved by those who can cut the most corners while still successfully producing the product.
* As a route to general AI, a neural architecture seems plausible. (Not at the current state-of-the-art, of course.)
* Neural networks (as they currently stand) are famously extremely hard to analyse: certainly we have no good reason to believe they're more easily analysed than a random arbitrary program.
* A team which is racing to make a neural-architecture AI has little incentive to even try to make their AI easy to analyse. Either it does the job or it doesn't. (Witness the current attempts to produce self-driving cars through deep learning.) Any further effort spent on making an easily-analysable AI is effort which is wasting time that another team is using just to build the damn thing.
* Therefore, absent a heroic effort to the contrary, the first AI will be a program which is as hard as a random arbitrary program to analyse. And, as much as I hate to appeal to Wolfram, he has abundantly shown that random arbitrary programs, even very simply-specified ones, tend to be hard to analyse in practice.
(My argument doesn't actually require a neural architecture of the AI; it's just a proxy for a general unanalyseable thing.)
2. Certainly the most plausible thing we have now, I'm not sure that that makes it plausible, but better than anything else. so okay.
3. This depends on what you mean. Neural Networks are actually significantly easier to analyze than arbitrary programs, when you essentially restrict yourself to two operations (multiplication and sigmoid or ReLU), things get a lot easier to analyze. Here are some questions we can answer about a neural network that we can't about an arbitrary program: "Will this halt for this input?", "Will this halt for all inputs?", "What will a mild perturbation of this input have on the output?", these are as a consequence of fineiteness and differentiability, which are not attributes that a normal program has. (caveat: this gets more difficult with things like RNNs and NTMs, but afaik is still true). The questions that we find difficult answer for a Neural Network are very different than for a normal program: namely "How did this network arrive at these weights as opposed to these other ones?" and related "What does this weight or set of weights represent?", but I don't think that there's any indication that those questions are impossible to answer (and often we can answer them, like for facial recognition networks where we can clearly see that successive layers detect gradients, curves, facial features, and then eventually entire faces)
4. Agreed. There's no real reason to know why it works if it works.
5. I think you can tell, but I don't think this holds.
I just hate to see Rice's theorem interpreted as "nobody can ever know if a program is correct or not". People have been making a ton of progress on knowing if (some) programs are correct, and Rice's theorem never said they can't.
You can do better solving a terrible problem that does exist than solving a sci-fi problem that doesn't exist.
I know it's usually uncouth to compare different charities like this, but that's exactly what Effective Altruism was supposed to be about, and this cause directly competes with curing malaria.
If more than zero AGI technology starts existing, we can re-prioritize. It makes no sense for a field to go from not existing to superhuman performance without anyone noticing.
many many worse situations later we get to:
It never leads anywhere but AGI never happens anyway and it just ends up being welfare-for-future-phobes instead of curing debilitating disease or buying every homeless person in a city a new pair of shoes or whatever.
"we're early" is in fact the best possible scenario, actually it's basically the only positive scenario.
I think the whole discussion thread has a false premise, though. The main argument for working on AGI accident risk is that it's high-probability, not that it's 'low-probability but not super low.'
Roughly: it would be surprising if we didn't reach AGI this century; it would be surprising if AGI exhibited roughly human levels of real-world capability (in spite of potential hardware and software improvements over the brain) rather than shooting past human-par performance; and it would be surprising if it were easy to get robustly good outcomes out of AI systems much smarter than humans, operating in environments too complex for it to be feasible to specify desirable v. undesirable properties of outcomes. "It's really difficult to make reliable predictions about when and how people will make conceptual progress on a tough technological challenge, and there's a lot of uncertainty" doesn't imply "the probability of catastrophic accidents is <10%" or even "the probability of catastrophic accidents is <50%".
Personally, I think there's a greater than 10% chance that we'll see AGI that definitively surpasses human ability within the next 50-100 years (growing a lot higher as we get near/past 100). And given what's coming out this early on with minimal funding, I expect that the work that OpenAI does in the near future will have at least a 10% chance of strongly influencing the direction of that AGI work during the critical turning points. A 1% or more chance of their work mattering a lot is plain old betting-on-a-black-swan territory, not Pascal's Wager.
http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/potential-risks-advance...
"But there are people suffering right now!"
The median expert estimate for when we'll be 10% likely to have human-level AI is ~10 years.
AI risk research didn't receive a penny of funding until the last few years, and is still funded at way lower levels than a lot of things that have dramatically less impact.
In nearly every debate on the topic I've seen (with a few exceptions), the people concerned about AI risk have carefully considered the topic, are aware of the areas where there's still a lot of uncertainty, and make clear and well-hedged arguments that acknowledge that uncertainty; meanwhile the people who scoff at it haven't read any of the arguments (not even in popular book form in Superintelligence), haven't thought about most of the considerations, and have a general air of "assuming things will probably be fine". That's not a straw man, that's just direct observation of the state of the debate. People are doing serious academic work on the topic and have thought about it very deeply; the standard HN middlebrow dismissal is both common and inappropriate.
I first opened the "FHI Winter Intelligence" report: it's an informal survey made to 35 participants of a conference, of which only 8 work on AI at all (let alone be an expert in AGI).
I then looked at the "Kruel interviews", which the site reports as giving a prediction of "2025" for 10% chance, yet reading the interviews it's quite clear that many gave no prediction at all. Also, averaging answers by people ranging from Pat Heyes to PhD students seems suspect.
Is your number based on these reports?
“Concerning the above questions, how would you describe your own expertise?”
(0 = none, 9 = expert)
− Mean 5.85
“Concerning technical work in artificial intelligence, how would you describe your own expertise?”
(0 = none, 9 = expert)
− Mean 6.26
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll.
Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, and many other people who have ACTUALLY worked in AI are the ones who scoff at it. They don't need to make arguments because what do you respond to a young earth creationist?
All of the arguments in Supreintelligence or otherwise are simply that AI will eventually exist. The only argument for that it will come by 2050 is a badly conducted survey of non-experts.
Should we worry about all sorts of existential risk which could arrive in any undetermined time in the future?
The whole project is so absurd, it's hard even to begin to make any counter arguments, because none of the arguments make any sense.
Edit: In particular, the TOP100 subgroup.
Even Stuart Russel, the only CS guy in the AI risk camp, doesn't actually believe that AGI is anywhere near. But he works on it simply because he thinks we can do solve some of the problems like learning from demonstrations instead of (possibly faulty) rewards. That's actually a core AI research topic, not a AI ethics/values/blahblah topic. Oh, and also because this allows him to have a differentiated research program, and thus directs any funding on this niche to him.
"Behold the cult of global warming, who believe that the unclean practices of man will anger the sky gods and bring down furious vengeance. Sad to see so many otherwise-smart climatologists drawn in by this drivel."
"'Antibiotic resistance'? Oh my god, you must be one of those 'biosecurity cultists'. Do you really believe that magical microscopic beings are going to grow strong because we're feeding farm animals the wrong food, and that those same invisible creatures will destroy human civilization? Oh man, do you have chants? What a nutjob."
"Seriously, you're really afraid of 'nuclear weapons'? You really believe that people will somehow cast some magic spell that will turn rocks into fire and destroy entire cities, that this same magic will cause 'mutations' and a 'nuclear winter'? Can't you see that you're part of a doomsday cult?"
Meanwhile, all we have from the AGI doomsday people is sci-fi stories, and actual programs that still can barely distinguish a cat from a mole even after looking at thousands of pictures.
Or maybe if there were any evidence that AI capabilities are increasing, like becoming dominant at Chess or Go, driverless cars, or a slew of recent papers on transfer learning.
Maybe if one of the co-authors of the leading AI textbook, Stuart Russell, voiced concerns, we could count that as evidence.
But you're right, it's better to wait until we know for a fact that someone's built an agent smart enough to end civilization before we commit any resources to the problem.
To me, all these discussions sound like someone who read The Earth to the Moon in 1865 and started working on how to avoid getting humans harmed by the explosion in the barrel.
The AlphaGo situation is an interesting one. Did you have any predictions for when an AI would beat a top pro at Go? I didn't really learn to play until sometime in 2015 but I was amazed AIs still hadn't dominated, they weren't even close. Still I saw that with the single trick of MCTS AIs had improved a lot, and seemed to have some steady improvement year after year for a while. I don't think it would be unreasonable to have predicted that at some point with X amount of computing power an AI could be made to win. Then later that year I saw a paper that reported they were beating all the MCTS bots with a deep learning based one they were making. Immediately it seemed clear that the first person to create a fusion of deep learning + MCTS would create a very strong Go AI bot, but would it beat pros? Maybe with a year of effort by a big company using custom hardware like IBM's Deep Blue or more likely these days GPU clusters, but would it happen soon? Not for a year at least. Turns out it was already happening (AlphaGo guys started in 2014, and Facebook had a project going too) and the Fan Hui matches being announced took a lot of people by surprise. Some because their predictions were ignorant of advances in either or both of MCTS or deep learning and so still predicted many years before computers would win. I was more surprised it was done without anyone hearing about it sooner. Even so it wasn't clear it could beat Lee Sedol a few months later, since there's another big gap between lower pros and higher pros, but it did.
A couple lessons to take from AlphaGo: we don't necessarily know what's actively being worked on around the world nor how far along it is, and problems that seem insurmountable with current computer hardware can suddenly become solved with the right fusion of existing ideas that haven't yet been fused.
Black swans are hard to predict, disagreements over the predictions are totally normal and fine, I think the harder disagreement is just getting people to accept that should nothing specifically hinder it (like an extinction event from an asteroid/disease, or successfully enforced bans on AI research), AGI is inevitable at some point in humanity's future. There probably should be some research done into its safety, and since the prediction problem is so uncertain, there's no pressing reason not to start now or indeed 10 years ago. "You could have used that money for feeding Africans!" is a non-argument.
Ways it is different: obsession over cognitive heuristics and biases, AI is not supernatural and must be human caused, behavior not totally certain (it is "risk" after all), no perks that true believers receive should their hopes and wishes come true that non-believers or apostates don't also receive nor revenge fantasies of such, no requirement for tithing, no Big Alpha divine or otherwise to represent or interpret or decree official approved beliefs (though I'll admit Big Yud can seem close), no anthropomorphizing the AI, and proponents concede evidence not faith must determine beliefs and actions so are willing to look for such.
The army already developed the capability of bombing your house based on your metadata. Once the Pentagon decides to remove humans from the loop, how are these people going to stop them? Hell, even stopping a single DDOS would be awesome.
Until they show they can do this extremely simple thing, I'll remain skeptic.