Asking Yudkowsky what we should do about AI is like asking Green Peace what we should do about nuclear power.
Its a perfect thing for rich, extremely privileged people to grab onto as a cause to present thenselves as (and maybe even feel like they are, depending on their capacity for self-delusion) “doing something for humanity” while continuing to ignore the substantive material condition of, as a first order approximation, everyone in the world, and their role in perpetuating it.
Global treaties pretty much all occur with implied threats of violence, and we don't have enough guns to force this across India, China, the middle east, the EU, and the US. Major AI development happens in all of those places.
Yudkowsky's point is that this is the minimum and least difficult thing we need to do. LeCun and others on both sides of the "AI regulation" argument are busy arguing the color of the carpet, while the whole house is on fire.
With possibly one exception (biological weapons, research on which seems to have few positive externalities) they have always been wrong. I did not mean nuclear weapons - we are seeing significant negative societal fallout from failing to invest in nuclear technology. So no, the house is almost certainly not on fire.
Can't think of any such examples, do you have some?
Of the two that come to my mind:
- The only thing the Luddites were yelling about is having their livelihoods pulled out from under them by greedy factory owners who aggressively applied automation instead of trying to soften the blow. They weren't against the technological progress; the infamous destruction of looms wasn't a protest against progress, but a protest against treatment of laboring class.
- The "Limits to Growth" crowd, I don't think they were wrong at all. Their predictions didn't materialize on schedule because we hit a couple unexpected technological miracles, the Haber–Bosch process being the most prominent one, but the underlying reasoning looks sound, and there is no reason to expect we'll keep lucking into more technological miracles.
I remember skimming a summary of the story itself. Sounded like textbook failure mode of reinforcement learning. I was actually saddened to later learn it apparently was just a thought experiment, and not a simulated exercise - for a moment I hoped for a more visceral anecdote about a ML model finding an unusual solution after being trained too hard, rather than my go-to "AI beating a game in record time by finding and exploiting timing bugs" kind of stories.
https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/search?f=tweets&since=2023-05...
First tweet:
> ...can we get confirmation on this being real?
https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/status/1664313290317795330#m
Second tweet, which is a reply:
> Good they tested in sim, bad they didn't see it coming given how much the entire alignment field plus the previous fifty years of SF were warning in advance about this exact case
https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/status/1664357633762140160#m
Third tweet:
> Disconfirmed.
https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/status/1664639807002214401#m
The second tweet does not explicitly say "conditional on this turning out to be real", but given that the immediately preceding tweet was expressing doubt, it is implicit from the context that that is what he meant.
Because he identified the potential risk of superhuman AI 20 years before almost everyone else. Sure, science fiction also identified that risk (as people here seem eager to point out), but he identified it as an actual real-world risk and has been trying to take real-world action on it for 20 years. No matter what else you think about him or the specifics of his ideas, for me that counts for something.
As far as I can tell, all he did was open a forum for people to write fanfic about these earlier ideas.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100304171507/http://lesswrong....
Plenty of people have been beating that drum for years.
If you want AI gone wrong, Magician's Apprentice.
If you want misalignment between what you wanted and what you actually asked for, Greek myths, Midas or Tithonus would both suffice.
Your original made no mention of sci-fi, and made it sound as if no one had imagined a malicious AI before yudkowski
(edit: you can see that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38116456 responds to the scifi part of my comment as well and was posted before yours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38116494 (if my assumption that ids are chronological is correct))
"${my favorite work of fiction} mentioned/alluded to it too!" does not make that work of fiction equivalent to a serious take on the topic in real-world context.
It originally credited Mr. Yudkowsky with being the first person to imagine ai as a serious threat to humans, without mentioning that the trope existed in sci-fi, or mentioning sci-fi at all
The pre-edit text must've sounded funny, as from what I remember of Yudkowsky's writings, he frequently referenced old sci-fi tropes about or related to AI, commenting on their relevance and applicability in the real world.
The whole concept is farcical.
It would be nice if the world worked that way. Then we could diminish any risk just by writing a lot of scifi about it :)
As for real world risk… well, an AI with some kind of personality disorder might not be much of a realistic risk today, but even assuming it never is, there are still plenty of GOFAI that have gone wrong, either killing people directly when their bugs caused them to give patients lethal radiation doses, or nearly triggering WW3 because they weren't programmed to recognise the moon wasn't a Soviet bomber group, or causing economic catastrophes because the investors all reacted to the phrase "won the Nobel prize for economics" as a thought-terminating cliché, or categorising humans as gorillas if they had too much melanin[0], or promoted messages encouraging genocide to groups vulnerable to such messages thanks to a lack of oversight and a language barrier between platform owners and the messages in question.
[0] Asimov's three laws was a plot device, and most of the works famously show how they can go wrong. Genuine question as I've not read them all: did that kind of failure mode ever come up in his fiction?
"Co-Founder of Greenpeace Envisions a Nuclear Future" - https://www.wired.com/2007/11/co-founder-of-greenpeace-envis...