I think these judgements would benefit from more concreteness: that rather than proposing a dichotomy of “capabilities research” (them, Bad) and “alignment research” (us, Good), you could be more specific about what kinds of work you want to see more and less of.
I agree that (say) Carmack and Sutton are doing a bad thing by declaring a goal to “build AGI” while dismissing the reasons that this is incredibly dangerous. But the thing that makes infohazard concerns so fraught is that there’s a lot of work that potentially affects our civilization’s trajectory into the machine intelligence transition in complicated ways, which makes it hard to draw a boundary around “trusted alignment researchers” in a principled and not self-serving way that doesn’t collapse into “science and technology is bad”.
We can agree that OpenAI as originally conceived was a bad idea. What about the people working on music generation? That’s unambiguously “capabilities”, but it’s also not particularly optimized at ending the world that way “AGI for AGI’s sake” projects are. If that’s still bad even though music generation isn’t going to end the world (because it’s still directing attention and money into AI, increasing the incentive to build GPUs, &c.), where do you draw the line? Some of the researchers I cited in my most recent post are working on “build[ing] better models of primate visual cognition”. Is that wrong? Should Judea Pearl not have published? Turing? Charles Babbage?
In asking these obnoxious questions, I’m not trying to make a reductio ad absurdum of caring about risk, or proposing an infinitely slippery slope where our only choices are between max accelerationism and a destroy-all-computers Butlerian Jihad. I just think it’s important to notice that “Stop thinking about AI” kind of does amount to a Butlerian Jihad (and that publishing and thinking are not unrelated)?
I think these judgements would benefit from more concreteness: that rather than proposing a dichotomy of “capabilities research” (them, Bad) and “alignment research” (us, Good), you could be more specific about what kinds of work you want to see more and less of.
I agree that (say) Carmack and Sutton are doing a bad thing by declaring a goal to “build AGI” while dismissing the reasons that this is incredibly dangerous. But the thing that makes infohazard concerns so fraught is that there’s a lot of work that potentially affects our civilization’s trajectory into the machine intelligence transition in complicated ways, which makes it hard to draw a boundary around “trusted alignment researchers” in a principled and not self-serving way that doesn’t collapse into “science and technology is bad”.
We can agree that OpenAI as originally conceived was a bad idea. What about the people working on music generation? That’s unambiguously “capabilities”, but it’s also not particularly optimized at ending the world that way “AGI for AGI’s sake” projects are. If that’s still bad even though music generation isn’t going to end the world (because it’s still directing attention and money into AI, increasing the incentive to build GPUs, &c.), where do you draw the line? Some of the researchers I cited in my most recent post are working on “build[ing] better models of primate visual cognition”. Is that wrong? Should Judea Pearl not have published? Turing? Charles Babbage?
In asking these obnoxious questions, I’m not trying to make a reductio ad absurdum of caring about risk, or proposing an infinitely slippery slope where our only choices are between max accelerationism and a destroy-all-computers Butlerian Jihad. I just think it’s important to notice that “Stop thinking about AI” kind of does amount to a Butlerian Jihad (and that publishing and thinking are not unrelated)?