Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!): The author argues that if today’s AI development methods lead directly to powerful enough AI systems, disaster is likely by default (in the absence of specific countermeasures).
This is because there is good economic reason to have AIs ‘aim’ at certain outcomes—eg. We might want an AI that can accomplish goals such as ‘get me a TV for a great price’. Current methods train AIs to do this via trial and error, but because we ourselves are often misinformed, we can sometimes negatively reinforce truthful behavior and positively reinforce deception that makes it look like things are going well. This can mean AIs learn an unintended aim, which if ambitious enough, is very dangerous. There are also intermediate goals like ‘don’t get turned off’ and ‘control the world’ that are useful for almost any ambitious aim.
Warning signs for this scenario are hard to observe, because of the deception involved. There will likely still be some warning signs, but in a situation with incentives to roll out powerful AI as fast as possible, responses are likely to be inadequate.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The author argues that if today’s AI development methods lead directly to powerful enough AI systems, disaster is likely by default (in the absence of specific countermeasures).
This is because there is good economic reason to have AIs ‘aim’ at certain outcomes—eg. We might want an AI that can accomplish goals such as ‘get me a TV for a great price’. Current methods train AIs to do this via trial and error, but because we ourselves are often misinformed, we can sometimes negatively reinforce truthful behavior and positively reinforce deception that makes it look like things are going well. This can mean AIs learn an unintended aim, which if ambitious enough, is very dangerous. There are also intermediate goals like ‘don’t get turned off’ and ‘control the world’ that are useful for almost any ambitious aim.
Warning signs for this scenario are hard to observe, because of the deception involved. There will likely still be some warning signs, but in a situation with incentives to roll out powerful AI as fast as possible, responses are likely to be inadequate.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Are these summaries from ChatGPT?
Currently it’s all manually, but the ChatGPT summaries are pretty decent, I’m looking into which types of posts it does well.