Unlike destructive technologies, philosophical hurdles are only a problem for aligned AIs. With destructive technologies, both aligned and unaligned AIs (at least the ones who don’t terminally value destruction) would want to coordinate to prevent them and they only have to figure out how. But with philosophical problems, unaligned AIs instead want to exploit them to gain advantages over aligned AIs. For example if aligned AIs have to spend a lot of time to think about how to merge or self-improve safely (due to deferring to slow humans), unaligned AIs won’t want to join some kind of global pact to all wait for the humans to decide, but will instead move forward amongst themselves as quickly as they can. This seems like a crucial disanalogy between destructive technologies and philosophical hurdles.
This comes down to the claim that P(get house in order after AI but before catastrophe | not gotten house in order prior to AI) is at least 1⁄2.
This seems really high. In your Medium article you only argued that (paraphrasing) AI could be as helpful for improving coordination as for creating destructive technology. I don’t see how you get from that to this conclusion.
Unaligned AIs don’t necessarily have efficient idealized values. Waiting for (simulated) humans to decide is analogous to computing a complicated pivotal fact about unaligned AI’s values. It’s not clear that “naturally occurring” unaligned AIs have simpler idealized/extrapolated values than aligned AIs with upload-based value definitions. Some unaligned AIs may actually be on the losing side, recall the encrypted-values AI example.
Unlike destructive technologies, philosophical hurdles are only a problem for aligned AIs. With destructive technologies, both aligned and unaligned AIs (at least the ones who don’t terminally value destruction) would want to coordinate to prevent them and they only have to figure out how. But with philosophical problems, unaligned AIs instead want to exploit them to gain advantages over aligned AIs. For example if aligned AIs have to spend a lot of time to think about how to merge or self-improve safely (due to deferring to slow humans), unaligned AIs won’t want to join some kind of global pact to all wait for the humans to decide, but will instead move forward amongst themselves as quickly as they can. This seems like a crucial disanalogy between destructive technologies and philosophical hurdles.
This seems really high. In your Medium article you only argued that (paraphrasing) AI could be as helpful for improving coordination as for creating destructive technology. I don’t see how you get from that to this conclusion.
Unaligned AIs don’t necessarily have efficient idealized values. Waiting for (simulated) humans to decide is analogous to computing a complicated pivotal fact about unaligned AI’s values. It’s not clear that “naturally occurring” unaligned AIs have simpler idealized/extrapolated values than aligned AIs with upload-based value definitions. Some unaligned AIs may actually be on the losing side, recall the encrypted-values AI example.