Some people do have confident beliefs that imply “things will go well”; I disagree there, but I expect some amount of disagreement like that.
… and focused on the many people who don’t have a confident objection to nanotech.
I and others have given lots of clear arguments for why relatively early AGI systems will plausibly be vastly smarter than humans. Eric Drexler has given lots of clear arguments for why nanotechnology is probably fairly easy to build.
None of this constitutes a proof that early AGI systems will be able to solve the inverse protein folding problem, etc., but it should at least raise the scenario to consideration and cause it to be taken seriously, for people who don’t have specific reasons to dismiss the scenario.
I’ll emphasize again this point I made in the OP:
Note that I’m not arguing “an AGI-mediated extinction event is such a big deal that we should make it a top priority even if it’s very unlikely”.
And this one:
My own view is that extreme disaster scenarios are very likely, not just a tail risk to hedge against. I actually expect AGI systems to achieve Drexler-style nanotechnology within anywhere from a few months to a few years of reaching human-level-or-better ability to do science and engineering work. At this point, I’m looking for any hope of us surviving at all, not holding out hope for a “conservative” scheme (sane as that would be).
So I’m not actually calling for much “conservatism” here. “Conservative” would be hedging against 1-in-a-thousand risks (or more remote tail risks of the sort that we routinely take into account when designing bridges or automobiles). I’m calling for people to take seriously their own probabilities insofar as they assign middling-ish probabilities to scenarios (e.g., 1-in-10 rather than 1-in-1000).
Another example would be that in 2018, Paul Christiano said he assigned around 30% probability to hard takeoff. But when I have conversations with others who seem to be taking Paul’s views and running with them, I neither generally see them seriously engaging with hard takeoff as though they think it has a medium-ish probability, nor do I see them say anything about why they disagree with 2018-Paul about the plausibility of hard takeoff.
I don’t think it’s weird that there’s disagreement here, but I do think it’s weird how people are eliding the distinction between “these sci-fi scenarios aren’t that implausible, but they aren’t my mainline prediction” and “these sci-fi scenarios are laughably unlikely and can be dismissed”. I feel like I rarely see pushback that’s even concrete and explicit even to distinguish those two possibilities. (Which probably contributes to cascades of over-updating among people who reasonably expect more stuff to be said about nanotech if it’s not obviously a silly sci-fi scenario.)
To be clear, I very much agree with being careful with technologies that have 10% chance of causing existential catastrophe. But I don’t see how the part of OP about conservatism connects to it. I think it’s more likely that being conservative about impact would generate probabilities much less than 10%. And if anyone says that their probability is 10%, then maybe it’s the case of people only having enough resolution for three kinds of probabilities and they think it’s less than 50%. Or they are already trying to not be very certain and explicitly widen their confidence intervals (maybe after getting probability from someone more confident), but they actually believe in being conservative more than they believe in their stated probability. So then it becomes about why it is at least 10% - why being conservative in that direction is wrong in general or what are your clear arguments and how are we supposed to weight them against “it’s hard to make impact”?
I don’t know what you mean by “conservative about impact”
I mean predicting modest impact for reasons futurist maybe should predict modest impacts (like “existential catastrophes never happened before” or “novel technologies always plateau” or whole cluster of similar heuristics in opposition to “building safety buffer”).
It sounds like you’re saying “being rigorous and circumspect in your predictions will tend to yield probabilities much less than 10%”?
Not necessary “rigorous”—I’m not saying such thinking is definitely correct. I just can’t visualize thought process that arrives at 50% before correction, then applies conservative adjustment, because it’s all crazy, still gets 10% and proceeds to “then it’s fine”. So if survey respondents have higher probabilities and no complicated plan, then I don’t actually believe that opposite-of-engineering-conservatism mindset applies to them. Yes, maybe you mostly said things about not being decision-maker, but then what’s the point of that quote about bridges?
This is why I said in the post:
… and focused on the many people who don’t have a confident objection to nanotech.
I and others have given lots of clear arguments for why relatively early AGI systems will plausibly be vastly smarter than humans. Eric Drexler has given lots of clear arguments for why nanotechnology is probably fairly easy to build.
None of this constitutes a proof that early AGI systems will be able to solve the inverse protein folding problem, etc., but it should at least raise the scenario to consideration and cause it to be taken seriously, for people who don’t have specific reasons to dismiss the scenario.
I’ll emphasize again this point I made in the OP:
And this one:
So I’m not actually calling for much “conservatism” here. “Conservative” would be hedging against 1-in-a-thousand risks (or more remote tail risks of the sort that we routinely take into account when designing bridges or automobiles). I’m calling for people to take seriously their own probabilities insofar as they assign middling-ish probabilities to scenarios (e.g., 1-in-10 rather than 1-in-1000).
Another example would be that in 2018, Paul Christiano said he assigned around 30% probability to hard takeoff. But when I have conversations with others who seem to be taking Paul’s views and running with them, I neither generally see them seriously engaging with hard takeoff as though they think it has a medium-ish probability, nor do I see them say anything about why they disagree with 2018-Paul about the plausibility of hard takeoff.
I don’t think it’s weird that there’s disagreement here, but I do think it’s weird how people are eliding the distinction between “these sci-fi scenarios aren’t that implausible, but they aren’t my mainline prediction” and “these sci-fi scenarios are laughably unlikely and can be dismissed”. I feel like I rarely see pushback that’s even concrete and explicit even to distinguish those two possibilities. (Which probably contributes to cascades of over-updating among people who reasonably expect more stuff to be said about nanotech if it’s not obviously a silly sci-fi scenario.)
To be clear, I very much agree with being careful with technologies that have 10% chance of causing existential catastrophe. But I don’t see how the part of OP about conservatism connects to it. I think it’s more likely that being conservative about impact would generate probabilities much less than 10%. And if anyone says that their probability is 10%, then maybe it’s the case of people only having enough resolution for three kinds of probabilities and they think it’s less than 50%. Or they are already trying to not be very certain and explicitly widen their confidence intervals (maybe after getting probability from someone more confident), but they actually believe in being conservative more than they believe in their stated probability. So then it becomes about why it is at least 10% - why being conservative in that direction is wrong in general or what are your clear arguments and how are we supposed to weight them against “it’s hard to make impact”?
I don’t know what you mean by “conservative about impact”. The OP distinguishes three things:
conservatism in decision-making and engineering: building in safety buffer, erring on the side of caution.
non-conservatism in decision-making and engineering, that at least doesn’t shrug at things like “10% risk of killing all humans”.
non-conservatism that does shrug at medium-probability existential risks.
It separately distinguishes these two things:
forecasting “conservatism”, in the sense of being rigorous and circumspect in your predictions.
forecasting pseudo-conservatism (‘assuming without argument that everything will be normal and familiar indefinitely’).
It sounds like you’re saying “being rigorous and circumspect in your predictions will tend to yield probabilities much less than 10%”? I don’t know why you think that, and I obviously disagree, as do 91+% of the survey respondents in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QvwSr5LsxyDeaPK5s/existential-risk-from-ai-survey-results. See e.g. AGI Ruin for a discussion of why the risk looks super high to me.
I mean predicting modest impact for reasons futurist maybe should predict modest impacts (like “existential catastrophes never happened before” or “novel technologies always plateau” or whole cluster of similar heuristics in opposition to “building safety buffer”).
Not necessary “rigorous”—I’m not saying such thinking is definitely correct. I just can’t visualize thought process that arrives at 50% before correction, then applies conservative adjustment, because it’s all crazy, still gets 10% and proceeds to “then it’s fine”. So if survey respondents have higher probabilities and no complicated plan, then I don’t actually believe that opposite-of-engineering-conservatism mindset applies to them. Yes, maybe you mostly said things about not being decision-maker, but then what’s the point of that quote about bridges?