For what it’s worth, I think you’re approaching this in good faith, which I appreciate. But I also think you’re approaching the whole thing from a very, uh, lesswrong.com-y perspective, quietly making assumptions and using concepts that are common here, but not anywhere else.
I won’t reply to every individual point, because there’s lots of them, so I’m choosing the (subjectively) most important ones.
This is the actual topic. It’s the Black Marble thought experiment by Bostrom,
No it’s not, and obviously so. The actual topic is AI safety. It’s not false vacuum, it’s not a black marble, or a marble of any color for that matter. Connor wasn’t talking about the topic, he was building up to the topic using an analogy, a more abstract model of the situation. Which might be fair enough, except you can’t just assert this model. I’m sure saying that AI is a black marble will be accepted as true around here, but it would obviously get pushback in that debate, so you shouldn’t sneak it past quietly.
Again, Connor is simply correct here. This is not a novel argument. It’s Goodhart’s Law.
As I’m pretty sure I said in the post, you can apply this reasoning to pretty much any expression of values or goals. Let’s say your goal is stopping AI progress. If you’re consistent, that means you’d want humanity to go extinct, because then AI would stop. This is the exact argument that Connor was using, it’s so transparent and I’m disappointed that you don’t see it.
Again, this is what Eliezer, Connor, and I think is the obvious thing that would happen once an unaligned superintelligence exists: it pushes its goals to the limit at the expense of all we value. This is not Connor being unfair; this is literally his position.
Great! So state and defend and argue for this position, in this specific case of an unaligned superintelligence! Because the way he did it in a debate, was just by extrapolating whatever views Beff expressed, without care for what they actually are, and showing that when you push them to the extreme, they fall apart. Because obviously they do, because of Goodhart’s Law. But you can’t dismiss a specific philosophy via a rhethorical device that can dismiss any philosophy.
Finally? Connor has been talking about this the whole time. Black marble!
Again, I extremely strongly disagree, but I suspect that’s a mannerism common in rationalist circles, using additional layers of abstraction and pretending they don’t exist. Black marble isn’t the point of the debate. AI safety is. You could put forward the claim that “AI = black marble”. I would lean towards disagreeing, I suspect Beff would strongly disagree, and then there could be a debate about this proposition.
Instead, Connor implicitly assumed the conclusion, and then proceeded to argue the obvious next point that “If we assume that AI black marble will kill us all, then we should not build it”.
Duh. The point of contention isn’t that we should destroy the world. The point of contention is that AI won’t destroy the world.
Connor is correctly making a very legit point here.
He’s not making a point. He’s again assuming the conclusion. You happen to agree with the conclusion, so you don’t have a problem with it.
The conclusion he’s assuming is: “Due to the nature of AI, it will progress so quickly going forward that already at this point we need to slow down or stop, because we won’t have time to do that later.”
My contention with this would be “No, I think AI capabilities will keep growing progressively, and we’ll have plenty of time to stop when that becomes necessary.”
This is the part that would have to be discussed. Not assumed.
That is a very old, very bad argument.
Believe it or not, I actually agree. Sort of. I think it’s not good as an argument, because (for me) it’s not meant to be an argument. It’s meant to be an analogy. I think we shouldn’t worry about overpopulation on Mars because the world we live in will be so vastly different when that becomes an immediate concern. Similarly, I think we shouldn’t (overly) worry about superintelligent AGI killing us, because the state of AI technology will be so vastly different when that becomes an immediate concern.
And of course, whether or not the two situations are comparable would be up to debate. I just used this to state my own position, without going the full length to justify it.
Yes. That would have been good. I could tell Connor was really trying to get there. Beff wasn’t listening though.
I kinda agree here? But the problem is on both sides. Beff was awfully resistant to even innocuous rhethorical devices, which I’d understand if that started late in the debate, but… it took him like idk 10 minutes to even respond to the initial technology ban question.
At the same time Connor was awfully bad at leading the conversation in that direction. Let’s just say he took the scenic route with a debate partner who made it even more scenic.
Besides that (which you didn’t even mention), I cannot imagine what Connor possibly could have done differently to meet your unstated standards, given his position. [...] What do you even want from him?
Great question. Ideally, the debate would go something like this.
B: So my view is that we should accelerate blahblah free energy blah AI blah [note: I’m not actually that familiar with the philosophical context, thermodynamic gods and whatever else; it’s probably mostly bullshit and imo irrelevant]
C: Yea, so my position is if we build AI without blah and before blah, then we will all die.
B: But the risk of dying is low because of X and Y reasons.
C: It’s actually high because of Z, I don’t think X is valid because W.
And keep trying to understand at what point exactly they disagree. Clearly they both want humanity/life/something to proliferate in some capacity, so even establishing that common ground in the beginning would be valuable. They did sorta reach it towards the end, but at that point the whole debate was played out.
Overall, I’m highly disappointed that people seem to agree with you. My problem isn’t even whether Connor is right, it’s how he argued for his positions. Obviously people around here will mostly agree with him. This doesn’t mean that his atrocious performance in the debate will convince anyone else that AI safety is important. It’s just preaching to the choir.
As I’m pretty sure I said in the post, you can apply this reasoning to pretty much any expression of values or goals. Let’s say your goal is stopping AI progress. If you’re consistent, that means you’d want humanity to go extinct, because then AI would stop. This is the exact argument that Connor was using, it’s so transparent and I’m disappointed that you don’t see it.
I see what you’re saying, and yes, fully general counterarguments are suspect, but that is totally not what Connor was doing. OK, sure, instrumental goals are not terminal values. Stopping AI progress is not a terminal value. It’s instrumental, and hopefully temporary. Bostrom himself has said that stopping progress on AI indefinitely would be a tragedy, even if he does see the need for it now. That’s why the argument can’t be turned on Connor.
The difference is, and this is critical, Beff’s stated position (as far as Connor or I can tell) is that acceleration of growth equals the Platonic Good. This is not instrumental for Beff; he’s claiming it’s the terminal value in his philosophy, i.e., the way you tell what “Good” is. See the difference? Connor thinks Beff hasn’t thought this through, and this would be inconsistent with Beff’s moral intuitions if pressed. That’s the Fisher-Price Nick Land comment. Nick bit the bullet and said all humans die is good, actually. Beff wouldn’t even look.
No it’s not, and obviously so. The actual topic is AI safety. It’s not false vacuum, it’s not a black marble, or a marble of any color for that matter.
It is, and Connor said so repeatedly throughout the conversation. AI safety is a subtopic, a special case, of Connor’s main thrust, albeit the most important one. (Machine transcript, emphasis mine.)
The world is not ergodic, actually. It’s actually a very non-ergodic you can die. [...] I’m wondering if you agree with this, forget [A]I for a moment that at some point not saying it’s [A]I just at some point we will develop technology that is so powerful that if you fuck it up, it blows up everybody.
The way I see things is, is that never mind. Like, I know AGI is the topic I talk about the most and whatever comes the most pressing one, but [A]I actually AGI is not the main thing I care about. The main thing I care about is technology in general, and of which AGI is just the most salient example in the current future. You know, 50 if I was born 50 years ago, I would care about nukes [...] And the thing I fundamentally care about is the stewardship of technology. [...] of course things can go bad. It’s like we’re[...] mimetically engineering, genetically engineering, super beings. Like, of course this is dangerous. Like, if we were genetically engineering super tigers, people would be like, hey, that seems maybe a bit, but let let’s talk about this
Beff starts talking before he could finish, so skipping ahead a bit:
The way I see things is, is that our civilization is just not able to handle powerful technology. I just don’t trust our institutions. Our leaders are, you know, distributed systems. Anything with, you know, hyper powerful technology at this point in time, this doesn’t mean we couldn’t get to systems that could handle this technology without catastrophic or at least vastly undesirable side effects. But I don’t think we’re there.
But I want to make clear again, just the point I’m trying to make here. Is that the point I’m trying to make here is, is that predictably, if you have a civilization that doesn’t even try, that just accelerates fast as possible, predictably guaranteed, you’re not going to make it. You’re definitely not going to make it. At some point, you will develop technology that is too powerful to handle if you just have the hands of random people, and if you do it as unsafe as possible, eventually an accident will happen. We almost nuked ourselves twice during the Cold War, where only a single person was between a nuke firing and it not happening. If the same thing happens with, say, superintelligence or some other extremely powerful technology which will happen in your scenario sooner or later. You know, maybe it goes well for 100 years, maybe it goes well for a thousand years, but eventually your civilization is just not going to make it.
For what it’s worth, I think you’re approaching this in good faith, which I appreciate. But I also think you’re approaching the whole thing from a very, uh, lesswrong.com-y perspective, quietly making assumptions and using concepts that are common here, but not anywhere else.
I won’t reply to every individual point, because there’s lots of them, so I’m choosing the (subjectively) most important ones.
No it’s not, and obviously so. The actual topic is AI safety. It’s not false vacuum, it’s not a black marble, or a marble of any color for that matter.
Connor wasn’t talking about the topic, he was building up to the topic using an analogy, a more abstract model of the situation. Which might be fair enough, except you can’t just assert this model. I’m sure saying that AI is a black marble will be accepted as true around here, but it would obviously get pushback in that debate, so you shouldn’t sneak it past quietly.
As I’m pretty sure I said in the post, you can apply this reasoning to pretty much any expression of values or goals. Let’s say your goal is stopping AI progress. If you’re consistent, that means you’d want humanity to go extinct, because then AI would stop. This is the exact argument that Connor was using, it’s so transparent and I’m disappointed that you don’t see it.
Great! So state and defend and argue for this position, in this specific case of an unaligned superintelligence! Because the way he did it in a debate, was just by extrapolating whatever views Beff expressed, without care for what they actually are, and showing that when you push them to the extreme, they fall apart. Because obviously they do, because of Goodhart’s Law. But you can’t dismiss a specific philosophy via a rhethorical device that can dismiss any philosophy.
Again, I extremely strongly disagree, but I suspect that’s a mannerism common in rationalist circles, using additional layers of abstraction and pretending they don’t exist. Black marble isn’t the point of the debate. AI safety is. You could put forward the claim that “AI = black marble”. I would lean towards disagreeing, I suspect Beff would strongly disagree, and then there could be a debate about this proposition.
Instead, Connor implicitly assumed the conclusion, and then proceeded to argue the obvious next point that “If we assume that
AIblack marble will kill us all, then we should not build it”.Duh. The point of contention isn’t that we should destroy the world. The point of contention is that AI won’t destroy the world.
He’s not making a point. He’s again assuming the conclusion. You happen to agree with the conclusion, so you don’t have a problem with it.
The conclusion he’s assuming is: “Due to the nature of AI, it will progress so quickly going forward that already at this point we need to slow down or stop, because we won’t have time to do that later.”
My contention with this would be “No, I think AI capabilities will keep growing progressively, and we’ll have plenty of time to stop when that becomes necessary.”
This is the part that would have to be discussed. Not assumed.
Believe it or not, I actually agree. Sort of. I think it’s not good as an argument, because (for me) it’s not meant to be an argument. It’s meant to be an analogy. I think we shouldn’t worry about overpopulation on Mars because the world we live in will be so vastly different when that becomes an immediate concern. Similarly, I think we shouldn’t (overly) worry about superintelligent AGI killing us, because the state of AI technology will be so vastly different when that becomes an immediate concern.
And of course, whether or not the two situations are comparable would be up to debate. I just used this to state my own position, without going the full length to justify it.
I kinda agree here? But the problem is on both sides. Beff was awfully resistant to even innocuous rhethorical devices, which I’d understand if that started late in the debate, but… it took him like idk 10 minutes to even respond to the initial technology ban question.
At the same time Connor was awfully bad at leading the conversation in that direction. Let’s just say he took the scenic route with a debate partner who made it even more scenic.
Great question. Ideally, the debate would go something like this.
B: So my view is that we should accelerate blahblah free energy blah AI blah [note: I’m not actually that familiar with the philosophical context, thermodynamic gods and whatever else; it’s probably mostly bullshit and imo irrelevant]
C: Yea, so my position is if we build AI without blah and before blah, then we will all die.
B: But the risk of dying is low because of X and Y reasons.
C: It’s actually high because of Z, I don’t think X is valid because W.
And keep trying to understand at what point exactly they disagree. Clearly they both want humanity/life/something to proliferate in some capacity, so even establishing that common ground in the beginning would be valuable. They did sorta reach it towards the end, but at that point the whole debate was played out.
Overall, I’m highly disappointed that people seem to agree with you. My problem isn’t even whether Connor is right, it’s how he argued for his positions. Obviously people around here will mostly agree with him. This doesn’t mean that his atrocious performance in the debate will convince anyone else that AI safety is important. It’s just preaching to the choir.
I see what you’re saying, and yes, fully general counterarguments are suspect, but that is totally not what Connor was doing. OK, sure, instrumental goals are not terminal values. Stopping AI progress is not a terminal value. It’s instrumental, and hopefully temporary. Bostrom himself has said that stopping progress on AI indefinitely would be a tragedy, even if he does see the need for it now. That’s why the argument can’t be turned on Connor.
The difference is, and this is critical, Beff’s stated position (as far as Connor or I can tell) is that acceleration of growth equals the Platonic Good. This is not instrumental for Beff; he’s claiming it’s the terminal value in his philosophy, i.e., the way you tell what “Good” is. See the difference? Connor thinks Beff hasn’t thought this through, and this would be inconsistent with Beff’s moral intuitions if pressed. That’s the Fisher-Price Nick Land comment. Nick bit the bullet and said all humans die is good, actually. Beff wouldn’t even look.
It is, and Connor said so repeatedly throughout the conversation. AI safety is a subtopic, a special case, of Connor’s main thrust, albeit the most important one. (Machine transcript, emphasis mine.)
Non-ergodicity, not necessarily AI:
Connor explicitly calls out AGI as not his main point:
Beff starts talking before he could finish, so skipping ahead a bit:
This is Connor’s mindset in the whole debate. Backing up a bit:
Also the rolling death comment I mentioned previously. And the comment about crazy wackos.