I agree that a possible downside of talking about capabilities is that people might assume they are uncorrelated and we can choose not to create them. It does seem relatively easy to argue that deception capabilities arise as a side effect of building language models that are useful to humans and good at modeling the world, as we are already seeing with examples of deception / manipulation by Bing etc.
I think the people who think we can avoid building systems that are good at deception often don’t buy the idea of instrumental convergence either (e.g. Yann LeCun), so I’m not sure that arguing for correlated capabilities in terms of intelligence would have an advantage.
I agree that a possible downside of talking about capabilities is that people might assume they are uncorrelated and we can choose not to create them. It does seem relatively easy to argue that deception capabilities arise as a side effect of building language models that are useful to humans and good at modeling the world, as we are already seeing with examples of deception / manipulation by Bing etc.
I think the people who think we can avoid building systems that are good at deception often don’t buy the idea of instrumental convergence either (e.g. Yann LeCun), so I’m not sure that arguing for correlated capabilities in terms of intelligence would have an advantage.