I would be interested in just talking with some people about “the basic case for AI X-risk”.
I’ve found it quite valuable to go back and forth with people on just going quite slow and without much of any references to long-chained existing explanations, try to explain what the exact mechanisms for AI risk are, and what our current models of the hope and plausibility of various approaches are.
I might be interested in this, depending on what qualifies as “basic”, and what you want to emphasize.
I feel like I’ve been getting into the weeds lately, or watching others get into the weeds, on how various recent alignment and capabilities developments affect what the near future will look like, e.g. how difficult particular known alignment sub-problems are likely to be or what solutions for them might look like, how right various peoples’ past predictions and models were, etc.
And to me, a lot of these results and arguments look mostly irrelevant to the core AI x-risk argument, for which the conclusion is that once you have something actually smarter than humans hanging around, literally everyone drops dead shortly afterwards, unless a lot of things before then have gone right in a complicated way.
(Some of these developments might have big implications for how things are likely to go before we get to the simultaneous-death point, e.g. by affecting the likelihood that we screw up earlier and things go off the rails in some less predictable way.)
But basically everything we’ve recently seen looks like it is about the character of mind-space and the manipulability of minds in the below-human-level region, and this just feels to me like a very interesting distraction most of the time.
In a dialogue, I’d be interested in fleshing out why I think a lot of results about below-human-level minds are likely to be irrelevant, and where we can look for better arguments and intuitions instead. I also wouldn’t mind recapitulating (my view of) the core AI x-risk argument, though I expect I have fewer novel things to say on that, and the non-novel things I’d say are probably already better said elsewhere by others.
I might also also be interested in having a dialogue on this topic with someone else if habryka isn’t interested, though I think it would work better if we’re not starting from too far apart in terms of basic viewpoint.
I might be interested in this, depending on what qualifies as “basic”, and what you want to emphasize.
I feel like I’ve been getting into the weeds lately, or watching others get into the weeds, on how various recent alignment and capabilities developments affect what the near future will look like, e.g. how difficult particular known alignment sub-problems are likely to be or what solutions for them might look like, how right various peoples’ past predictions and models were, etc.
And to me, a lot of these results and arguments look mostly irrelevant to the core AI x-risk argument, for which the conclusion is that once you have something actually smarter than humans hanging around, literally everyone drops dead shortly afterwards, unless a lot of things before then have gone right in a complicated way.
(Some of these developments might have big implications for how things are likely to go before we get to the simultaneous-death point, e.g. by affecting the likelihood that we screw up earlier and things go off the rails in some less predictable way.)
But basically everything we’ve recently seen looks like it is about the character of mind-space and the manipulability of minds in the below-human-level region, and this just feels to me like a very interesting distraction most of the time.
In a dialogue, I’d be interested in fleshing out why I think a lot of results about below-human-level minds are likely to be irrelevant, and where we can look for better arguments and intuitions instead. I also wouldn’t mind recapitulating (my view of) the core AI x-risk argument, though I expect I have fewer novel things to say on that, and the non-novel things I’d say are probably already better said elsewhere by others.
I might also also be interested in having a dialogue on this topic with someone else if habryka isn’t interested, though I think it would work better if we’re not starting from too far apart in terms of basic viewpoint.
This sounds great! I’ll invite you to a dialogue, and then if you can shoot off an opening statement, we can get started.