My understanding is that a crucial aspect of Eliezer’s worldview is that we’d be fucked even if we had a 10-year pause where we had access to AGI that we could use to work on developing and aligning superintelligence. I disagree.
Given the tradeoffs of extinction and the entire future, the potential for FOOM and/or an irreversible singleton takeover, and the shocking dearth of a scientific understanding of intelligence and agentic behavior, I think a 1,000-year investment into researching AI alignment with very carefully increasing capability levels would be a totally natural trade-off to make. While there are substantive differences between 3 vs 10 years, feeling non-panicked or remotely satisfied with either of them seems to me quite unwise.
(This argues for a slightly weaker position than “10 years certainly cannot be survived”, but it gets one to a pretty similar attitude.)
You might think it would be best for humanity to do a 1,000 year investment, but nevertheless to think that in terms of tractability aiming for something like a 10-year pause is by far the best option available. The value of such a 10-year pause seems pretty sensitive to the success probability of such a pause, so I wouldn’t describe this as “quibbling”.
(I edited out the word ‘quibbling’ within a few mins of writing my comment, before seeing your reply.)
It is an extremely high-pressure scenario, where a single mistake mistake can cause extinction. It is perhaps analogous to a startup in stealth mode that planned to have 1-3 years to build a product, suddenly having a NYT article cover them and force them into launching right now; or being told in the first weeks of an otherwise excellent romantic relationship that you suddenly need to decide whether to get married and have children, or break up. In both cases the difference of a few weeks is not really a big difference, overall you’re still in an undesirable and unnecessarily high-pressure situation. Similarly, 10 years is better than 3 years, but from the perspective of thinking one might have enough time to be confident of getting it right (e.g. 1,000 years), they’re both incredible pressure and very early, panic / extreme stress is a natural response; you’re in a terrible crisis and don’t have any guarantees of being able to get an acceptable outcome.
I am responding to something of a missing mood about the crisis and lack of guarantee of any good outcome. For instance, in many 10-year worlds, we have no hope and are already dead yet walking, and the few that do require extremely high-performance in lots and lots of areas to have a shot, and that reads to me not to be found in the parts of this discussion that hold that it’s plausible humanity will survive in the world histories where we have 10 years until human-superior AGI is built.
Given the tradeoffs of extinction and the entire future, the potential for FOOM and/or an irreversible singleton takeover, and the shocking dearth of a scientific understanding of intelligence and agentic behavior, I think a 1,000-year investment into researching AI alignment with very carefully increasing capability levels would be a totally natural trade-off to make. While there are substantive differences between 3 vs 10 years, feeling non-panicked or remotely satisfied with either of them seems to me quite unwise.
(This argues for a slightly weaker position than “10 years certainly cannot be survived”, but it gets one to a pretty similar attitude.)
You might think it would be best for humanity to do a 1,000 year investment, but nevertheless to think that in terms of tractability aiming for something like a 10-year pause is by far the best option available. The value of such a 10-year pause seems pretty sensitive to the success probability of such a pause, so I wouldn’t describe this as “quibbling”.
(I edited out the word ‘quibbling’ within a few mins of writing my comment, before seeing your reply.)
It is an extremely high-pressure scenario, where a single mistake mistake can cause extinction. It is perhaps analogous to a startup in stealth mode that planned to have 1-3 years to build a product, suddenly having a NYT article cover them and force them into launching right now; or being told in the first weeks of an otherwise excellent romantic relationship that you suddenly need to decide whether to get married and have children, or break up. In both cases the difference of a few weeks is not really a big difference, overall you’re still in an undesirable and unnecessarily high-pressure situation. Similarly, 10 years is better than 3 years, but from the perspective of thinking one might have enough time to be confident of getting it right (e.g. 1,000 years), they’re both incredible pressure and very early, panic / extreme stress is a natural response; you’re in a terrible crisis and don’t have any guarantees of being able to get an acceptable outcome.
I am responding to something of a missing mood about the crisis and lack of guarantee of any good outcome. For instance, in many 10-year worlds, we have no hope and are already dead yet walking, and the few that do require extremely high-performance in lots and lots of areas to have a shot, and that reads to me not to be found in the parts of this discussion that hold that it’s plausible humanity will survive in the world histories where we have 10 years until human-superior AGI is built.