In that case, having an argument that sounds implausible at first, but makes sense when you dig into the logic is way worse than having an argument that sounds plausible in the first place.
I agree with this. A little bit of appeal to “greed” or “recklessness” or “fear of getting left behind” can be useful as well, since it provides a layer of telos to the whole thing. “Society undone by greed and fear” feels more natural “Society undone because the universe was just really mean with how hard AI alignment was.”
Likewise, putting human agency as the first thing in the story helps ground people. A lot of people have this belief (alief?) that humans have a magic first-mover spark which nothing else can produce (except sometimes random natural disasters I guess?).
Putting these together gets you “Humans are excitable and afraid, so of course we’d put AI in charge of a bunch of industrial and military processes.”
There’s also a framing jump which goes from “AI is a tool” to “AI kills us” which I’m currently working on. I want to pump an intuition that “tools” very occasionally let you push on parts of the world that you don’t understand, and that this is a really common way to get yourself killed. In this case, deep learning is a “tool” which pushes on intelligence itself, which we don’t understand at all. Loads of people have an intuition that “don’t play with things you don’t understand” is good advice. This is more aimed at certain middle-sophistication individuals (e.g. Bluesky types and TypeScript web devs) who are particularly resistant to existing ideas.
I think convincing someone in a five-minute conversation is actually a ridiculous pipe-dream scenario we will not get for most people.
Hmm. I don’t think it’s “ridiculous” because I don’t have a solid upper-bound on how persuasive it’s possible for a person to be. I’d rather not rule out things like this, and just keep working on better pedagogy until it is done.
I was referring to the fact that we won’t even get the opportunity to deliver five minutes of information to most people, not that it couldn’t be convincing if you had that opportunity.
I think a lot of what you say makes sense. Framing AI as human folly seems more believable.
I agree with this. A little bit of appeal to “greed” or “recklessness” or “fear of getting left behind” can be useful as well, since it provides a layer of telos to the whole thing. “Society undone by greed and fear” feels more natural “Society undone because the universe was just really mean with how hard AI alignment was.”
Likewise, putting human agency as the first thing in the story helps ground people. A lot of people have this belief (alief?) that humans have a magic first-mover spark which nothing else can produce (except sometimes random natural disasters I guess?).
Putting these together gets you “Humans are excitable and afraid, so of course we’d put AI in charge of a bunch of industrial and military processes.”
There’s also a framing jump which goes from “AI is a tool” to “AI kills us” which I’m currently working on. I want to pump an intuition that “tools” very occasionally let you push on parts of the world that you don’t understand, and that this is a really common way to get yourself killed. In this case, deep learning is a “tool” which pushes on intelligence itself, which we don’t understand at all. Loads of people have an intuition that “don’t play with things you don’t understand” is good advice. This is more aimed at certain middle-sophistication individuals (e.g. Bluesky types and TypeScript web devs) who are particularly resistant to existing ideas.
Hmm. I don’t think it’s “ridiculous” because I don’t have a solid upper-bound on how persuasive it’s possible for a person to be. I’d rather not rule out things like this, and just keep working on better pedagogy until it is done.
I was referring to the fact that we won’t even get the opportunity to deliver five minutes of information to most people, not that it couldn’t be convincing if you had that opportunity.
I think a lot of what you say makes sense. Framing AI as human folly seems more believable.