Please correct me if I’ve missed something, but this seems to be a fake quote, in both the ‘not literally what he said’ and ‘misrepresentation of what he did say’ senses.
The phrase “worst-case scenario” doesn’t appear in the linked clip, and a quick search of the full YouTube transcript makes me think that he didn’t say it at all.
The real quote is
If something goes wrong, I would say like, somehow it’s that we build legitimate superintelligence, and it doesn’t make the world much better, doesn’t change things as much as it sounds like it should.
and at least in the linked clip, there’s no context indicating this is his “worst-case scenario”; my impression is that he may be presenting it as his highest-probability bad scenario.
If something goes wrong, I would say like, somehow it’s that we build legitimate superintelligence
I think a reasonable interpretation of that sentence in that context is “if anything goes wrong, it might be this” which I do think is colloquially used to bound the downside of some kind of event. Like if I said “if anything goes wrong with this migration, it would be that we have a few minutes of downtime”, I would interpret that to mean “the worst that can happen with this migration is a few minutes of downtime” and I would have egg on my face if we are down for multiple hours, or lose important user data, or something like that.
I do think it’s useful to clarify this is an interpretation, and I think it wouldn’t be totally unreasonable to interpret it a different way, but I do think that is how most people would understand that language, and kind of what it was trying to communicate.
I guess I interpret “worst-case scenario” fairly literally. Obviously there’s always something worse that *could* happen with probability >0, and that doesn’t mean we can never use the phrase; but if, say, I was nervously trying to decide whether to take a trip, and someone reassured me that the “worst-case scenario” was that I’d be bored and uncomfortable for a few days (ignoring the possibility that I could die during the car journey, or get very sick, or...) I would think they were wrong.
Likewise, in your migration example, I’m guessing your colleagues would know that a few minutes’ downtime *isn’t* the worst-case scenario, and if you actually said it was then you would be wrong; it’s far from unheard of for something to unexpectedly break and cause a bigger outage (or data loss, or whatever). When you say “if anything goes wrong with this migration, it would be that we have a few minutes of downtime” you are indicating that you’re confident of avoiding those worse outcomes (just as Altman was projecting confidence that we’ll avoid an AI catastrophe), but I wouldn’t take you to be saying that the probability of something worse is ~0, and I’d be surprised if most others did.
Either way, when reporting on someone’s speech I think it’s pretty important to reserve quotation marks for real quotes. I can’t see any reason to use this phrasing
> Sam Altman says that ‘the worst case scenario’ for superintelligence is ‘the world doesn’t change much.’
unless the intention is to make people believe that Altman actually said that. If it’s meant to be a paraphrase, the sentence loses nothing by simply dropping the quotation marks!
Ah, yeah, definitely. If the phrase “worst case scenario” is in quotes, I would also absolutely expect a direct quote, with Sam Altman having said a sentence with “the worst case scenario” and “the world doesn’t change much” both in it, and nothing else in it that would substantially change the meaning of the sentence.
I hadn’t noticed the first quotes when I responded to you. I now agree this feels quite misleading.
Please correct me if I’ve missed something, but this seems to be a fake quote, in both the ‘not literally what he said’ and ‘misrepresentation of what he did say’ senses.
The phrase “worst-case scenario” doesn’t appear in the linked clip, and a quick search of the full YouTube transcript makes me think that he didn’t say it at all.
The real quote is
and at least in the linked clip, there’s no context indicating this is his “worst-case scenario”; my impression is that he may be presenting it as his highest-probability bad scenario.
I think a reasonable interpretation of that sentence in that context is “if anything goes wrong, it might be this” which I do think is colloquially used to bound the downside of some kind of event. Like if I said “if anything goes wrong with this migration, it would be that we have a few minutes of downtime”, I would interpret that to mean “the worst that can happen with this migration is a few minutes of downtime” and I would have egg on my face if we are down for multiple hours, or lose important user data, or something like that.
I do think it’s useful to clarify this is an interpretation, and I think it wouldn’t be totally unreasonable to interpret it a different way, but I do think that is how most people would understand that language, and kind of what it was trying to communicate.
I guess I interpret “worst-case scenario” fairly literally. Obviously there’s always something worse that *could* happen with probability >0, and that doesn’t mean we can never use the phrase; but if, say, I was nervously trying to decide whether to take a trip, and someone reassured me that the “worst-case scenario” was that I’d be bored and uncomfortable for a few days (ignoring the possibility that I could die during the car journey, or get very sick, or...) I would think they were wrong.
Likewise, in your migration example, I’m guessing your colleagues would know that a few minutes’ downtime *isn’t* the worst-case scenario, and if you actually said it was then you would be wrong; it’s far from unheard of for something to unexpectedly break and cause a bigger outage (or data loss, or whatever). When you say “if anything goes wrong with this migration, it would be that we have a few minutes of downtime” you are indicating that you’re confident of avoiding those worse outcomes (just as Altman was projecting confidence that we’ll avoid an AI catastrophe), but I wouldn’t take you to be saying that the probability of something worse is ~0, and I’d be surprised if most others did.
Either way, when reporting on someone’s speech I think it’s pretty important to reserve quotation marks for real quotes. I can’t see any reason to use this phrasing
> Sam Altman says that ‘the worst case scenario’ for superintelligence is ‘the world doesn’t change much.’
unless the intention is to make people believe that Altman actually said that. If it’s meant to be a paraphrase, the sentence loses nothing by simply dropping the quotation marks!
Ah, yeah, definitely. If the phrase “worst case scenario” is in quotes, I would also absolutely expect a direct quote, with Sam Altman having said a sentence with “the worst case scenario” and “the world doesn’t change much” both in it, and nothing else in it that would substantially change the meaning of the sentence.
I hadn’t noticed the first quotes when I responded to you. I now agree this feels quite misleading.