To be clear, I don’t claim that my counter-example “works on paper”. I don’t know whether it’s in principle possible to create a stable, not omnicidal collective from human level AIs, and I agree that even if it’s possible in principle, maybe the first way we try it might result in disaster. So even if humanity went with the AI Collective plan, and committed not to build more unified superintelligences, I agree that it would be a deeply irresponsible plan that would have a worrying high chance of causing extinction or other very bad outcomes. Maybe I should have made this clearer in the post. On the other hand, all the steps in my argument seem pretty likely to me, so I don’t think one should assign over 90% probability to this plan for A&B failing. If people disagree, I think it would be useful to know which step they disagree with.
I agree my counter-example doesn’t address point (C), I tried to make this clear in my Conclusion section. However, given the literal reading of the bolded statement in the book, and their general framing, I think Nate and Eliezer also think that we don’t have a solution to A&B that’s more than 10% likely to work. If that’s not the case, that would be good to know, and would help to clarify some of the discourse around the book.
I think my crux is ‘how much does David’s plan resemble the plans labs actually plan to pursue?’
I read Nate and Eliezer as baking in ‘if the labs do what they say they plan to do, and update as they will predictably update based on their past behavior and declared beliefs’ to all their language about ‘the current trajectory’ etc etc.
I don’t think this resolves ‘is the tittle literally true’ in a different direction if it’s the only crux, and agree that this should have been spelled out more explicitly in the book (e.g. ‘in detail, why are the authors pessimistic about current safety plans’) from a pure epistemic standpoint (although think it was reasonable to omit from a rhetorical standpoint, given the target audience) and in various Headline Sentences throughout the book, and The Problem.
One generous way to read Nate and Eliezer here is to say ‘current techniques’ is itself intending to bake in ‘plans the labs currently plan to pursue’. I was definitely reading it this way, but think it’s reasonable for others not to. If we read it that way, and take David’s plan above to be sufficiently dissimilar from real lab plans, then I think the title’s literal interpretation goes through.
[your post has updated me from ‘the title is literally true’ to ‘the title is basically reasonable but may not be literally true depending on how broadly we construe various things’, which is a significantly less comfortable position!]
Thanks for the reply.
To be clear, I don’t claim that my counter-example “works on paper”. I don’t know whether it’s in principle possible to create a stable, not omnicidal collective from human level AIs, and I agree that even if it’s possible in principle, maybe the first way we try it might result in disaster. So even if humanity went with the AI Collective plan, and committed not to build more unified superintelligences, I agree that it would be a deeply irresponsible plan that would have a worrying high chance of causing extinction or other very bad outcomes. Maybe I should have made this clearer in the post. On the other hand, all the steps in my argument seem pretty likely to me, so I don’t think one should assign over 90% probability to this plan for A&B failing. If people disagree, I think it would be useful to know which step they disagree with.
I agree my counter-example doesn’t address point (C), I tried to make this clear in my Conclusion section. However, given the literal reading of the bolded statement in the book, and their general framing, I think Nate and Eliezer also think that we don’t have a solution to A&B that’s more than 10% likely to work. If that’s not the case, that would be good to know, and would help to clarify some of the discourse around the book.
I think my crux is ‘how much does David’s plan resemble the plans labs actually plan to pursue?’
I read Nate and Eliezer as baking in ‘if the labs do what they say they plan to do, and update as they will predictably update based on their past behavior and declared beliefs’ to all their language about ‘the current trajectory’ etc etc.
I don’t think this resolves ‘is the tittle literally true’ in a different direction if it’s the only crux, and agree that this should have been spelled out more explicitly in the book (e.g. ‘in detail, why are the authors pessimistic about current safety plans’) from a pure epistemic standpoint (although think it was reasonable to omit from a rhetorical standpoint, given the target audience) and in various Headline Sentences throughout the book, and The Problem.
One generous way to read Nate and Eliezer here is to say ‘current techniques’ is itself intending to bake in ‘plans the labs currently plan to pursue’. I was definitely reading it this way, but think it’s reasonable for others not to. If we read it that way, and take David’s plan above to be sufficiently dissimilar from real lab plans, then I think the title’s literal interpretation goes through.
[your post has updated me from ‘the title is literally true’ to ‘the title is basically reasonable but may not be literally true depending on how broadly we construe various things’, which is a significantly less comfortable position!]