I think you gamed it a bit by packing a lot into each point (and to someone who doesn’t know the arguments already — or even someone who does — the groupings feel pretty unnatural).
Yeah each core point has some number of subpoints. I’m curious if you think I should instead have instantiated each point with just the strongest, or easiest to explain, subpoint (especially when it was branching). Eg the current structure looks like
1: The world’s largest tech companies are building intelligences that will become better than humans at almost all economically and militarily relevant tasks
1.1 (implicit) building intelligences that will become better than humans at almost all economically relevant tasks
1.2 (implicit) building intelligences that will become better than humans at almost all militarily relevant tasks
I can imagine a version that picks one side of the tree and just focuses on economic tasks, or military tasks.
2: Many of these intelligences will be goal-seeking minds acting in the real world, rather than just impressive pattern-matchers
2.1 goal-seeking minds (“agentic” will be ML parlance, but I was deliberately trying to avoid that jargon)
2.2 acting in the real world.
2.3 existing efforts to make things goal-seeking
2.4 the trend
2.5 selection pressure to make them this way.
This has 5 subpoints (really 6 since it’s a 2 x 3 tuple).
Maybe the “true” simplest argument will just pick one branch, like selection pressures for goal-seeking minds.
And so forth.
My current guess is the true minimalist argument, at least presented at the current level of quality/given my own writing skill, will be substantially less persuasive, but this is only weakly held. I wish I had better intuitions for this type of thing!
The article’s now out! Comments appreciated
https://linch.substack.com/p/simplest-case-ai-catastrophe
I think you gamed it a bit by packing a lot into each point (and to someone who doesn’t know the arguments already — or even someone who does — the groupings feel pretty unnatural).
Yeah each core point has some number of subpoints. I’m curious if you think I should instead have instantiated each point with just the strongest, or easiest to explain, subpoint (especially when it was branching). Eg the current structure looks like
1: The world’s largest tech companies are building intelligences that will become better than humans at almost all economically and militarily relevant tasks
1.1 (implicit) building intelligences that will become better than humans at almost all economically relevant tasks
1.2 (implicit) building intelligences that will become better than humans at almost all militarily relevant tasks
I can imagine a version that picks one side of the tree and just focuses on economic tasks, or military tasks.
2: Many of these intelligences will be goal-seeking minds acting in the real world, rather than just impressive pattern-matchers
2.1 goal-seeking minds (“agentic” will be ML parlance, but I was deliberately trying to avoid that jargon)
2.2 acting in the real world.
2.3 existing efforts to make things goal-seeking
2.4 the trend
2.5 selection pressure to make them this way.
This has 5 subpoints (really 6 since it’s a 2 x 3 tuple).
Maybe the “true” simplest argument will just pick one branch, like selection pressures for goal-seeking minds.
And so forth.
My current guess is the true minimalist argument, at least presented at the current level of quality/given my own writing skill, will be substantially less persuasive, but this is only weakly held. I wish I had better intuitions for this type of thing!