I went into IABIED trying to take on the mindset of a layperson (hard of course!) and actually came away thinking it did a really great job. Of course, as you say, time will tell.
Some of your complaints of the book seem to stem from the fact that you are “For Y” and Y&S are “Not X”. If you believed as strongly as they do in “Not X”, do you think some of the decisions in the book would make more sense?
I thought the length of the book was great for people new to the topic. Readers will likely have counterarguments while reading the book. But if you even try to address those a little, the book would quickly grow beyond just 20% longer. The decisions on what to include made sense to me.
The scenario in part 2 does a great job responding to the common question “but how exactly will AI take over and kill us all?”. I feel very confident most readers would much much rather have a clear story than extrapolations. It’s true that stories of how AI will kill us carry lots of risk of hole-poking and discarding. But I actually think they handled that very well by adding plenty of clear caveats before, during, and after the scenario.
I think their proposal, aside from the 8 GPUs (I would choose a higher threshold), makes sense as is. They admit their lack of knowledge on how to implement it IIRC. I think that’s completely fine. I’m glad they don’t go into detail about what they don’t know. The may point of the book is right there in the title. What logically follows from the title is that you need international agreements similar to how we’ve handled nuclear war. I assume they hope others who read the book with more knowledge on how to get to such a place, will get motivated to act.
This book is the first of Yudkowsky I actually managed to finish. When I heard Shakeel talk about torturous language and others complaining about the parables, I was worried (because those are exactly the reasons I couldn’t finish his other works). But I ended up really surprised by how much I enjoyed the writing and all of the parables. And funnily enough I thought the leaded gasoline one was one of the most boring ones. But perhaps I was so pleasantly surprised because of the low expectations I had going in. And I can definitely imagine how they might still be too sciencey/sci-fi for laypeople. Good point!
Haven’t read your book yet, so I can’t say how it compares!
I went into IABIED trying to take on the mindset of a layperson (hard of course!) and actually came away thinking it did a really great job. Of course, as you say, time will tell.
Some of your complaints of the book seem to stem from the fact that you are “For Y” and Y&S are “Not X”. If you believed as strongly as they do in “Not X”, do you think some of the decisions in the book would make more sense?
I thought the length of the book was great for people new to the topic. Readers will likely have counterarguments while reading the book. But if you even try to address those a little, the book would quickly grow beyond just 20% longer. The decisions on what to include made sense to me.
The scenario in part 2 does a great job responding to the common question “but how exactly will AI take over and kill us all?”. I feel very confident most readers would much much rather have a clear story than extrapolations. It’s true that stories of how AI will kill us carry lots of risk of hole-poking and discarding. But I actually think they handled that very well by adding plenty of clear caveats before, during, and after the scenario.
I think their proposal, aside from the 8 GPUs (I would choose a higher threshold), makes sense as is. They admit their lack of knowledge on how to implement it IIRC. I think that’s completely fine. I’m glad they don’t go into detail about what they don’t know. The may point of the book is right there in the title. What logically follows from the title is that you need international agreements similar to how we’ve handled nuclear war. I assume they hope others who read the book with more knowledge on how to get to such a place, will get motivated to act.
This book is the first of Yudkowsky I actually managed to finish. When I heard Shakeel talk about torturous language and others complaining about the parables, I was worried (because those are exactly the reasons I couldn’t finish his other works). But I ended up really surprised by how much I enjoyed the writing and all of the parables. And funnily enough I thought the leaded gasoline one was one of the most boring ones. But perhaps I was so pleasantly surprised because of the low expectations I had going in. And I can definitely imagine how they might still be too sciencey/sci-fi for laypeople. Good point!
Haven’t read your book yet, so I can’t say how it compares!