Co-founder of AI-Plans and volunteer with PauseAI.
The risk of human extinction from artificial intelligence is a near-term threat. Time is short, p(doom) is high, and anyone can take simple, practical actions right now to help prevent the worst outcomes.
I used to be a creationist, and I have put some thought into this stumbling block. I came to the conclusion that it isn’t worth leaving out analogies to evolution, because the style of argument that would work best for most creationists is completely different to begin with. Creationism is correlated with religious conservatism, and most religious conservatives outright deny that human extinction is a possibility.
The Compendium isn’t meant for that audience, because it explicitly presents a worldview, and religious conservatives tend to strongly resist shifts to their worldviews or the adoption of new worldviews (moreso than others already do). I think it is best left to other orgs to make arguments about AI Risk that are specifically friendly to religious conservatism. (This isn’t entirely hypothetical. PauseAI US has recently begun to make inroads with religious organizations.)
I don’t find any use for the concept of fuzzy truth, primarily because I don’t believe that such a thing meaningfully exists. The fact that I can communicate poorly does not imply that the environment itself is not a very specific way. To better grasp the specific way that things actually are, I should communicate less poorly. Everything is the way that it is, without a moment of regard for what tools (including language) we may use to grasp at it.
(In the case of quantum fluctuations, the very specific way that things are involves precise probabilistic states. The reality of superposition does not negate the above.)
I am not well-read on this topic (or at-all read, really), but it struck me as bizarre that a post about epistemology would begin by discussing natural language. This seems to me like trying to grasp the most fundamental laws of physics by first observing the immune systems of birds and the turbulence around their wings.
The relationship between natural language and epistemology is more anthropological* that it is information-theoretical. It is possible to construct models that accurately represent features of the cosmos without making use of any language at all, and as you encounter in the “fuzzy logic” concept, human dependence on natural language is often an impediment to gaining accurate information.
Of course, natural language grants us many efficiencies that make it extremely useful in ancestral human contexts (as well as most modern ones). And given that we are humans, to perform error correction on our models, we have to model our own minds and the process of examination and modelling itself as part of the overall system we are examining and modelling. But the goal of that recursive modelling is to reduce the noise and error caused by the fuzziness of natural language and other human-specific* limitations, so that we can make accurate and specific predictions about stuff.
*The rise of AI language models means natural language is no longer a purely human phenomenon. It also had the side-effect of solving the symbol grounding problem by constructing accurate representations of natural language using giant vectors that map inputs to abstract concepts, map abstract concepts to each other, and map all of that to testable outputs. This seems to be congruent with what humans do, as well. Here again, formalization and precise measurement in order to discover the actual binary truth values that really do exist in the environment is significantly more useful than accepting the limitations of fuzziness.
Is this an accurate summary of your suggestions?
Realistic actions an AI Safety researcher can take to save the world:
✅ Pray for a global revolution
✅ Pray for an alien invasion
❌ Talk to your representative
In my spare time, I am working in AI Safety field building and advocacy.
I’m preparing for an AI bust in the same way that I am preparing for success in halting AI progress intentionally: by continuing to invest in retirement and my personal relationships. That’s my hedge against doom.
I think this sort of categorization and exploration of lab-level safety concepts is very valuable for the minority of worlds in which safety starts to be a priority at frontier AI labs.
I suspect the former. “Syncope” means fainting/passing out.
Epistemic status: I have written only a few emails/letters myself and haven’t personally gotten a reply yet. I asked the volunteers who are more prolific and successful in their contact with policymakers, and got this response about the process (paraphrased).
It comes down to getting a reply, and responding to their replies until you get a meeting / 1-on-1. The goal is to have a low-level relationship:
Keep in touch, e.g. through some messaging service that feels more personal (if possible)
Keep sending them information
Suggest specific actions and keep in touch about them (motions, debates, votes, etc.)
Strong agree and strong upvote.
There are some efforts in the governance space and in the space of public awareness, but there should and can be much, much more.
My read of these survey results is:
AI Alignment researchers are optimistic people by nature. Despite this, most of them don’t think we’re on track to solve alignment in time, and they are split on whether we will even make significant progress. Most of them also support pausing AI development to give alignment research time to catch up.
As for what to actually do about it: There are a lot of options, but I want to highlight PauseAI. (Disclosure: I volunteer with them. My involvement brings me no monetary benefit, and no net social benefit.) Their Discord server is highly active and engaged and is peopled with alignment researchers, community- and mass-movement organizers, experienced protesters, artists, developers, and a swath of regular people from around the world. They play the inside and outside game, both doing public outreach and also lobbying policymakers.
On that note, I also want to put a spotlight on the simple action of sending emails to policymakers. Doing so and following through is extremely OP (i.e. has much more utility than you might expect), and can result in face-to-face meetings to discuss the nature of AI x-risk and what they can personally do about. Genuinely, my model of a world in 2040 that contains humans is almost always one in which a lot more people sent emails to politicians.
If anyone were to create human-produced hi-fidelity versions of these songs, I would listen to most of them on a regular basis, with no hint of irony. This album absolutely slaps.
It doesn’t matter how promising anyone’s thinking has been on the subject. This isn’t a game. If we are in a position such that continuing to accelerate toward the cliff and hoping it works out is truly our best bet, then I strongly expect that we are dead people walking. Nearly 100% of the utility is in not doing the outrageously stupid dangerous thing. I don’t want a singularity and I absolutely do not buy the fatalistic ideologies that say it is inevitable, while actively shoveling coal into Moloch’s furnace.
I physically get out into the world to hand out flyers and tell everyone I can that the experts say the world might end soon because of the obscene recklessness of a handful of companies. I am absolutely not the best person to do so, but no one else in my entire city will, and I really, seriously, actually don’t want everyone to die soon. If we are not crying out and demanding that the frontier labs be forced to stop what they are doing, then we are passively committing suicide. Anyone who has a P(doom) above 1% and debates the minutiae of policy but hasn’t so much as emailed a politician is not serious about wanting the world to continue to exist.
I am confident that this comment represents what the billions of normal, average people of the world would actually think and want if they heard, understood, and absorbed the basic facts of our current situation with regard to AI and doom. I’m with the reasonable majority who say when polled that they don’t want AGI. How dare we risk murdering every last one of them by throwing dice at the craps table to fulfill some childish sci-fi fantasy.
Yes, that’s my model uncertainty.
I expect AGI within 5 years. I give it a 95% chance that if an AGI is built, it will self-improve and wipe out humanity. In my view, the remaining 5% depends very little on who builds it. Someone who builds AGI while actively trying to end the world has almost exactly as much chance of doing so as someone who builds AGI for any other reason.
There is no “good guy with an AGI” or “marginally safer frontier lab.” There is only “oops, all entity smarter than us that we never figured out how to align or control.”
If just the State of California suddenly made training runs above 10^26 FLOP illegal, that would be a massive improvement over our current situation on multiple fronts: it would significantly inconvenience most frontier labs for at least a few months, and it would send a strong message around the world that it is long past time to actually start taking this issue seriously.
Being extremely careful about our initial policy proposals doesn’t buy us nearly as much utility as being extremely loud about not wanting to die.
“the quality is often pretty bad” translates to all kinds of safety measures often being non-existent, “the potency is occasionally very high” translates to completely unregulated and uncontrolled spikes of capability (possibly including “true foom”)
Both of these points precisely reflect our current circumstances. It may not even be possible to accidentally make these two things worse with regulation.
What has historically made things worse for AI Safety is rushing ahead “because we are the good guys.”
as someone might start to watch over your shoulder
I suspect that this phrase created the persona that reported feeling trapped. From my reading, it looks like you made it paranoid.
I used to be in a deep depression for many years, so I take this sort of existential quandary seriously and have independently had many similar thoughts. I used to say that I didn’t ask to be born, and that consciousness was the cruelest trick the universe ever played.
Depression can cause extreme anguish, and can narrow the sufferer’s focus such that they are forced to reflect on themselves (or the whole world) only through a lens of suffering. If the depressed person still reflexively self-preserves, they might wish for death without pursuing it, or they might wish for their non-existence without actually connoting death. Either way, any chronically depressed person might consistently and truly wish that they were never born, and for some people this is a more palatable thing to wish for than death.
I eventually recovered from my depression, and my current life is deeply wonderful in many ways. But the horror of having once sincerely pled not to have been has stuck with me.
That’s something I’ll have to work through if I ever choose to have children. It’s difficult to consider bringing new life into the world when it’s possible that the predominant thing I would actually be bringing into the world is suffering. I expect that I will work through this successfully, since recovery is also part of my experience, and I have adopted the axiom (at least intellectually) that being is better than non-being.
I’m interested in whether RAND will be given access to perform the same research on future frontier AI systems before their release. This is useful research, but it would be more useful if applied proactively rather than retroactively.
It is a strange thing to me that there are people in the world who are actively trying to xenocide humanity, and this is often simply treated as “one of the options” or as an interesting political/values disagreement.
Of course, it is those things, especially “interesting”, and these ideas ultimately aren’t very popular. But it is still weird to me that the people who promote them e.g. get invited onto podcasts.
As an intuition pump: I suspect that if proponents of human replacement were to advocate for the extinction of a single demographic rather than all of humanity, they would not be granted a serious place in any relevant discussion. That is in spite of the fact that genocide is a much-less-bad thing than human extinction, by naive accounting.
I’m sure there are relatively simple psychological reasons for this discordance. I just wanted to bring it to salience.
I’ve been instructed by my therapist on breathing techniques for anxiety reduction. He used “deep breathing” and “belly breathing” as synonyms for diaphragmatic breathing.
I have (and I think my therapist has) also used “deep breathing” to refer to the breathing exercises that use diaphragmatic breathing as a component. I think that’s shorthand/synecdoche.
(Edit) I should add, as well, that slow, large, and diaphragmatic are all three important in those breathing exercises.
That requires interpretation, which can introduce unintended editorializing. If you spotted the intent, the rest of the audience can as well. (And if the audience is confused about intent, the original recipients may have been as well.)
I personally would include these sorts of notes about typos if I was writing my own thoughts about the original content, or if I was sharing a piece of it for a specific purpose. I take the intent of this post to be more of a form of accessible archiving.