humnrdble

• humnrdble 18 May 2025 16:07 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Any­one Builds It, Every­one Dies

  A German bookseller claims there is a softcover (Taschenbuch) version available for preorder: https://​​www.thalia.de/​​shop/​​home/​​artikeldetails/​​A1075128502

  Is that correct? It does not seem to be available on any US website.

  

• humnrdble 1 Apr 2025 19:19 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: 1a3orn’s comment on: Why do many peo­ple who care about AI Safety not clearly en­dorse PauseAI?

  When you visit the website for PauseAI, you might find some very steep proposals for Pausing AI [...] (I could train one)

  Their website is probably outdated. I read their proposals as “keep the current level of AI, regulate stronger AI”. Banning current LLaMA models seems silly from an x-risk perspective, in hindsight. I think PauseAI is perfectly fine with pausing “too early”, which I personally don’t object to.

  If you look at the kind of claims that PauseAI makes in their risks page

  PauseAI is clearly focused on x-risk. The risks page seems like an attempt to guide the general public from naively-realistic “Present dangers” slowly towards introducing (exotic-sounding) x-risk. You can disagree with that approach, of course. I would disagree that mixing AI Safety and AI Ethics is being “very careless about truth”.

  Thank you for answering my question! I wanted to know what you people think about PauseAI, so this fits well.

  [...] in this respect the discourse around PauseAI seems unexceptionable and rather predictable.

  Yes. I hope we can be better at coordination… I would frame PauseAI as “the reasonable [aspiring] mass-movement”. I like that it is easy to support or join PauseAI even without having an ML PhD. StopAI is an organization more radical than them.

• humnrdble 1 Apr 2025 18:58 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Why do many peo­ple who care about AI Safety not clearly en­dorse PauseAI?

  Thank you for responding!

  A: Yeah. I’m mostly positive about their goal to work towards “building the Pause button”. I think protesting against “relatively responsible companies” makes a lot of sense when these companies seem to use their lobbying power more against AI-Safety-aligned Governance than in favor of it. You’re obviously very aware of the details here.

  B: I asked my question because I’m frustrated with that. Is there a way for AI Safety to coordinate a better reaction?

  C:

  There does not seem to be a legible path to prevent possible existential risks from AI without slowing down its current progress.

  I phrased that a bit sharply, but I find your reply very useful:

  Obviously P(doom | no slowdown) < 1. Many people’s work reduces risk in both slowdown and no-slowdown worlds, and it seems pretty clear to me that most of them shouldn’t switch to working on increasing P(slowdown).^[1]

  These are quite strong claims! I’ll take that as somewhat representative of the community. My attempt at paraphrasing: It’s not (strictly?) necessary to slow down AI to prevent doom. There is a lot of useful AI Safety work going on that is not focused on slowing/​pausing AI. This work is useful even if AGI is coming soon.

  1. ^

     it seems pretty clear to me that most of them shouldn’t switch to working on increasing P(slowdown).

     Saying “PauseAI good” does not take a lot of an AI Safety researcher’s time.

[Question] Why do many peo­ple who care about AI Safety not clearly en­dorse PauseAI?