Your prediction for 2025 sounds alarmingly like… right now.
nem
Karma: 79
Well for my own sanity, I am going to give money anyway. If there’s really no differentiation between options, I’ll just keep giving to Miri.
I Believe we are in a Hardware Overhang
I am not an AI researcher, but it seems analogous to the acceptance of mortality for most people. Throughout history, almost everyone has had to live with the knowledge that they will inevitably die, perhaps suddenly. Many methods of coping have been utilized, but at the end of the day it seems like something that human psychology is just… equipped to handle. x-risk is much worse than personal mortality, but you know, failure to multiply and all that.
Is this game playable by people only lightly familiar with the topic of AI safety? In other words, can I use this game to introduce friends to the ideas? Can I use it to convince skeptical friends? Or would it be too jargony/reliant on prior knowledge?
Edit: The play online option is non-functional, and I can’t see any examples of a real hand, so it’s hard for me to get a sense of what this game is like.
For this Petrov day, I’m also interested in how many people will have access to the button as a function of time. How many users have 1000+ Karma?
Is there anywhere to see the history of lesswrong Petrov day? I’d be interested in whether we’ve ever succeeded before.
Also, I think most people know that the real cost of 1500 people not being able to check lesswrong for 12 hours is essentially 0. It may even be net positive to have a forced hiatus. Perhaps that’s just a failure to multiply on my part. Anyway, I view this exercise as purely symbolic.
Interestingly, Jane will probably end up doing the exact same thing as Susan, only on the timescale of years instead of days. She kept those years in prison. If, in one iteration, the years immediately following prison were of some profound importance, she would probably keep those too. In the absence of a solar flair, she would find herself a 70 year old woman whose memories consisted of only the most important selected years from the 10s of thousands that make up her full history.
Thank you for the story.
Thank you for the response. I do think there should be at least some emphasis on boxing. I mean, hell. If we just give AIs unrestricted access to the web, they don’t even need to be general to wreak havoc. That’s how you end up with a smart virus, if not worse.
Then another basic question? Why have we given up? I know that an ASI will almost definitely be uncontainable. But that does not mean that it can’t be hindered significantly given an asymmetric enough playing field.
Stockfish would beat me 100 times in a row, even playing without a queen. But take away its rooks as well, and I can usually beat it. Easy avenues to escaping the box might be the difference between having a fire alarm and not having one.
So in your opinion, is an AI with access to GET requests essentially already out of the box?
I just thought of a question. If there is a boxed AI that has access to the internet, but only through Get requests, it might still communicate with the outside world through network traffic patterns. I’m reading a book right now where the AI overloads pages on dictionary websites to recruit programmers under the guise of it being a technical recruiting challenge.
My question: should we raise awareness of this escape avenue so that if, in the year 2030, a mid level web dev gets a mysterious message through web traffic, they know enough to be suspicious?
You captured this in your post, but for me it really comes down to people dismissing existential fears as scifi. It’s not more complicated than “Oh you’ve watched one too many Terminator movies”. What we need is for several well-respected smart figureheads to say “Hey, this sounds crazy, but it really is the biggest threat of our time. Bigger than climate change, bigger than biodiversity loss. We really might all die if we get this wrong. And it really might happen in our lifetimes.”
If I could appeal to authority when explaining this to friends, it would go over much better.
I am pretty concerned about alignment. Not SO concerned as to switch careers and dive into it entirely, but concerned enough to talk to friends and make occasional donations. With Eliezer’s pessimistic attitude, is MIRI still the best organization to funnel resources towards, if for instance, I was to make a monthly donation?
Not that I don’t think pessimism is necessarily bad; I just want to maximize the effectiveness of my altruism.
This could be the case. However, my instinct is that human intelligence is only incrementally higher than other animals. Sure, we crossed a threshold that allowed us to accomplish great things (language, culture, specialization), but I would honestly be shocked if you told me that evolution was incapable of producing another similarly intelligent species if it started from the baseline intelligence of, say wolves, or crows. If there is a “1-in-a-quadrillion chance” somewhere in our history, I expect that filter to be much further back than the recent evolution of hominids.
I don’t have research to back this up. Just explaining why I personally wouldn’t push timelines back significantly based on the anthropic principle.
Another way this could potentially backfire. $1,000,000 is a lot of money for 3 months. A lump sum like this will cause at least some of the researchers to A) Retire, B) Take a long hiatus/sabbatical, or C) Be less motivated by future financial incentives.
If 5 researchers decide to take a sabbatical, then whatever. If 150 of them do? Maybe that’s a bigger deal. You’re telling me you wouldn’t consider it if 5-10 times your annual salary was dropped in your lap?
A stitch in time saves nine. As in, if you use a stitch to fix a small tear in your shirt now, you won’t have to use more stitches to fix a bigger tear later.
and
The land of the free and the home of the brave. Last line of the US National Anthem.
I am not an AI safety researcher; more of a terrified spectator monitoring LessWrong for updates about the existential risk of unnaligned AGI (thanks a bunch HPMOR). That said, if it was a year away, I would jump into action. My initial thought would be to put almost all my net worth into a public awareness campaign. If we can cause enough trepidation in the general public, it’s possible we could delay the emergence of AGI by a few weeks or months. My goal is not to solve alignment, rather to prod AI researchers to implement basic safety concerns that might reduce S-Risk by 1 or 2 percent. Then… think deeply about whether I want to be alive for the most Interesting Time in human history.
I am very excited that the Frostwing Snipper did so well. I hope that one of them migrated and lived a good life in the Grassland. Thanks for putting this together Isusr. It’s been a lot of fun.
I wonder if the Tundra would have been more viable with more algae-eaters.
I did not know about HPPD, although I’ve experienced it. After a bad trip (second time I’d ever experimented), I experienced minor hallucinogenic experiences for years. They were very minor (usually visuals when my eyes were closed) and would not have been unpleasant, except that I had the association with the bad trip.
I remember having so much regret on that trip. Almost everything in life, you have some level of control over. You can almost always change your perspective on things, or directly change your situation. On this trip though, I realized I messed with the ONE thing that I am always stuck with: my own point of view. I couldn’t BELIEVE I had messed with that so flippantly.
That said, the first time I tried hallucinogens, it was a very pleasant and eye-opening experience. The point is not to take it lightly, and not to assume there are no risks.
As another anecdote, I had a friend when I was 17 who sounds very much like you, John. He knew more about drugs then than I ever have during my life. His knowledge of what was ‘safe’ and what wasn’t didn’t stop his drug usage from turning into a huge problem for him. I am certain that he was better off than someone thoughtlessly snorting coke, but he was also certainly worse off than he would have been had he never been near any sort of substance. If nothing else, it damaged some of his relationships, and removed support beams that he needed when other things inevitably went wrong. It turns out, damaging your reputation actually can be bad for you.
If you decide to experiment with drugs (and I am not recommending that, just saying if), my advice is two-fold:
1) Don’t be in a hurry. You can absolutely afford to wait a few years (or decades), and it won’t negatively impact you or your drug experience. Make sure you are in the right headspace.
2) Don’t let it become a major aspect of your life. Having a couple trips to see what it’s like is completely different from having a bi-monthly journey and making it your personality to try as many different mind-benders as possible. I’ve seen that go very badly.