Nikita Sokolsky

Karma: 169

Nikita Sokolsky 28 Apr 2024 23:52 UTC
1 point
0
on: ACX/LW Seattle spring meetup 2024
We’re in the north-west corner of Stoup

Nikita Sokolsky 28 Apr 2024 22:58 UTC
1 point
0
on: ACX/LW Seattle spring meetup 2024
Suggested discussion questions / ice breakers for today’s meetup, assembled from ACX posts in the past 6 months. See you all in one hour :-)
1. What was the most interesting question for you from the recent ACX survey?
2. What do you think of the Coffeepocalypse argument in relation to AI risk?
3. Do you agree with the Robin Hanson idea that (more) medicine doesn’t work?
4. Do you like the “Ye Olde Bay Area House Party” series of posts?
5. What do you think about the Lumina Probiotic? Are you planning to order it in the future?
6. What’s your position on the COVID lab leak debate?
7. Do you like prediction markets? What was a prediction you’ve made in the past year that you’re proud of?
8. What book would you review for the ACX book review contest if you were to write one?
9. Do you believe that capitalism is more effective than charity in solving world poverty?
10. Which dictator did you find the most interesting from the “Dictator Book Club” series?

Nikita Sokolsky 24 Apr 2024 19:55 UTC
1 point
0
on: ACX/LW Seattle spring meetup 2024
Looks like we’ll have a small reimbursement budget for this meetup so there will be free Chipotle (chicken or vegan) available to the first ~20 attendees.

Nikita Sokolsky 10 Oct 2022 18:44 UTC
1 point
0
on: Seattle ACX Everywhere—October 2022
If you have a bit of free time, we’d appreciate if you fill out the post-event survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe8Lpqt-In6aIAtSlA9pWEgRUlwW2CbLzYogJhJ3KC7mkycVg/viewform

Nikita Sokolsky 4 Aug 2022 5:22 UTC
1 point
0
on: LW/ACX/EA Seattle summer meetup
Thanks for coming! Please fill out a short survey if you have a moment: https://forms.gle/WDHS9Z2dvgoM7iCg9

Nikita Sokolsky 3 Aug 2022 17:42 UTC
1 point
0
on: LW/ACX/EA Seattle summer meetup
Weather is nearly perfect, so the event is definitely happening today. I’ll be wearing a black jacket and a grey shirt.

Nikita Sokolsky 24 Jun 2022 23:31 UTC
2 points
on: Seattle ACX Schelling Meetup 2022
Follow up summer event is now live: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zPw5WLaJ9f4QEfpyR/lw-acx-seattle-summer-meetup.

Nikita Sokolsky 15 Jun 2022 18:29 UTC
5 points
2
on: Slow motion videos as AI risk intuition pumps
Points from this post I agree with:
- AGI will have at least 100x faster decision making speed for any given decision, compared to human decision making
- AGI will be able to interact with all 9 billion humans at once, in parallel, giving it a massive advantage
- Slow motion videos present a helpful analogy
My objection is primarily around the fact that having a 100x faster processing power wouldn’t automatically allow you to do things 100x faster in the physical world:
1. Any mechanical systems that you control won’t be 100x faster due to limitations of how faster real-world mechanical parts will work. I.e. if you control a drone, you have to deal with the fact that the drone won’t fly/rotate 100x faster just because your processing power is 100x faster. And you’ll probably have to control the drone remotely because you wouldn’t fit the entire AGI on the drone itself, placing a limit on how fast you can make decisions.
2. Any operations where you rely on human action will run at 1x speed, even if you somewhat streamline them thanks to parallelization and superior decision making
3. Being 100x faster is useless if you don’t have full information on what the humans are doing/plotting. And they could hide pretty easily by meeting up offline with no electronics in place.

Nikita Sokolsky 15 Jun 2022 16:56 UTC
1 point
in reply to: acylhalide’s comment on: Contra EY: Can AGI destroy us without trial & error?
1. Even “manipulating humans” is something that can be hard to do if you don’t have a way to directly interact with the physical world. I.e. good luck manipulating the Ukrainian war zone from the Internet.
2. But how will the AI get that confidence without trial & error?

Nikita Sokolsky 14 Jun 2022 15:23 UTC
3 points
in reply to: anonymousaisafety’s comment on: Contra EY: Can AGI destroy us without trial & error?
You should make a separate post on “Can AGI just simulate the physical world?”. Will make it easier to find and reference in the future.

Nikita Sokolsky 14 Jun 2022 15:21 UTC
3 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Contra EY: Can AGI destroy us without trial & error?
“but with humanity being overwhelmed by the number of different kinds of attack.”
But AGI will only be able to start carrying out these sneaky attacks once its fairly convinced it can survive without human help? Otherwise humans will notice the various problems propping up and might just decide to “burn all GPUs” which is currently an unimaginable act.. So AGI will have to act sneakily behind the scenes for a very long time. This is again coming back to the argument that humans have a strong upper hand as long as we’ve got monopoly on physical world manipulation.

Nikita Sokolsky 14 Jun 2022 15:02 UTC
5 points
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Contra EY: Can AGI destroy us without trial & error?
People here shouldn’t assume that, because Eliezer never posted a detailed analysis on LessWrong, everyone on the doomer train is starting from unreasonable premises regarding how robot building and research could function in practice.
I agree but unfortunately my Google-fu wasn’t strong enough to find detailed prior explanations of AGI vs. robot research. I’m looking forward to your explanation.

Nikita Sokolsky 13 Jun 2022 22:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: anonymousaisafety’s comment on: Contra EY: Can AGI destroy us without trial & error?
Those are excellent comments! Do you mind if I add a few quotes from them to the post?

Nikita Sokolsky 2 May 2022 20:25 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Joey’s comment on: Seattle ACX Schelling Meetup 2022
Physical space = did you like that the meetup was in Capitol Hill? (ignoring that it was at Optimism specifically)
Venue = did you like that the meetup was in Optimism Brewing? (ignoring that its located in Cap Hill)

Nikita Sokolsky 2 May 2022 5:13 UTC
1 point
on: Seattle ACX Schelling Meetup 2022
Thank you for attending! The guessing jar count is… 1400. And the winner is Utna D / @regexkind with a guess of 1425. The median guess (excluding the 1 outlier) was 1374, which was remarkably close! The full data is here: https://tinyurl.com/4vdv346f
I wasn’t able to find Utna/@regexkind’s email or Facebook, so please reach out to me to claim your $50 prize!
And if you have a free minute, I’d appreciate if you could fill out a survey about the meetup: https://forms.gle/yZJQQTKJYSsKiB5XA. Responses will be shared with Scott Alexander and other meetup organizers, to help make the next one even better.