Ever since first hearing the music of the Disney movie “Encanto” I’ve been sneering at the lyrics “stars don’t shine they burn/ and constellations shift” because, no, of course constellations don’t shift, without really stopping to think about it. Caught in my epistemic arrogance again!
YonatanK
Karma: 69
To the average human, controlled AI is just as lethal as ‘misaligned’ AI
Oops, Samuel beat me to the punch by 2 minutes.
You’ve already noted that it doesn’t really matter, but I thought I’d help fill in the blanks.
The current global regime of sovereign nation-states that we take for granted is the product of the 20th century. It’s not like an existing sovereign nation-state belonging to the Palestinians was carved up by external powers and arbitrarily handed to Jews. Rather, the disintegration of empires created opportunities for local nationalist movements to arise, creating new countries based on varying and competing unifying or dividing factors such as language, tribal associations, and sect. Palestinians and Zionist Jews both had nationalist aspirations during this period, and for various reasons the Zionists came out on top.
The idea that “the Palestinians were there first” is not particularly meaningful or accurate, especially given the historical fact of Judea and Israel as the birthplace of Judaism and the continuous presence of Jewish communities in the region, despite the many events contributing to the creation of a Jewish diaspora.
This response is not unreasonable, but the description of “WW2-style solution” seems ignorant of the fact that Israel did occupy Gaza for decades, and had something very similar to a “puppet government” there, in the form of the Fatah party in control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005, and Hamas violently took over in 2007.
The rest of it operates under the hypothesis that Hamas is opposed to the objective interests of the Palestinians of Gaza. This ends up being tautological if objective self-interest is defined as ‘not being killed during Israeli retaliation.’ But this is a very narrow definition. There is a common saying that ‘it is better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.’ One need not drag in religious extremism or poor education as explanatory factors for an average Gazan viewing their own death under Israeli bombardment as an acceptable alternative to living with the indignity of the perpetual Israeli blockade of Gaza, to say nothing of the evisceration of dreams of Palestinian sovereignty.Note that the preceding was not an endorsement of last week’s attack, I’m just calling out the weaknesses in the depiction of Gazans as nothing but uneducated bomb fodder to the Hamas regime.
A helpful counterpoint.
Why would the human beings have to be suicidal, if they can also have the AI provide them with a vaccine?
Winners-take-how-much?
Thank you. If I understand your explanation correctly, you are saying that there are alignment solutions that are rooted in more general avoidance of harm to currently living humans. If these turn out to be the only feasible solutions to the not-killing-all-humans problem, then they will produce not-killing-most-humans as a side-effect. Nuke analogy: if we cannot build/test a bomb without igniting the whole atmosphere, we’ll pass on bombs altogether and stick to peaceful nuclear energy generation.
It seems clear that such limiting approaches would be avoided by rational actors under winner-take-all dynamics, so long as other approaches remain that have not yet been falsified.
Follow-up Question: does the “any meaningfully useful AI is also potentially lethal to its operator” assertion hold under the significantly different usefulness requirements of a much smaller human population? I’m imagining limited AI that can only just “get the (hard) job done” of killing most people under the direction of its operators, and then support a “good enough” future for the remaining population, which isn’t the hard part because the Earth itself is pretty good at supporting small human populations.
Hi all, writing here to introduce myself and to test the waters for a longer post.
I am an experienced software developer by trade. I have an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a graduate degree in a field of applied moral and political philosophy. I am a Rawlsian by temperament but an Olsonian by observation of how the world seems to actually work. My knowledge of real-world AI is in the neighborhood of the layman’s. I have “Learning Tensorflow.js” on my nightstand, which I promised my spouse not to start into until after the garage has been tidied.
Now for what brings me here: I have a strong suspicion that the AI Risk community is under-reporting the highly asymmetric risks from AI in favor of symmetric ones. Not to deny that a misaligned AI that kills everyone is a scary problem that people should be worrying about. But it seems to me that the distribution of the “reward” in the risk-reward trade-off that gives rise to the misalignment problem in the first place needs more elucidation. If, for most people, the difference between AI developers “getting it right” and “getting it wrong” is being killed at the prompting of people instead of the self-direction of AI, the likelihood of the latter vs. the former is rather academic, is it not?
To use the “AI is like nukes” analogy, if misalignment is analogous to the risk of the whole atmosphere igniting in the first fission bomb test (in terms of a really bad outcomes for everyone—yes, I know the probabilities aren’t equivalent), then successful alignment is the analogue of a large number of people getting a working-exactly-as-intended bomb dropped on their city, which, one would think, on July 15th 1945 would have been predicted as the likely follow-up to a successful Trinity test.
The disutility of a large human population in a world where human labor is becoming fungible with automation seems to me to be the fly in the ointment for anyone hoping to enjoy the benefits of all that automation.
That’s the gist of it, but I can write a longer post. Apologies if I missed a discussion in which this concern was already falsified.
I’m surprised by the lack of follow-up to this post and the accompanying thread, which took place in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th massacre. A lot has happened since then—new data against which the original thinking could be evaluated. Also time has provided opportunity to self-educate about the conflict, which a few people admitted to not knowing a lot about. Given the human misery that has only worsened since the OP started asking questions, I would think that a follow-up would be a worthy exercise. @Annapurna ?