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Summary

This document seeks to outline why I feel uneasy about high existential risk estimates from AGI (e.g., 80% doom by 2070). When I try to verbalize this, I view considerations like 

  • selection effects at the level of which arguments are discovered and distributed
  • community epistemic problems, and 
  • increased uncertainty due to chains of reasoning with imperfect concepts 

as real and important. 

I still think that existential risk from AGI is important. But I don’t view it as certain or close to certain, and I think that something is going wrong when people see it as all but assured. 

Discussion of weaknesses

I think that this document was important for me personally to write up. However, I also think that it has some significant weaknesses:

  1. There is some danger in verbalization leading to rationalization.
  2. It alternates controversial points with points that are dead obvious.
  3. It is to a large extent a reaction to my imperfectly digested understanding of a worldview pushed around the ESPR/CFAR/MIRI/LessWrong cluster from 2016-2019, which nobody might hold now.

In response to these weaknesses:

  1. I want to keep in mind that I do want to give weight to my gut feeling, and that I might want to update on a feeling of uneasiness rather than on its accompanying reasonings or rationalizations.
  2. Readers might want to keep in mind that parts of this post may look like a bravery debate. But on the other hand, I've seen that the points which people consider obvious and uncontroversial vary from person to person, so I don’t get the impression that there is that much I can do on my end for the effort that I’m willing to spend.
  3. Readers might want to keep in mind that actual AI safety people and AI safety proponents may hold more nuanced views, and that to a large extent I am arguing against a “Nuño of the past” view.

Despite these flaws, I think that this text was personally important for me to write up, and it might also have some utility to readers.

Uneasiness about chains of reasoning with imperfect concepts

Uneasiness about conjunctiveness

It’s not clear to me how conjunctive AI doom is. Proponents will argue that it is very disjunctive, that there are lot of ways that things could go wrong. I’m not so sure. 

In particular, when you see that a parsimonious decomposition (like Carlsmith’s) tends to generate lower estimates, you can conclude:

  1. That the method is producing a biased result, and trying to account for that
  2. That the topic under discussion is, in itself, conjunctive: that there are several steps that need to  be satisfied. For example, “AI causing a big catastrophe” and “AI causing human exinction given that it has caused a large catastrophe” seem like they are two distinct steps that would need to be modelled separately,

I feel uneasy about only doing 1.) and not doing 2.) I think that the principled answer might be to split some probability into each case. Overall, though, I’d tend to think that AI risk is more conjunctive than it is disjunctive 

I also feel uneasy about the social pressure in my particular social bubble. I think that the social pressure is for me to just accept Nate Soares’ argument here that Carlsmith’s method is biased, rather than to probabilistically incorporate it into my calculations. As in “oh, yes, people know that conjunctive chains of reasoning have been debunked, Nate Soares addressed that in a blogpost saying that they are biased”.

I don’t trust the concepts

My understanding is that MIRI and others’ work started in the 2000s. As such, their understanding of the shape that an AI would take doesn’t particularly resemble current deep learning approaches. 

In particular, I think that many of the initial arguments that I most absorbed were motivated by something like an AIXI (Somolonoff induction + some decision theory). Or, alternatively, by imagining what a very buffed-up Eurisko would look like. This seems to be like a fruitful generative approach which can generate things that could go wrong, rather than demonstrating that something will go wrong, or pointing to failures that we know will happen.

As deep learning attains more and more success, I think that some of the old concerns port over. But I am not sure which ones, to what extent, and in which context. This leads me to reduce some of my probability. Some concerns that apply to a more formidable Eurisko but which may not apply by default to near-term AI systems:

  • Alien values
  • Maximalist desire for world domination
  • Convergence to a utility function
  • Very competent strategizing, of the “treacherous turn” variety
  • Self-improvement
  • etc.

Uneasiness about in-the-limit reasoning

One particular form of argument, or chain of reasoning, goes like:

  1. An arbitrarily intelligent/capable/powerful process would be of great danger to humanity. This implies that there is some point, either at arbitrary intelligence or before it, such that a very intelligent process would start to be and then definitely be a great danger to humanity.
  2. If the field of artificial intelligence continues improving, eventually we will get processes that are first as intelligent/capable/powerful as a single human mind, and then greatly exceed it.
  3. This would be dangerous

The thing is, I agree with that chain of reasoning. But I see it as applying in the limit, and I am much more doubtful about it being used to justify specific dangers in the near future. In particular, I think that dangers that may appear in the long-run may manifest in limited and less dangerous form in earlier on.

I see various attempts to give models of AI timelines as approximate. In particular:

  • Even if an approach is accurate at predicting when above-human level intelligence/power/capabilities would arise
  • This doesn’t mean that the dangers of in-the-limit superintelligence would manifest at the same time

AGI, so what? 

For a given operationalization of AGI, e.g., good enough to be forecasted on, I think that there is some possibility that we will reach such a level of capabilities, and yet that this will not be very impressive or world-changing, even if it would have looked like magic to previous generations. More specifically, it seems plausible that AI will continue to improve without soon reaching high shock levels which exceed humanity’s ability to adapt.

This would be similar to how the industrial revolution was transformative but not that transformative. One possible scenario for this might be a world where we have pretty advanced AI systems, but we have adapted to that, in the same way that we have adapted to electricity, the internet, recommender systems, or social media. Or, in other words, once I concede that AGI could be as transformative as the industrial revolution, I don't have to concede that it would be maximally transformative.

I don’t trust chains of reasoning with imperfect concepts

The concerns in this section, when combined, make me uneasy about chains of reasoning that rely on imperfect concepts. Those chains may be very conjunctive, and they may apply to the behaviour of an in-the-limit-superintelligent system, but they may not be as action-guiding for systems in our near to medium term future.

For an example of the type of problem that I am worried about, but in a different domain, consider Georgism, the idea of deriving all government revenues from a land value tax. From a recent blogpost by David Friedman: “since it is taxing something in perfectly inelastic supply, taxing it does not lead to any inefficient economic decisions. The site value does not depend on any decisions made by its owner, so a tax on it does not distort his decisions, unlike a tax on income or produced goods.”

Now, this reasoning appears to be sound. Many people have been persuaded by it. However, because the concepts are imperfect, there can still be flaws. One possible flaw might be that the land value would have to be measured, and that inefficiency might come from there. Another possible flaw was recently pointed out by David Friedman in the blogpost linked above, which I understand as follows: the land value tax rewards counterfactual improvement, and this leads to predictable inefficiencies because you want to be rewarding Shapley value instead, which is much more difficult to estimate.

I think that these issues are fairly severe when attempting to make predictions for events further in the horizon, e.g., ten, thirty years. The concepts shift like sand under your feet.

Uneasiness about selection effects at the level of arguments

I am uneasy about what I see as selection effects at the level of arguments. I think that there is a small but intelligent community of people who have spent significant time producing some convincing arguments about AGI, but no community which has spent the same amount of effort looking for arguments against.

Here is a neat blogpost by Phil Trammel on this topic.

Here are some excerpts from a casual discussion among Samotsvety Forecasting team members:

The selection effect story seems pretty broadly applicable to me. I'd guess most Christian apologists, Libertarians, Marxists, etc. etc. etc. have a genuine sense of dialectical superiority: "All of these common objections are rebutted in our FAQ, yet our opponents aren't even aware of these devastating objections to their position", etc. etc.

You could throw in bias in evaluation too, but straightforward selection would give this impression even to the fair-minded who happen to end up in this corner of idea space. There are many more 'full time' (e.g.) Christian apologists than anti-apologists, so the balance of argumentative resources (and so apparent balance of reason) will often look slanted.

This doesn't mean the view in question is wrong: back in my misspent youth there were similar resources re, arguing for evolution vs. creationists/ID (https://www.talkorigins.org/). But it does strongly undercut "but actually looking at the merits clearly favours my team" alone as this isn't truth tracking (more relevant would be 'cognitive epidemiology' steers: more informed people tend to gravitate to one side or another, proponents/opponents appear more epistemically able, etc.)


An example for me is Christian theology. In particular, consider Aquinas' five proofs of good (summarized in Wikipedia), or the various ontological arguments. Back in the day, in took me a bit to a) understand what exactly they are saying, and b) understand why they don't go through. The five ways in particular were written to reassure Dominican priests who might be doubting, and in their time they did work for that purpose, because the topic is complex and hard to grasp.


You should be worried about the 'Christian apologist' (or philosophy of religion, etc.) selection effect when those likely to discuss the view are selected for sympathy for it. Concretely, if on acquaintance with the case for AI risk your reflex is 'that's BS, there's no way this is more than 1/million', you probably aren't going to spend lots of time being a dissident in this 'field' versus going off to do something else.

This gets more worrying the more generally epistemically virtuous folks are 'bouncing off': e.g. neuroscientists who think relevant capabilities are beyond the ken of 'just add moar layers', ML Engineers who think progress in the field is more plodding than extraordinary, policy folks who think it will be basically safe by default etc. The point is this distorts the apparent balance of reason - maybe this is like Marxism, or NGDP targetting, or Georgism, or general semantics, perhaps many of which we will recognise were off on the wrong track.

(Or, if you prefer being strictly object-level, it means the strongest case for scepticism is unlikely to be promulgated. If you could pin folks bouncing off down to explain their scepticism, their arguments probably won't be that strong/have good rebuttals from the AI risk crowd. But if you could force them to spend years working on their arguments, maybe their case would be much more competitive with proponent SOTA).


It is general in the sense there is a spectrum from (e.g.) evolutionary biology to (e.g.) Timecube theory, but AI risk is somewhere in the range where it is a significant consideration.

It obviously isn't an infallible one: it would apply to early stage contrarian scientific theories and doesn't track whether or not they are ultimately vindicated. You rightly anticipated the base-rate-y reply I would make.

Garfinkel and Shah still think AI is a very big deal, and identifying them at the sceptical end indicates how far afield from 'elite common sense' (or similar) AI risk discussion is. Likewise I doubt that there are some incentives to by a dissident from this consensus means there isn't a general trend in selection for those more intuitively predisposed to AI concern.

There are some possible counterpoints to this, and other Samotsvety Forecasting team members made those, and that’s fine. But my individual impression is that the selection effects argument packs a whole lot of punch behind it.

One particular dynamic that I’ve seen some gung-ho AI risk people mention is that (paraphrasing): “New people each have their own unique snowflake reasons for rejecting their particular theory of how AI doom will develop. So I can convince each particular person, but only by talking to them individually about their objections.”

So, in illustration, the overall balance could look something like:

Whereas the individual matchup could look something like:

And so you would expect the natural belief dynamics stemming from that type of matchup. 

What you would want to do is to have all the evidence for and against, and then weigh it. 

I also think that there are selection effects around which evidence surfaces on each side, rather than only around which arguments people start out with.

It is interesting that when people move to the Bay area, this is often very “helpful” for them in terms of updating towards higher AI risk. I think that this is a sign that a bunch of social fuckery is going on. In particular, I think it might be the case that Bay area movement leaders identify arguments for shorter timelines and higher probability of x-risk with “the rational”, which produces strong social incentives to be persuaded and to come up with arguments in one direction.

More specifically, I think that “if I isolate people from their normal context, they are more likely to agree with my idiosyncratic beliefs” is a mechanisms that works for many types of beliefs, not just true ones. And more generally, I think that “AI doom is near” and associated beliefs are a memeplex, and I am inclined to discount their specifics.

Miscellanea

Difference between in-argument reasoning and all-things-considered reasoning

I’d also tend to differentiate between the probability that an argument or a model gives, and the all-things considered probability. For example, I might look at Ajeya’s timeline, and I might generate a probability by inputting my curves in its model. But then I would probably add additional uncertainty on top of that model.

My weak impression is that some of the most gung-ho people do not do this.

Methodological uncertainty

It’s unclear whether we can get good accuracy predicting dynamics that may happen across decades. I might be inclined to discount further based on that. One particular uncertainty that I worry about is that we can get “AI will be a big deal and be dangerous”,  but that danger taking a different shape than what we expected.

For this reason, I am more sympathetic to tools other than forecasting for long-term decision-making, e.g., as outlined here

Uncertainty about unknown unknowns

I think that unknown unknowns mostly delay AGI. E.g., covid, nuclear war, and many other things could lead to supply chain disruptions. There are unknown unknowns in the other direction, but the higher one's probability goes, the more unknown unknowns should shift one towards 50%.

Updating on virtue

I think that updating on virtue is a legitimate move. By this I mean to notice how morally or epistemically virtuous someone is, to update based on that about whether their arguments are made in good faith or from a desire to control, and to assign them more or less weight accordingly.

I think that a bunch of people around the CFAR cluster that I was exposed to weren't particularly virtuous and willing to go to great lengths to convince people that AI is important. In particular, I think that isolating people from the normal flow of their lives for extended periods has an unreasonable effectiveness at making them more pliable and receptive to new and weird ideas, whether they are right or wrong. I am a bit freaked out about the extent to which ESPR, a rationality camp for kids in which I participated, did that.

(Brief aside: An ESPR instructor points out that ESPR separated itself from CFAR after 2019, and has been trying to mitigate these factors. I do think that the difference is important, but this post isn't about ESPR in particular but about AI doom skepticism and so will not be taking particular care here.)

Here is a comment from a CFAR cofounder, which has since left the organization, taken from this Facebook comment thread (paragraph divisions added by me):

Question by bystander: Around 3 minutes, you mention that looking back, you don't think CFAR's real drive was _actually_ making people think better. Would be curious to hear you elaborate on what you think the real drive was.

Answer: I'm not going to go into it a ton here. It'll take a bit for me to articulate it in a way that really lands as true to me. But a clear-to-me piece is, CFAR always fetishized the end of the world. It had more to do with injecting people with that narrative and propping itself up as important. 

We did a lot of moral worrying about what "better thinking" even means and whether we're helping our participants do that, and we tried to fulfill our moral duty by collecting information that was kind of related to that, but that information and worrying could never meaningfully touch questions like "Are these workshops worth doing at all?" We would ASK those questions periodically, but they had zero impact on CFAR's overall strategy. 

The actual drive in the background was a lot more like "Keep running workshops that wow people" with an additional (usually consciously (!) hidden) thread about luring people into being scared about AI risk in a very particular way and possibly recruiting them to MIRI-type projects. 

Even from the very beginning CFAR simply COULD NOT be honest about what it was doing or bring anything like a collaborative tone to its participants. We would infantilize them by deciding what they needed to hear and practice basically without talking to them about it or knowing hardly anything about their lives or inner struggles, and we'd organize the workshop and lectures to suppress their inclination to notice this and object. 

That has nothing to do with grounding people in their inner knowing; it's exactly the opposite. But it's a great tool for feeling important and getting validation and coercing manipulable people into donating time and money to a Worthy Cause™ we'd specified ahead of time. Because we're the rational ones, right? 😛 

The switch Anna pushed back in 2016 to CFAR being explicitly about xrisk was in fact a shift to more honesty; it just abysmally failed the is/ought distinction in my opinion. And, CFAR still couldn't quite make the leap to full honest transparency even then. ("Rationality for its own sake for the sake of existential risk" is doublespeak gibberish. Philosophical summersaults won't save the fact that the energy behind a statement like that is more about controlling others' impressions than it is about being goddamned honest about what the desire and intention really is.)

The dynamics at ESPR, a rationality camp I was involved with, were at times a bit more dysfunctional than that, particularly before 2019. For that reason, I am inclined to update downwards. I think that this is a personal update, and I don’t necessarily expect it to generalize.

I think that some of the same considerations that I have about ESPR might also hold for those who have interacted with people seeking to persuade, e.g., mainline CFAR workshops, 80,000 hours career advising calls, ATLAS, or similar. But to be clear I haven't interacted much with those other groups myself and my sense is that CFAR—which organized the iterations of ESPR up to 2019— went off the guardrails but that these other organizations haven't.

Industry vs AI safety community

It’s unclear to me what the views of industry people are. In particular, the question seems a bit confused. I want to get at the independent impression that people get from working with state-of-the-art AI models. But industry people may already be influenced by AI safety community concerns, so it’s unclear how to isolate the independent impression. Doesn’t seem undoable, though. 

Suggested decompositions

The above reasons for skepticism lead me to suggest the following decompositions for my forecasting group, Samotsvety, to use when forecasting AGI and its risks:

Very broad decomposition

I: 

  • Will AGI be a big deal?
  • Conditional on it being “a big deal”, will it lead to problems?
  • Will those problems be existential?

II: 

  1. AI capabilities will continue advancing
  2. The advancement of AI capabilities will lead to social problems
  3. … and eventually to a great catastrophe
  4. … and eventually to human extinction

Are we right about this stuff decomposition

  1. We are right about this AGI stuff 
  2. This AGI stuff implies that AGI will be dangerous
  3. … and it will lead to human extinction

Inside the model/outside the model decomposition

I:

  • Model/Decomposition X gives a probability
  • Are the concepts in the decomposition robust enough to support chains of inference?
  • What is the probability of existential risk if they aren’t?

I: 

  • Model/Decomposition X gives a probability
  • Is model X roughly correct?
    • Are the concepts in the decomposition robust enough to support chains of inference?
    • Will the implicit assumptions that it is making pan out?
  • What is the probability of existential risk if model X is not correct?

Implications of skepticism

I view the above as moving me away from certainty that we will get AGI in the short term. For instance, I think that having 70 or 80%+ probabilities on AI catastrophe within our lifetimes is probably just incorrect, insofar as a probability can be incorrect. 

Anecdotally, I recently met someone at an EA social event that a) was uncalibrated, e.g., on Open Philanthropy’s calibration tool, but b) assigned 96% to AGI doom by 2070. Pretty wild stuff.

Ultimately, I’m personally somewhere around 40% for "By 2070, will it become possible and financially feasible to build advanced-power-seeking AI systems?", and somewhere around 10% for doom. I don’t think that the difference matters all that much for practical purposes, but:

  1. I am marginally more concerned about unknown unknowns and other non-AI risks
  2. I would view interventions that increase civilizational robustness (e.g., bunkers) more favourably, because these are a bit more robust to unknown risks and could protect against a wider range or risks
  3. I don’t view AGI soon as particularly likely
  4. I view a stance which “aims to safeguard humanity through the 21st century” as more appealing than “Oh fuck AGI risk”

Conclusion

I’ve tried to outline some factors about why I feel uneasy with high existential risk estimates. I view the most important points as:

  1. Distrust of reasoning chains using fuzzy concepts
  2. Distrust of selection effects at the level of arguments
  3. Distrust of community dynamics

It’s not clear to me whether I have bound myself into a situation in which I can’t update from other people’s object-level arguments. I might well have, and it would lead to me playing in a perhaps-unnecessary hard mode.

If so, I could still update from e.g.:

  • Trying to make predictions, and seeing which generators are more predictive of AI progress
  • Investigations that I do myself, that lead me to acquire independent impressions, like playing with state-of-the-art models
  • Deferring to people that I trust independently, e.g., Gwern

Lastly, I would loathe it if the same selection effects applied to this document: If I spent a few days putting this document together, it seems easy for the AI safety community to easily put a few cumulative weeks into arguing against this document, just by virtue of being a community.

This is all.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Samotsvety forecasters that have discussed this topic with me, and to Ozzie Gooen for comments and review. The above post doesn't necessarily represent the views of other people at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, which nonetheless supports my research.

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One of my main high-level hesitations with AI doom and futility arguments is something like this, from Katja Grace:

My weak guess is that there’s a kind of bias at play in AI risk thinking in general, where any force that isn’t zero is taken to be arbitrarily intense. Like, if there is pressure for agents to exist, there will arbitrarily quickly be arbitrarily agentic things. If there is a feedback loop, it will be arbitrarily strong. Here, if stalling AI can’t be forever, then it’s essentially zero time. If a regulation won’t obstruct every dangerous project, then is worthless. Any finite economic disincentive for dangerous AI is nothing in the face of the omnipotent economic incentives for AI. I think this is a bad mental habit: things in the real world often come down to actual finite quantities. This is very possibly an unfair diagnosis. (I’m not going to discuss this later; this is pretty much what I have to say.)

"Omnipotent" is the impression I get from a lot of the characterization of AGI.

Another recent specific example here.

Similarly, I've had the impression that specific AI takeover scenarios don't engage enough with the ways they could fail for the AI. Some are based prima... (read more)

[writing in my personal capacity, but asked an 80k colleague if it seemed fine for me to post this]

Thanks a lot for writing this - I agree with a lot of (most of?) of what's here.

One thing I'm a bit unsure of is the extent to which these worries have implications for the beliefs of those of us who are hovering more around 5% x-risk this century from AI, and who are one step removed from the bay area epistemic and social environment you write about. My guess is that they don't have much implication for most of us, because (though what you say is way better articulated) some of this is already naturally getting into people's estimates.

e.g. in my case, basically I think a lot of what you're writing about is sort of why for my all-things-considered beliefs I partly "defer at a discount" to people who know a ton about AI and have high x-risk estimates. Like I take their arguments, find them pretty persuasive, end up at some lower but still middlingly high probability, and then just sort of downgrade everything because of worries like the ones you cite, which I think is part of why I end up near 5%.

This kind of thing does have the problematic effect probably of incentivising the bay area folks to have more and more extreme probabilities - so that, to the extent that they care, quasi-normies like me will end up with a higher probability - closer to the truth in their view - after deferring at a discount.

The 5% figure seems pretty common, and I think this might also be a symptom of risk inflation. 

There is a huge degree of uncertainty around this topic. The factors involved in any prediction very by many orders of magnitude, so it seems like we should expect the estimates to vary by orders of magnitude as well. So you might get some people saying the odds are 1 in 20, or 1 in 1000, or 1 in a million, and I don't see how any of those estimates can be ruled out as unreasonable. Yet I hardly see anyone giving estimates of 0.1% or 0.001%. 

I think people are using 5% as a stand in for "can't rule it out". Like why did you settle at 1 in 20 instead of 1 in a thousand? 

3
philipkd
It looks like we landed on the same thought. User Muster the Squirrels quoted your comment in a reply to my comment on ACX. 
6
NunoSempere
Hey,  * Your last point about exaggeration incentives seems like an incentive that could exist, but I don't see it playing out * For 80kh itself, considerations such as in this post might apply to career advisors, who have the tricky job of balancing charismatic persuasion with just providing evidence and stepping back when they try to help people make better career decisions.

[context: I'm one of the advisors, and manage some of the others, but am describing my individual attitude below]

FWIW I don't think the balance you indicated is that tricky, and think that conceiving of what I'm doing when I speak to people as 'charismatic persuasion' would be a big mistake for me to make. I try to:

 

  • Say things I think are true, and explain why I think them (both the internal logic and external evidence if it exists) and how confident I am.

     
  • Ask people questions in a way which helps them clarify what they think is true, and which things they are more or less sure of.

     
  • Make tradeoffs (e.g. between a location preference and a desire for a particular job) explicit to people who I think might be missing that they need to make one, but usually not then suggesting which tradeoff to make, but instead that they go and think about it/talk to other people affected by it.

     
  • Encourage people to think through things for themselves, usually suggesting resources which will help them do that/give a useful perspective as well as just saying 'this seems worth you taking time to think about'.

     
  • To the extent that I'm paying attention to how other people perceive me[
... (read more)

I think writing this sort of thing up is really good; thanks for this, Nuno. :)

I also feel uneasy about the social pressure in my particular social bubble. I think that the social pressure is for me to just accept Nate Soares’ argument here that Carlsmith’s method is biased, rather than to probabilistically incorporate it into my calculations. As in “oh, yes, people know that conjunctive chains of reasoning have been debunked, Nate Soares addressed that in a blogpost saying that they are biased”.

It sounds like your social environment might be conflating four different claims:

  1. "I personally find Nate's arguments for disjunctiveness compelling, so I have relatively high p(doom)."
  2. "Nate's arguments have debunked the idea that AI risk is conjunctive, in the sense that he's given a completely ironclad argument for this that no remotely reasonable person could disagree with."
  3. "Nate and Eliezer have debunked the idea that multiple-stages-style reasoning is generically reliable (e.g., in the absence of very strong prior reasons to think that a class of scenarios is conjunctive / unlikely on priors)."
  4. "Nate has shown that it's unreasonable to treat anything as conjunctive, and that we can
... (read more)

The actual drive in the background was a lot more like "Keep running workshops that wow people" with an additional (usually consciously (!) hidden) thread about luring people into being scared about AI risk in a very particular way and possibly recruiting them to MIRI-type projects. 

Even from the very beginning CFAR simply COULD NOT be honest about what it was doing or bring anything like a collaborative tone to its participants. We would infantilize them by deciding what they needed to hear and practice basically without talking to them about it or knowing hardly anything about their lives or inner struggles, and we'd organize the workshop and lectures to suppress their inclination to notice this and object. 

That paints a pretty fucked up picture of early-CFAR's dynamics. I've heard a lot of conflicting stories about CFAR in this respect, usually quite vague (and there are nonzero ex-CFAR staffers who I just flatly don't trust to report things accurately). I'd be interested to hear from Anna or other early CFAR staff about whether this matches their impressions of how things went down. It unfortunately sounds to me like a pretty realistic way this sort of thing can play ... (read more)

If we bracket the timelines part and just ask about p(doom), I think https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ke2ogqSEhL2KCJCNx/security-mindset-lessons-from-20-years-of-software-security and https://intelligence.org/2017/11/25/security-mindset-ordinary-paranoia/ makes it quite easy to reach extremely dire forecasts about AGI. Getting extremely novel software right on the first try is just that hard.

Surely not. Neither of those make any arguments about AI, just about software generally. If you literally think those two are sufficient arguments for concluding "AI kills us with high probability" I don't see why you don't conclude "Powerpoint kills us with high probability".

7
RobBensinger
Yep! To be explicit, I was assuming that general intelligence is very powerful, that you can automate it, and that it isn't (e.g.) friendly by default.
5[anonymous]
I'm not sure I understand what statements like "general intelligence is very powerful" mean even though it seems to be a crucial part of the argument. Can you explain more concretely what you mean by this? E.g. What is "general intelligence"? What are the ways in which it is and isn't powerful? 

By "general intelligence" I mean "whatever it is that lets human brains do astrophysics, category theory, etc. even though our brains evolved under literally zero selection pressure to solve astrophysics or category theory problems".

Human brains aren't perfectly general, and not all narrow AIs/animals are equally narrow. (E.g., AlphaZero is more general than AlphaGo.) But it sure is interesting that humans evolved cognitive abilities that unlock all of these sciences at once, with zero evolutionary fine-tuning of the brain aimed at equipping us for any of those sciences. Evolution just stumbled into a solution to other problems, that happened to generalize to billions of wildly novel tasks.

To get more concrete:

  • AlphaGo is a very impressive reasoner, but its hypothesis space is limited to sequences of Go board states rather than sequences of states of the physical universe. Efficiently reasoning about the physical universe requires solving at least some problems (which might be solved by the AGI's programmer, and/or solved by the algorithm that finds the AGI in program-space; and some such problems may be solved by the AGI itself in the course of refining its thinking) that are diffe
... (read more)
2
Mau
Nitpick: doesn't the argument you made also assume that there'll be a big discontinuity right before AGI? That seems necessary for the premise about "extremely novel software" (rather than "incrementally novel software") to hold.
5
RobBensinger
I do think that AGI will be developed by methods that are relatively novel. Like, I'll be quite surprised if all of the core ideas are >6 years old when we first achieve AGI, and I'll be more surprised still if all of the core ideas are >12 years old. (Though at least some of the surprise does come from the fact that my median AGI timeline is short, and that I don't expect us to build AGI by just throwing more compute and data at GPT-n.) Separately and with more confidence, I'm expecting discontinuities in the cognitive abilities of AGI. If AGI is par-human at heart surgery and physics, I predict that this will be because of "click" moments where many things suddenly fall into place at once, and new approaches and heuristics (both on the part of humans and on the part of the AI systems we build), not just because of a completely smooth, incremental, and low-impact-at-each-step improvement to the knowledge and thought-habits of GPT-3. "Superhuman AI isn't just GPT-3 but thinking faster and remembering more things" (for example) matters for things like interpretability, since if we succeed shockingly well at finding ways to reasonably thoroughly understand what GPT-3's brain is doing moment-to-moment, this is less likely to be effective for understanding what the first AGI's brain is doing moment-to-moment insofar as the first AGI is working in very new sorts of ways and doing very new sorts of things. I'm happy to add more points like these to the stew so they can be talked about. "Your list of reasons for thinking AGI risk is high didn't explicitly mention X" is a process we can continue indefinitely long if we want to, since there are always more background assumptions someone can bring up that they disagree with. (E.g., I also didn't explicitly mention "intelligence is a property of matter rather than of souls imparted into particular animal species by God", "AGI isn't thousands of years in the future", "most random goals would produce bad outcomes if optimize
6
Mau
Fair! Sorry for the slow reply, I missed the comment notification earlier. I could have been clearer in what I was trying to point at with my comment. I didn't mean to fault you for not meeting an (unmade) challenge to list all your assumptions--I agree that would be unreasonable. Instead, I meant to suggest an object-level point: that the argument you mentioned seems pretty reliant on a controversial discontinuity assumption--enough that the argument alone (along with other, largely uncontroversial assumptions) doesn't make it "quite easy to reach extremely dire forecasts about AGI." (Though I was thinking more about 90%+ forecasts.) (That assumption--i.e. the main claims in the 3rd paragraph of your response--seems much more controversial/non-obvious among people in AI safety than the other assumptions you mention, as evidenced by researchers criticizing it and researchers doing prosaic AI safety work.)
4
MaxRa
(Minor: I really liked your top-level comment but almost didn't read this second comment because I didn't immediately realize you split up your comment due to (I suppose) running out of space. Maybe worth it to add a "[cont.]" or something in such cases in future.)
3
RobBensinger
Added!

Ok, so thinking about this, one trouble with answering your comment this is that you have a self-consistent worldview which has contrary implications to some of the stuff I hold, but I feel that you are not giving answers with reference to stuff that I already hold, but rather to stuff that further references that worldview.

Let me know if this feels way off.

So I'm going to just pick one object-level argument and dig in to that:

As deep learning attains more and more success, I think that some of the old concerns port over. But I am not sure which ones, to what extent, and in which context. This leads me to reduce some of my probability.

On net I think the deep learning revolution increases p(doom), mostly because it's a surprisingly opaque and indirect way of building intelligent systems, that gives you relatively few levers to control internal properties of the reasoner you SGDed your way to.

Well, I think that the question is, increased p(doom) compared to what, e.g., what were your default expectations before the DL revollution?

  • Compared to equivalent progress in a seed AI which has a utility function
    • Deep learning seems like it has some advantages, e.g,.: it is [doing the kinds of t
... (read more)
7
RobBensinger
Sounds right to me! I don't know your worldview, so I'm mostly just reporting my thoughts on stuff, not trying to do anything particularly sophisticated. I personally started thinking about ML and AGI risk in 2013, and I didn't have much of a view of "how are we likely to get to AGI?" at the time. My sense is that MIRI-circa-2010 wasn't confident about how humanity would get to AI, but expected it would involve gaining at least some more (object-level, gearsy) insight into how intelligence works. "Just throw more compute at a slightly tweaked version of one of the standard old failed approaches to AGI" wasn't MIRI's top-probability scenario. From my perspective, humanity got "unlucky" in three different respects: * AI techniques started working really well early, giving us less time to build up an understanding of alignment. * Techniques started working for reasons other than us acquiring and applying gearsy new insights into how reasoning works, so the advances in AI didn't help us understand how to do alignment. * And the specific methods that worked are more opaque than most pre-deep-learning AI, making it hard to see how you'd align the system even in principle. Seems like the wrong comparison; the question is whether AGI built by deep learning (that's at the "capability level" of GPT-3) is safer than seed AGI (that's at the "capability level" of GPT-3). I don't think GPT-3 is an AGI, or has the same safety profile as baby AGIs built by deep learning. (If there's an efficient humanly-reachable way to achieve AGI via deep learning.) So an apples-to-apples comparison would either think about hypothetical deep-learning AGI vs. hypothetical seed AGI, or it would look at GPT-3 vs. hypothetical narrow AI built on the road to seed AGI. If we can use GPT-3 or something very similar to GPT-3 to save the world, then it of course matters that GPT-3 is way safer than seed AGI. But then the relevant argument would look something like "maybe the narrow AI tech that
9
Lizka
Could you list some of your favorite/the strongest-according-to-you (collections of) arguments against AI risk? 

Sure! It would depend on what you mean by "an argument against AI risk":

  • If you mean "What's the main argument that makes you more optimistic about AI outcomes?", I made a list of these in 2018.
  • If you mean "What's the likeliest way you think it could turn out that aligning AGI is unnecessary in order to do a pivotal act / initiate an as-long-as-needed reflection?", I'd currently guess it's using strong narrow-AI systems to accelerate you to Drexlerian nanotechnology (which can then be used to build powerful things like "large numbers of fast-running human whole-brain emulations").
  • If you mean "What's the likeliest way you think it could turn out that humanity's current trajectory is basically OK / no huge actions or trajectory changes are required?", I'd say that the likeliest scenario is one where AGI kills all humans, but this isn't a complete catastrophe for the future value of the reachable universe because the AGI turns out to be less like a paperclip maximizer and more like a weird sentient alien that wants to fill the universe with extremely-weird-but-awesome alien civilizations. This sort of scenario is discussed in Superintelligent AI is necessary for an amazing future, but
... (read more)
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RobBensinger
Another way it could be bad that EAs are focusing on AI is if EAs are accelerating AGI capabilities / shortening timelines way more than we're helping with alignment (or otherwise increasing the probability of good outcomes).
3[anonymous]
Here are a few non-MIRI perspectives if you're interested: What does it mean to align AI with human values? The implausibility of intelligence explosion Against the singularity hypothesis Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence

What does it mean to align AI with human values?

This article is... really bad.

It's mostly a summary of Yudkowsky/Bostrom ideas, but with a bunch of the ideas garbled and misunderstood.

Mitchell says that one of the core assumptions of AI risk arguments is "that any goal could be 'inserted' by humans into a superintelligent AI agent". But that's not true, and in fact a lot of the risk comes from the fact that we have no idea how to'insert' a goal into an AGI system.

The paperclip maximizer hypothetical here is a misunderstanding of the original idea. (Though it's faithful to the version Bostrom gives in Superintelligence.) And the misunderstanding seems to have caused Mitchell to misunderstood a bunch of other things about the alignment problem. Picking one of many examples of just-plain-false claims:

"And importantly, in keeping with Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis, the machine has achieved superintelligence without having any of its own goals or values, instead waiting for goals to be inserted by humans."

The article also says that "research efforts on alignment are underway at universities around the world and at big AI companies such as Google, Meta and OpenAI". I assume Google here ... (read more)

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NunoSempere
Idk, I can't help but notice that your title at MIRI is "Research Communications", but there is nobody paid by the "Machine Intelligence Skepticism Institute" to put forth claims that you are wrong. edit: removed superfluous "that".

Idk, I can't help but notice that your title at MIRI is "Research Communications", but there is nobody paid by the "Machine Intelligence Skepticism Institute" to put forth claims that you are that wrong.

Since we're talking about p(doom), this sounds like a claim that my job at MIRI is to generate arguments for worrying more about AGI, and we haven't hired anybody whose job it is to generate arguments for worrying less.

Well, I'm happy to be able to cite that thing I wrote with a long list of reasons to worry less about AGI risk!

(Link)

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RobBensinger
I'm not claiming the list is exhaustive or anything, or that everyone would agree with what should go on such a list. It's the reasons that update me the most, not the reasons that I'd expect to be most convincing to some third party. But the very existence of public lists like this seems like something your model was betting against. Especially insofar as it's a novel list with items MIRI came up with itself that reflect MIRI-ish perspectives, not a curated list of points other groups have made.
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NunoSempere
Nice
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NunoSempere
It also occurs to me that I've also written an argument in favor of worrying about x-risk, here.
-1[anonymous]
I like the post you linked but I'm not sure this is much of a rebuttal to Nuno's point. This is a single post, saying the situation is not maximally bad, against a much larger corpus of writings and communications by you and MIRI emphasizing risks from AGI. 
4
RobBensinger
If you think that AGI risk is extremely high (as I do), then the intellectually honest thing to do is to write out the main considerations that cause you to think it's that high. This includes any major considerations that cause you to not think it's even higher. One of Nuno's points in the OP was, paraphrasing: 'I worry that the doomers are only citing strong arguments for doom, and not citing strong arguments against doom. Either because (a) doomers are flinching away from thinking about arguments against doom, or because (b) they're strategically withholding arguments against doom in the hope of manipulating others into having doomier views. Whether (a) is true or (b), it follows that I should discount doomer arguments somewhat as filtered evidence.' The existence of my "reasons I'm less doomy than I could have been" post is meaningful evidence against (a) and (b). It can still be part of an eleven-dimensional chess game to (consciously or unconsciously) trick people, but it's nontrivial Bayesian evidence that we're doing the epistemically cooperative thing. If we had a huge number of posts pushing for optimism, then that would be even more evidence against (a) and (b). But that would also be evidence that we have way lower p(doom), or that we're trying to trick people into thinking we have lower p(doom) by giving excessive time to arguments that we think are way weaker than the counter-arguments. Be wary of setting a trap where there's no possible way for you to take claims of high p(doom) seriously, because when someone gives more arguments for doom than for hope you assume they're trying to trick you by filtering out secret strong reasons for hope, and when someone gives you similar numbers of arguments for doom and for hope you assume they can't really think p(doom) is that high.
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NunoSempere
I briefly touched on this at the end of the post and in this comment thread. In short: * Eehh, you can't just ignore your evidence being filtered * Strong kinds of evidence, e.g., empirical evidence, mathematical proof, very compelling arguments would still move my needle. Weak or fuzzy arguments much less * I can still process evidence from my own eyes, e.g., observe progress, tap into sources that I think are less filtered, think about this for myself, etc. * I can still "take claims of high p(doom) seriously" in the sense of believing that people reporting them hold that as a sincere belief. * Though that doesn't necessarily inspire a compulsion to defer to those beliefs.
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RobBensinger
That all seems right to me, and compatible with what I was saying. The part of Sphor's comment that seemed off to me was "against a much larger corpus of writings and communications by you and MIRI emphasizing risks from AGI": one blog post is a small data point to weigh against lots of other data points, but the relevant data to weigh it against isn't "MIRI wrote other things that emphasize risks from AGI" in isolation, as though "an organization or individual wrote a lot of arguments for X" on its own is strong reason to discount those arguments as filtered. The thing doing the work has to be some background model of the arguers (or of some process upstream of the arguers), not a raw count of how often someone argues for a thing. Otherwise you run into the "damned if you argue a lot for X, damned if you don't argue a lot for X" problem.
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NunoSempere
Yeah, I don't think that your paraphrase was accurate. I don't need to posit a conscious (strategically withholding) or subconscious (flinching away) conspiracy, in the same way that I don't need a conscious conspiracy to explain why there are so many medieval proofs of god. So the problem may not be at the individual but at the collective level.
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NunoSempere
I like Unconscious Economics as an illustration of some of these dynamics.
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NunoSempere
Incidentally, that's a good example of normal reasoning I'd consider fuzzy and which would bring my probabilities down
2[anonymous]
That's not the point Nuno was making above. He said in the OP that there are selection effects at the level of arguments, not that doomers were trying to trick people. You replied to it saying that this argument doesn't have much punch, because you trust EAs and Rationalists and think the field is established enough to have had arguments flowing in both directions. He replied by pointing out that MIRI promotes AI risk as an organization and there's no equivalent organization putting out arguments against AI risk. You said this doesn't apply because you once wrote a post saying not to be maximally pessimistic about AI. I said this doesn't mean much because the vast majority of writing by you and MIRI emphasizes AI risks. I don't know what your response to this specific line of criticism is. 

Thanks for winding back through the conversation so far, as you understood it; that helped me understand better where you're coming from.

He replied by pointing out that MIRI promotes AI risk as an organization and there's no equivalent organization putting out arguments against AI risk.

Nuno said: "Idk, I can't help but notice that your title at MIRI is 'Research Communications', but there is nobody paid by the 'Machine Intelligence Skepticism Institute' to put forth claims that you are wrong."

I interpreted that as Nuno saying: MIRI is giving arguments for stuff, but I cited an allegation that CFAR is being dishonest, manipulative, and one-sided in their evaluation of AI risk arguments, and I note that MIRI is a one-sided doomer org that gives arguments for your side, while there's nobody paid to raise counter-points.

My response was a concrete example showing that MIRI isn't a one-sided doomer org that only gives arguments for doom. That isn't a proof that we're correct about this stuff, but it's a data point against "MIRI is a one-sided doomer org that only gives arguments for doom". And it's at least some evidence that we aren't doing the specific dishonest thing Nuno accused CFAR... (read more)

1[anonymous]
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understood correctly. Are you saying you agree there are selection effects, but you object to how you think Nuno and I are modeling MIRI and the processes generating MIRI-style models on AGI? 
3
RobBensinger
I'm confused by your phrasing "there are selection effects", because it sounds so trivial to me. Every widespread claim faces some nonzero amount of (non-epistemic) selection bias. E.g., I'd assume that twelve-syllable sentences get asserted at least slightly less often than eleven-syllable sentences, because they're a bit more cumbersome. This is a non-epistemic selection effect, but it doesn't cause me to worry that I'll be unable to evaluate the truth of eleven- or twelve-syllable sentences for myself. There are plenty of selection effects in the world, but typically they don't put us into a state of epistemic helplessness; they just imply that it takes a bit of extra effort to dig up all the relevant arguments (since they're out there, some just take some more minutes to find on Google). When the world has already spent decades arguing about a question, and there are plenty of advocates for both sides of the question, selection effects usually mean "it takes you some more minutes to dig up all the key arguments on Google", not "we must default to uncertainty no matter how strong the arguments look". AI risk is pretty normal in that respect, on my view.
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NunoSempere
Re: Arguments against conjunctiveness So here the thing is that I don't find Nate's argument particularly compelling, and after a few times of the following pattern: 1. Here is a reason to think that AI might not happen/might not cause an existential risk 2. Here is an argument for why that reason doesn't apply, which could range from wrong to somewhat compelling to very compelling 3. [Advocate proceeds to take the argument on 2. as sort of permission in their mind to assign maximal probability to AI doom] I grow tired of it, and it starts to irk me.
3
RobBensinger
What's an example of "here is an argument for why that reason doesn't apply" that you think is wrong? And are you claiming that Nate or I are "assigning maximal probability to AI doom", or doing this kind of qualitative black-and-white reasoning? If so, why? Nate's post, for reference, was: AGI ruin scenarios are likely (and disjunctive)
3
NunoSempere
Rereading the post, I think that it has a bunch statements about what Soares believes, but it doesn't have that many mechanisms, pathways, counter-considerations, etc. E.g.,: This is probably a good statement of what Soares thinks needs to happen, but it is not a case for that, so I am left to evaluate the statements and the claim that they are conjunctive with reference to their intuitive plausibility. I think I might be a bit dense here. E.g.,: Idk, he later mentions the US government's COVID response, but I think the relevant branch of the government for dealing with AGI threats would probably be the department of defense, which seems much more competent, and seems capable of plays like blocking exports of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. 
5
Greg_Colbourn
But it does leave a path open to prevent doom: not reaching superintelligence! i.e. a global moratorium on AGI. (The rest of the comment is great btw :))
4
RobBensinger
What causes the moratorium to be adopted, and how is it indefinitely enforced in all countries in the world? (Also, if this can be achieved with roughly human-level AGIs running around, why can't it be achieved without such AGIs running around?)
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Greg_Colbourn
Social/moral consensus? There is precedent with e.g. recombinant DNA or human genetic engineering (if only the AI Asilomar conference was similarly focused on a moratorium!) It might be hard to indefinitely enforce globally, but we might at least be able to kick the can down the road a couple of decades (as seems to have happened with the problematic bio research). (It should be achieved without such AGIs running around, if we want to minimise x-risk. Indeed, we should have started on this already! I'm starting to wonder whether it might actually be the best option we have, given the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility(?) of alignment.)  
9
Greg_Colbourn
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to live in a glorious transhuman future (like e.g. Iain M Bank's Culture), but I just don't think it's worth the risk of doom, as things stand. Maybe after a few decades of moratorium, when we know a lot more, we can reassess (and hopefully we will still be able to have life extension so will personally still be around). It now seems unfortunate that the AI x-risk prevention community was seeded from the transhumanist/techno-utopian community (e.g. Yudkowsky and Bostrom). This historical contingency is probably a large part of the reason why a global moratorium on AGI has never been seriously proposed/attempted.
7
RobBensinger
Seems very surprising if true — the Yudkowskians are the main group that worries we're screwed without a global moratorium, and the main group that would update positively if there were a way to delay AGI by a few decades. (Though they aren't the main group that thinks it's tractable to coordinate such a big delay.) From my perspective Bostrom and Yudkowsky were the ones saying from the get-go that rushing to AGI is bad. E.g., in Superintelligence: (Though he flags that this is a "tentative conclusion" that "could be overturned, for example if the threats from other existential risks or from post-transition coordination failures turn out to be extremely large". If we were thinking about going from "AGI in 100 years" to "AGI in 300 years", I might agree; if we're instead going from "AGI in 15 years" to "AGI in 40 years", then the conclusion seems way less tentative to me, given how unsolved the alignment problem is!) The transhumanists were the ones who centered a lot of the early discussion around differential technological development, a.k.a. deliberately trying to slow down scary tech (e.g. AGI) so it comes after anti-scary tech (e.g. alignment), or attempting to accelerate alignment work to the same effect. The idea that Bostrom or Yudkowsky ever thought "the alignment problem is a major issue, but let's accelerate to AGI as quickly as possible for the sake of reaching the Glorious Transhumanist Future sooner" seems like revisionism to me, and I'm skeptical that the people putting less early emphasis on differential technological development back in 2014, in real life, would have somehow performed better in this counterfactual.
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Greg_Colbourn
I'm not saying this is (was) the case. It's more subtle than that. It's the kind of background worldview that makes people post this (or talk of "pivotal acts") rather than this.  The message of differential technological development clearly hasn't had the needed effect. There has been no meaningful heed paid to it by the top AI companies. What we need now is much stronger statements. i.e. ones that use the word "moratorium". Why isn't MIRI making such statements? It doesn't make sense to go to 0 hope of survival without even seriously attempting a moratorium (or at the very least, publicly advocating for one).

I think the blunt MIRI-statement you're wanting  is here:

Capabilities work is currently a bad idea

Nate’s top-level view is that ideally, Earth should take a break on doing work that might move us closer to AGI, until we understand alignment better.

That move isn’t available to us, but individual researchers and organizations who choose not to burn the timeline are helping the world, even if other researchers and orgs don't reciprocate. You can unilaterally lengthen timelines, and give humanity more chances of success, by choosing not to personally shorten them.

Nate thinks capabilities work is currently a bad idea for a few reasons:

  • He doesn’t buy that current capabilities work is a likely path to ultimately solving alignment.
  • Insofar as current capabilities work does seem helpful for alignment, it strikes him as helping with parallelizable research goals, whereas our bottleneck is serial research goals. (See A note about differential technological development.)
  • Nate doesn’t buy that we need more capabilities progress before we can start finding a better path.

[...]

On Nate’s view, the field should do experiments with ML systems, not just abstract theory. But if h

... (read more)
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Greg_Colbourn
This is good, but I don't think it goes far enough. And I agree with your comments re "might not want MIRI to say "that move isn't available to us"". It might not be realistic to get the entire world to take a break on AGI work, but it's certainly conceivable, and I think maybe at this point more realistic than expecting alignment to be solved in time (or at all?). It seems reasonable to direct marginal resources toward pushing for a moratorium on AGI rather than more alignment work (although I still think this should at least be tried too!) Your's and Nate's statement still implicitly assumes that AGI capabilities orgs are "on our side". The evidence is that they are clearly not.  Demis is voicing caution at the same time that Google leadership have started a race with OpenAI (Microsoft). It's out of Demis' (and his seemingly toothless ethics board's) hands.  Less  accepting what has been tantamount to "existential safety washing", and more realpolitik, is needed. Better now might be to directly appeal to the public and policymakers. Or find a way to strategise with those with power. For example, should the UN Security Council be approached somehow? This isn't "defection".
8
Greg_Colbourn
I'm saying all this because I'm not afraid of treading on any toes. I don't depend on EA money (or anyone's money) for my livelihood or career[1]. I'm financially independent. In fact, my life is pretty good, all apart from facing impending doom from this! I mean, I don't need to work to survive[2], I've got an amazing partner and and a supportive family. All that is missing is existential security! I'd be happy to have "completed it mate" (i.e I've basically done this with the normal life of house, car, spouse, family, financial security etc); but I haven't -  remaining is this small issue of surviving for a normal lifespan, having my children survive and thrive / ensuring the continuation of the sentient universe as we know it... 1. ^ Although I still care about my reputation in EA to be fair (can't really avoid this as a human) 2. ^ All my EA work is voluntary
4
RobBensinger
I think it's a lot more realistic to solve alignment than to delay AGI by 50 years. I'd guess that delaying AGI by 10 years is maybe easier than alignment, but it also doesn't solve anything unless we can use those 10 years to figure out alignment as well. For that matter, delaying by 50 years also requires that we solve alignment in that timeframe, unless we're trying to buy time to do some third other thing. The difficulty of alignment is also a lot more uncertain than the difficulty of delaying AGI: it depends more on technical questions that are completely unknown from our current perspective. Delaying AGI by decades is definitely very hard, whereas the difficulty of alignment is mostly a question mark. All of that suggests to me that alignment is far more important as a way to spend marginal resources today, but we should try to do both if there are sane ways to pursue both options today. If you want MIRI to update from "both seem good, but alignment is the top priority" to your view, you should probably be arguing (or gathering evidence) against one or more of these claims: * AGI alignment is a solvable problem. * Absent aligned AGI, there isn't a known clearly-viable way for humanity to achieve a sufficiently-long reflection (including centuries of delaying AGI, if that turned out to be needed, without permanently damaging or crippling humanity). * (There are alternatives to aligned AGI that strike me as promising enough to be worth pursuing. E.g., maybe humans can build Drexlerian nanofactories without help from AGI, and can leverage this for a pivotal act. But these all currently seem to me like even bigger longshots than the alignment problem, so I'm not currently eager to direct resources away from (relatively well-aimed, non-capabilities-synergistic) alignment research for this purpose.) * Humanity has never succeeded in any political task remotely as difficult as the political challenge of creating an enforced and effective 50+ year global mor
8
Greg_Colbourn
Even a 10 year delay is worth a huge amount (in expectation). We may well have a very different view of alignment by then (including perhaps being pretty solid on it's impossibility? Or perhaps a detailed plan for implementing it? (Or even the seemingly very unlikely "..there's nothing to worry about")), which would allow us to iterate on a better strategy (we shouldn't assume that our outlook will be the same after 10 years!) Yes! (And I think there are sane ways). There are people working on this (e.g. Yampolskiy, Landry & Ellen), and this is definitely something I want to spend more time on (note that the writings so far could definitely do with a more accessible distillation). I really don't think we need to worry about this now. AGI x-risk is an emergency - we need to deal with that emergency  first (e.g. kick the can down the road 10 years with a moratorium on AGI research); then when we can relax a little, we can have the luxury to think about long term flourishing. I think this can definitely be argued against (and I will try and write more as/when I make a more fleshed out post calling for a global AGI moratorium). For a start, without all the work on nuclear proliferation and risk, we may well not be here today. Yes there has been proliferation, but there hasn't been an all-out nuclear exchange yet! It's now 77 years since a nuclear weapon was used in anger. That's a pretty big result I think! Also, global taboos around bio topics such as human genetic engineering are well established. If such a taboo is established, enforcement becomes a lesser concern, as you are  then only fighting against isolated rogue elements rather than established megacorporations. Katja Grace discusses such taboos in her post on slowing down AI. Fair point. I think we should be thinking much wider than EA here. This needs to become mainstream, and fast. Also, I should say that I don't think MIRI should necessarily be diverting resources to work on a moratorium. Alignment is
6
RobBensinger
Agreed on all counts! Though as someone who's been working in this area for 10 years, I have a newfound appreciation for how little intellectual progress can easily end up happening in a 10-year period... I have a lot of hopes that seem possible enough to me to be worth thinking about, but this specific hope isn't one of them. Alignment may turn out to be easier than expected, but I think we can mostly rule out "AGI is just friendly by default". In which direction? :P  I'm joking, though I do take seriously that there are proposals that might be better signal-boosted by groups other than MIRI. But if you come up with a fuller proposal you want lots of sane people to signal-boost, do send it to MIRI so we can decide if we like it; and if we like it as a sufficiently-realistic way to lengthen timelines, I predict that we'll be happy to signal-boost it and say as much. I strongly agree and think it's right that people... like, put some human feeling into their words, if they agree about how fucked up this situation is? (At least if they find it natural to do so.)
4
NunoSempere
Yes, but you could think that the fuckery in the EA/rat comunity is concentrated on the topic of AI, and that the EA/rat communities can develop defenses against normal social fuckery but not viceversa.
3
NunoSempere
Hey, thanks for your lengthy comment. For future reference I would have found it more convenient if you had an individual comment for each consideration :)
4
RobBensinger
I could do that, though some of my points are related, which might make it confusing when karma causes the comments to get rearranged out of order.
bruce
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Despite these flaws, I think that this text was personally important for me to write up, and it might also have some utility to readers.

Just a brief comment to say that I definitely appreciated you writing this post up, as well as linking to Phil's blog post! I share many of these uncertainties, but have often just assumed I'm missing some important object-level knowledge, so it's nice to see this spelled out more explicitly by someone with more exposure to the relevant communities. Hope you get some engagement!

I'm missing some important object-level knowledge, so it's nice to see this spelled out more explicitly by someone with more exposure to the relevant community. Hope you get some engagement!

I know several people from outside EA (Ivy League, Ex-FANG, work in ML, startup, Bay Area) and they share the same "skepticism" (in quotes because it's not the right word, their view is more negative). 

I suspect one aspect of the problem is the sort of "Timnit Gebru"-style yelling and also sneering, often from the leftist community that is opposed to EA more broadly (but much of this leftist sneering was nucleated by the Bay Area communities).

This gives proponents of AI-safety an easy target, funneling online discourse into a cul de sac of tribalism. I suspect this dynamic is deliberately cultivated on both sides, a system ultimately supported by a lot of crypto/tech wealth. This leads to where we are today, where someone like Bruce (not to mention many young people) get confused. 

bruce
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I don't follow Timnit closely, but I'm fairly unconvinced by much of what I think you're referring to RE: "Timnit Gebru-style yelling / sneering", and I don't want to give the impression that my uncertainties are strongly influenced by this, or by AI-safety community pushback to those kinds of sneering. I'd be hesitant to agree that I share these views that you are attributing to me, since I don't really know what you are referring to RE: folks who share "the same skepticism" (but some more negative version).

When I talk about uncertainty, some of these are really just the things that Nuno is pointing out in this post. Concrete examples of what some of these uncertainties look like in practice for me personally include:

  • I don't have a good inside view on timelines, but when EY says our probability of survival is ~0% this seems like an extraordinary claim that doesn't seem to be very well supported or argued for, and something I intuitively want to reject outright, but don't have the object level expertise to meaningfully do so. I don't know the extent to which EY's views are representative or highly influential in current AI safety efforts, and I can imagine a world where there's too
... (read more)

Thank you for this useful content and explaining your beliefs.

don't follow Timnit closely, but I'm fairly unconvinced by much of what I think you're referring to RE: "Timnit Gebru-style yelling / sneering", and I don't want to give the impression that my uncertainties are strongly influenced by this, or by AI-safety community pushback to those kinds of sneering. 

My comment is claiming a dynamic that is upstream of, and produces the information environment you are in. This produces your "skepticism" or "uncertainty". To expand on this, without this dynamic, the facts and truth would be clearer and you would not be uncertain or feel the need to update your beliefs in response to a forum post. 

My comment is not implying you are influenced by "Gebru-style" content directly. It is sort of implying the opposite/orthogonal. The fact you felt it necessary to distance yourself from Gebru several times in your comment, essentially because a comment mentioned her name, makes this very point itself.

don't really know what you are referring to RE: folks who share "the same skepticism" (but some more negative version), but I'd be hesitant to agree that I share these views that you are a

... (read more)
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NunoSempere
Here is a post by Scott Alexander which I think might be pointing to a similar phenomenon as what you are hinting at. Money quote:
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timunderwood
Object level point: "I don't have a good inside view on timelines, but when EY says our probability of survival is ~0% this seems like an extraordinary claim that doesn't seem to be very well supported or argued for, and something I intuitively want to reject outright, but don't have the object level expertise to meaningfully do so. I don't know the extent to which EY's views are representative or highly influential in current AI safety efforts, and I can imagine a world where there's too much deferring going on. It seems like some within the community have similar thoughts." EY's view of doom being basically certain are fairly marginal. They definitely are part of the conversation, and he certainly is not the only person who holds them. But most people who are actively working on AI safety see the odds of survival as much higher than roughly 0% -- and I think most people see the P(doom) as actually much lower than 80%. The key motivating argument for AI safety being important, even if you think that EY's model of the world might be false (though it also might be true) is that while it is easy to come up with plausible reasons to think that P(doom) is much less than 1, it is very hard to dismiss enough of the arguments for it to get p(doom) close to zero. 

Yes, I think it's good that there is basically consensus here on AGI doom being a serious problem; the argument seems to be one of degree. Even OP says p(AGI doom by 2070) ~ 10%.

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David Johnston
I think Gary Marcus seems to play the role of an “anti-AI-doom” figurehead much more than Timnit Gebru. I don’t even know what his views on doom are, but he has established himself as a prominent critic of “AI is improving fast” views and seemingly gets lots of engagement from the safety community. I also think Marcus’ criticisms aren’t very compelling, and so the discourse they generate isn’t terribly valuable. I think similarly of Gebru’s criticism (I think it’s worse than Marcus’, actually), but I just don’t think it has as much impact on the safety community.
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NunoSempere
Brutal comment, love it
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NunoSempere
Thanks!
Pato
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1

Personally I have trouble understanding this post. Could you write simpler?

Here are my notes which might not be easier to understand, but they are shorter and capture the key ideas:

  • Uneasiness about chains of reasoning with imperfect concepts
    • Uneasy about conjunctiveness: It’s not clear how conjunctive AI doom is (AI doom being conjunctive would mean that Thing A and Thing B and Thing C all have to happen or be true in order for AI doom; this is opposed to being disjunctive where either A, or B, or C would be sufficient for AI Doom), and Nate Soares’s response to Carlsmith’s powerseeking AI report is not a silver bullet; there is social pressure in some places to just accept that Carlsmith’s report uses a biased methodology and to move on. But obviously there’s some element of conjunctiveness that has to be dealt with.
    • Don’t trust the concepts: a lot of the early AI Risk discussion’s came before Deep Learning. Some of the concepts should port over to near-term-likely AI systems, but not all of them (e.g., Alien values, Maximalist desire for world domination)
      • Uneasiness about in-the-limit reasoning: Many arguments go something like this: an arbitrarily intelligent AI will adopt instrumental power seeking tendencies and this will be very bad for humanity; progr
... (read more)
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NunoSempere
Nice, thanks, great summary.
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Pato
Thanks! I think I understood everything now and in a really quick read.
  • Some people said some things 
  • I think that the things those people said might not be as likely as they say they are, because:
    • I think the things  those people say require many conditions to happen
    • I think the things those people say are worded using fuzzy concepts, and so we can't trust that the concepts are correct
    • I think that in my social circle, there are many people saying those things and few people saying the opposite things, which gives the impression that the things that the first group say are probably true. In particular, the many will explore more arguments and so sound more convincing.
    • Some of the people who said the things are bad, and I used to listen to the bad people a lot.

You might also enjoy this tweet summary.

The above is condescending/a bit too simple, but I thought it was funny, hope you get some use out of it.

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Pato
Thank you a lot! I wasn't expecting a summary, I wrote it so maybe you could have it as a consideration for future posts, so I guess I should have written less simple.

I strongly agree on the dubious epistemics. A couple of corroborating experiences: 

  • When I looked at how people understood the orthogonality thesis, my impression was that somewhere from 20-80% of EAs believed that it showed that AI misalignment was extremely likely rather than (as, if anything, it actually shows) that it's not literally impossible.
  • These seemingly included an 80k careers advisor who suggested it as a reason why I should be much more concerned about AI; Will MacAskill, who in WWOtF describes  'The scenario most closely associated with [the book Superintelligence being] one in which a single AI agent designs better and better versions of itself, quickly developing abilities far greater than the abilities of all of humanity combined. Almost certainly, its aims would not be the same as humanity’s aims'; and some or all of the authors of the paper 'Long term cost-effectiveness of resilient foods for global catastrophes compared to artificial general intelligence' (David Denkenberger, Anders Sandberg, Ross John Tieman, and Joshua M. Pearce) which states 'the goals of the intelligence are essentially arbitrary [48]', with the reference pointing to Bostrom's ortho
... (read more)

Hi! Wanted to follow up as the author of the 80k software engineering career review, as I don't think this gives an accurate impression. A few things to say:

  • I try to have unusually high standards for explaining why I believe the things I write, so I really appreciate people pushing on issues like this.
     
  • At the time, when you responded to <the Anthropic person>, you said "I think <the Anthropic person> is probably right" (although you added "I don't think it's a good idea to take this sort of claim on trust for important career prioritisation research"). 
     
  • When I leave claims like this unsourced, it’s usually because I (and my editors) think they’re fairly weak claims, and/or they lack a clear source to reference. That is, the claim is effectively is a piece of research based on general knowledge (e.g. I wouldn't source the claim "Biden is the President of the USA”) and/or interviews with a range of experts, and the claim is weak or unimportant enough not to investigate further. (FWIW I think it’s likely I should have prioritised writing a longer footnote on why I believe this claim.)

    The closest data is the three surveys of NeurIPS researchers, but thes
... (read more)
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Arepo
Thanks Benjamin, I upvoted. Some things to clarify on my end: * I think the article as a whole was good, or I would have said so! * I did and do think a) that Anthropic Person (AP)  was probably right, b) that their attitude was nevertheless irresponsible and epistemically poor and c) that I made it clear that I thought despite them being probably right this needed more justification at the time (the last exchange I have a record of was me reopening the comment thread that you'd resolved to state that I really did think this was important and you re-closing it without further comment) * My concern with poor epistemics was less with reference to you - I presume you were working under time constraints  in an area you didn't have specialist knowledge on - than to AP, who had no such excuse. * I would have had no factual problem with the claim 'many experts believe'. The phrasing that I challenged, and the grounds I gave for challenging it was that 'many experts now believe'  (emphasis mine) implies positive change over time - that the proportion of experts who believe this is increasing. That doesn't seem anything like as self-evident as a comment about the POTUS.  * Fwiw I think the rate of change (and possibly even second derivative) of expert beliefs on such a speculative and rapidly evolving subject is much more important than the absolute number or even proportion of experts with the relevant belief, especially since it's very hard to define who even qualifies as an expert in such a field (per my comment, most of the staff at Google - and other big AI companies - could arguably qualify) * If you'd mentioned that other experts you'd spoken to had a sense that sentiment was changing (and mentioned those conversations as a pseudocitation) I would have been substantially less concerned by the point - though I do think it's important enough to merit proper research (though such research would have probably been beyond the scope of your 80k piece), and not to imp
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Benjamin Hilton
Thanks for this! Looks like we actually roughly agree overall :)
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aogara
I think it's noteworthy that surveys from 2016, 2019, and 2022 have all found roughly similar timelines to AGI (50% by ~2060) for the population of published ML researchers. On the other hand, the EA and AI safety communities seem much more focused on short timelines than they were seven years ago (though I don't have a source on that). 
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Benjamin Hilton
There are important reasons to think that the change by the EA community is within the measurement error of these surveys, which makes this less noteworthy. (Like say you put +/- 10 years and +/- 10% on all these answers - note there are loads of reasons why you wouldn't actually assess the uncertainty like this, (e.g. probabilities can't go below 0 or above 1), but just to get a feel for the uncertainty this helps. Well, then you get something like: *  10%-30% chance of TAI by 2026-2046 * 40%-60% by 2050-2070 * and 75%-95% by 2100 Then many many EA timelines and shifts in EA timelines fall within those errors.) Reasons why these surveys have huge error 1. Low response rates. The response rates were really quite low. 2. Low response rates + selection biases + not knowing the direction of those biases The surveys plausibly had a bunch of selection biases in various directions. This means you need a higher sample to converge on the population means, so the surveys probably aren't representative. But we're much less certain in which direction they're biased. Quoting me: 3. Other problems, like inconsistent answers in the survey itself AI impacts wrote some interesting caveats here, including: The 80k podcast on the 2016 survey goes into this too.

Cheers! You might want to follow up with 80,000 hours on the epistemics point, e.g., alexrjl would probably be interested in hearing about and then potentially addressing your complaints.

2[comment deleted]

This seems like a pretty general argument for being sceptical of anything, including EA!

I agree. In particular, it's a pretty general argument to be more skeptical of something than its most gung-ho advocates. And its stronger the more you think that these dynamics are going on. But for example, e.g., physics subject to experimental verification pretty much void this sort of objection.

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Greg_Colbourn
Also, the ending rubbed me up the wrong way a bit(!): Is this basically saying that you aren't interested in engaging in the object level  arguments? (Or the meta level arguments either, for that matter?) As you say: And:
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NunoSempere
Well, no, that was me saying that I thought it was a live possibility that this comment section would be swarmed by people with the opposite opinion in a way which was unpleasant for me. This didn't end up happening!

I like this, and think its healthy. I recommend talking to Quintin Pope for a smart person who has thought a lot about alignment, and came to the informed, inside-view conclusion that we have a 5% chance of doom (or just reading his posts or comments). He has updated me downwards on doom a lot.

Hopefully it gets you in a position where you're able to update more on evidence that I think is evidence, by getting you into a state where you have a better picture of what the best arguments against doom would be.

Is 5% low? 5% still strikes me as a "preventing this outcome should plausibly be civilization's #1 priority" level of risk.

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Lukas_Gloor
Yes to (paraphrased) "5% should plausibly still be civilization's top priority." However, in another sense, 5% is indeed low! I think that's a significant implicit source of disagreement over AI doom likelihoods – what sort of priors people start with. The following will be a bit simplistic (in reality proponents of each side will probably state their position in more sophisticated ways).   On one side, optimists may use a prior of "It's rare that humans build important new technology and it doesn't function the way it's intended." On the other side, pessimists can say that it has almost never happened that people who developed a revolutionary new technology displayed a lot of foresight about its long-term consequences when they started using it. For instance, there were comparatively few efforts at major social media companies to address ways in which social media might change society for the worse. Or, same reasoning for the food industry and the obesity epidemic or online dating and its effects on single parenthood rates.  I'm not saying revolutions in these sectors were overall negative for human happiness – just that there are what seems to be costly negative side-effects where no one competent has ever been "in charge" of proactively addressing them (nor do we have good plans to address them anytime soon). So, it's not easily apparent how we'll suddenly get rid of all these issues and fix the underlying dynamics, apart from "AI will give us god-like power to fix everything." The pessimists can argue that humans have never seemed particularly "in control" over technological progress. There's this accelerating force that improves things on some metrics but makes other things worse elsewhere. (Pinker-style arguments for the world getting better seem one-sided to me – he mostly looks at trends that were already relevant 100s of years ago, but doesn't talk about "newer problems" that only arose as Molochian side-effects of technological progress.)   AI will be
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D0TheMath
Eh, I don’t think this is a priors game. Quintin has lots of information, I have lots of information, so if we were both acting optimally according to differing priors, our opinions likely would have converged. In general I’m skeptical of arguments of disagreement which reduce things to differing priors. It’s just not physically or predictively correct, and it feels nice because now you no longer have an epistemological duty to go and see why relevant people have differing opinions.
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Lukas_Gloor
That would be a valid reply if I had said it's all about priors. All I said was that I think priors make up a significant implicit source of the disagreement – as suggested by some people thinking 5% risk of doom seems "high" and me thinking/reacting with "you wouldn't be saying that if you had anything close to my priors." Or maybe what I mean is stronger than "priors." "Differences in underlying worldviews" seems like the better description. Specifically, the worldview I identify more with, which I think many EAs don't share, is something like "The Yudkowskian worldview where the world is insane, most institutions are incompetent, Inadequate Equilibria is a big deal, etc." And that probably affects things like whether we anchor way below 50% or above 50% on what the risks should be that the culmination of accelerating technological progress will go well or not. That's misdescribing the scope of my point and drawing inappropriate inferences. Last time I made an object-level argument about AI misalignment risk was  just 3h before your comment. (Not sure it's particularly intelligible, but the point is, I'm trying! :) )  So, evidently, I agree that a lot of the discussion should be held at a deeper level than the one of priors/general worldviews. I'm a fan of Shard theory and some of the considerations behind it have already updated me towards a lower chance of doom than I had before starting to incorporate it more into my thinking. (Which I'm still in the process of doing.)
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D0TheMath
Yeah, he’s working on it, but its not his no. 1 priority. He developed shard theory.
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ben.smith
Agreed, but 5% is much lower than "certain or close to certain", which is the starting point Nuno Sempere said he was sceptical of. I don't know that anyone thinks doom is "certain or close to certain", though the April 1 post could be read that way. 5% is also much lower than, say, 50%, which seems to be a somewhat more common belief.
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NunoSempere
Thanks!
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Arepo
What outcome does he specifically predict 5% probability of?

I earlier gave some feedback on this, but more recently spent more time with it. I sent these comments to Nuno, and thought they could also be interesting to people here.

  • I think it’s pretty strong and important (as in, an important topic).
  • The first half in particular seems pretty dense. I could imagine some rewriting making it more understandable.
  • Many of the key points seem more encompassing than just AI. “Selection effects”, “being in the Bay Area” / “community epistemic problems”. I think I’d wish these could be presented as separate posts than linked to
... (read more)

The conjunctive/disjunctive dichotomy seems to be a major crux when it comes to AI x-risk. How much do belief in human progress, belief in a just world, the Long Peace, or even deep-rooted-by-evolution (genetic) collective optimism (all things in the "memetic water supply") play into the belief that the default is not-doom? Even as an atheist, I think it's sometimes difficult (not least because it's depressing to think about) to fully appreciate that we are "beyond the reach of God".

Note: After talking with an instructor, I added a "brief aside" section pointing out that ESPR separated itself from CFAR in 2019 and has been trying to mitigate the factors I complain about since then. This is important for ESPR in terms of not having its public reputation destroyed, but doesn't really affect the central points in the post.

Appreciated this post! Have you considered crossposting this to Lesswrong?  Seems like an important audience for this. 

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NunoSempere
Hey, I considered it and decided not to, but you are welcome to cross post it (or the original blog post <https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/23/my-highly-personal-skepticism-braindump-on-existential-risk/>)
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slg
Alright; I'll do so later today!

I completely agree with this position, but my take is different: Nuclear war risk is high all the time, and all geopolitical and climate risks can increase it.  It is perhaps not existential for the species, but certainly it is for cilivization. Given this, for me it is the top risk, and to some extent, all efforts for progress, political stabilization, climate risk mitigation are modestly important in themselves, and massively important to affect nuclear war risk.

Now, the problem with AI risk is that our understanding of why and how IA works is limit... (read more)

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Stephen Clare
Would you mind writing a bit more about the connection between climate change and nuclear risk?
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Arturo Macias
It increases large migrations, political unstability, drought... and that create geopolitical unstability, and the probability of conventional war, revolution, etc and those events can easily trigger a nucelar as long a nuclear power is involved. Do the math: around 1/3 of people lives in nuclear armed nations.  Nuclear war turn historical risk into something that can have geological time consequences. I don't believe there is really any other existential risk (on the timescale of decades) other than nuclear war.  There is only one "precipice" but many ways to fall there.

The point is this distorts the apparent balance of reason - maybe this is like Marxism, or NGDP targetting, or Georgism, or general semantics, perhaps many of which we will recognise were off on the wrong track.

I do note one is not like the others here. Marxism is probably way more wrong than any of the other beliefs, and I feel like the inclusion of the others rather weakens the case here.

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NunoSempere
Note that you can also think of many other topics people feel strongly about and how the balance of reason looks like e.g., feminist theory, monarchism & divine right of kings, anarcho-capitalist theory, Freudian psychology, Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, intelligent design, etc.
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Sabs
Shakespeare authorship is another classic one. Oxfordians will usually know far more about Shakespeare than you or I do!
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Arturo Macias
"Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism" Is this a test of attention? Or there is something I miss?
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NunoSempere
Well, I don't want to make the implication that everything that people believe in strongly is wrong. For example, in the case of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, community dynamics basically don't matter in the face of overwhelming experimental verification. 
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NunoSempere
Freudian psychology is another case which I think is interesting, in that it was pre-paradigmatic, and had both insights that have been incorporated into the mainstream (e.g., to analyze subconscious motivations) as well as some batshit insane stuff.
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Arturo Macias
All the rest of the list is between "utterly wrong" and "quite controversial", except for electromagnetism, that is "almost completely rigth"!
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NunoSempere
I don't have a point I'm arriving at here, but here is a paragraph from a philosophy of science book I'm reading that might be interesting: & in general the history of the theory of electromagnetism is fairly interesting.
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Arturo Macias
Now I see: my mathematician bias in action. For me maxwellian elctromagnetism means Maxwell (or Heaviside) equations. Of course, I have no idea about "physical interpretations" (either then or now). All physics I now come from "Physics for mathematicians" books.
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Greg_Colbourn
This is an important point. The difficulty with AGI x-risk is that experimental verification isn't really possible (short of catastrophic-but-not-existential warning shots, that the most doomy people think are unlikely). Can anyone steelman with any strongly held beliefs that are justified without resort to overwhelming empirical verification? Maybe certain moral beliefs like the Golden Rule? But what about risks? Is there precedent with non-empirically-verified commonly accepted belief in a risk?
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NunoSempere
Belief in "preventing nuclear war from producing widespread annihilation is important" seems reasonably widespread, and it is supported by empirical evidence that nuclear bombs are possible, even though the claim that nuclear war would be such that it would produce widespread annihilation hasn't been verified. But of course you can see that such widespread annihilation would be possible, by bombing the most populous cities in order.
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Greg_Colbourn
Yeah, I thought about nuclear risk, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like good enough evidence for the possibility of widespread annihilation (or even Trinity for that matter). This would only be a good example if there was widespread appreciation for GCR potential from nuclear risk before any nuclear detonations. I don't think there was? (Especially considering that there was only a few short years (1933 - 1945) from theory to practice with the nuclear chain reaction.)
  • Alien values
  • Maximalist desire for world domination
  • Convergence to a utility function
  • Very competent strategizing, of the “treacherous turn” variety
  • Self-improvement

Alien values are guaranteed unless we explicitly impart non-alien ethics to AI, which we currently don't know how to do, and don't know (or can't agree) what that ethics should be like. Next two points are synonyms and are also basically synonyms to "alien values". The treacherous turn is indeed unlikely (link).

Self-improvement is given, the only question is where is the "ceiling" of this improveme... (read more)

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