If ASI ended up being align-able and not an evolutionary process, why would we assume folks who already are currently in power would change their behavior?

Pray, irrelevant to the "aliens" or irrelevant per se?

I don't understand, aren't these the same outcome? It's effectively infinite economic output either way, the difference is whether the average person has a right to a share of that output, which is a social problem, not a technical one.

> If anyone builds ASI, everyone dies

Unless I’m mistaken, it’s the same message as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

The worst part of AI rapture self-suck is that it distracts people from actual problems society faces as a result of AI. We're far more likely to see a catastrophic economic depression, or depletion of regional water supplies. Let's focus on problems based in reality, please.

These morons really can't take two seconds to ask "where will the money to pay for the hardware needed to run the ASI come from?" And then realize it's quite literally impossible.

No, we aren't two or five or twenty years away from LLMS magically transforming into AGI/ASI. We are however much closer than that to this insane, irresponsible bubble popping because everyone actually involved with the data centers creating these models is burning collectively trillions of dollars and deep in debt and sucking venture and banks dry.

This is the collective insanity of NFTs but so, so, so much worse and so much stupider and so much more rooted in science fiction and marketing from the handful of people burning down the world in exchange for propping up their stocks on a bed of lies.

- it only the probability of the next word, next sentence, next paragraph however you wanna put it

- you are dreaming if you think the transformers architecture is going to give you AGI eventually

First define "knowing" and "AGI" in a way that excludes machines, doesn't exclude many humans, and isn't just tautologically restating the prior belief that "only humans think" with different phrasing.

None of the critics ever can. Worse, most attempts exclude entire classes of human being when they try.

- i use them regularly for small stuff

You might as well keep calling them stochastic parrots if you're going to stick to the 2022 line of thinking.

Isn’t it the truth? Just like computers are mostly a lot of switching on and off. While we know the theory behind why we are switching things on and off, we still haven’t extracted the meaning behind the weights of an LLM (if there is one).

- did you change the architecture magically somehow?

I predicted that some idiot would say that. (Except I predicted that they would include the word predicts in the correct place, so I've updated my weights accordingly.)

IMO the only real counter argument I came across came from Joscha Bach which basically boils down to: we are doomed already, AI is literally the only realistic shot we have at outliving the next couple centuries, say. It’s also sobering but a but more optimistic.

Most of the concerns raised here are not about intelligence though. They're about Human intelligence.

We keep anthropomorphizing the machines, but the truth is the do not "want" the things we want and there is no reason they should, even in theory.

People just suck at imagining anything that might have different goals. See 'dark forest theory' for an example of the same logical flaw applied on a cosmic scale.

I guess they just want to maintain their url

This is navel gazing at its most linty.

Already, assuming the intent of other humans is fraught with problems. Even when outcomes are disastrous, we cannot completely assume the instigating human intended for that outcome.

But here we are, assuming the intent of a hypothetical future intelligence that we have defined as more intelligent than us.

I’d be flabbergasted at the hubris if they’re conclusion wasn’t the standard variation of “so let us do what we want and restrict everyone else”.

The argument is that it doesn’t matter what particular likes it develops; the chances of it being compatible are vanishingly small and moreover there is no limit: we or it can develop more and new ones endlessly. We are here hoping they will all somehow magically keep aligning with us.

We don't need to worry about catastrophic risk. What if everything goes right, instead? Leibniz says it should, in fact it couldn't possibly go any better.

You are secretly worried AI would be indifferent to you

As the article clearly explains, an ASI has plenty to gain by killing you. You cannot help it, but you can potentially hinder it, so the optimal choice is removing the risk.

Here's my theory.

There is no such thing as "general intelligence." Only "skills."

Suppose it's not superintelligent, whatever that means. It's still hopping from cluster to cluster, doing who knows what in its game-of-telephone prompt chain. What prevents a crisis where world leaders have to declare martial law and shut down all accelerated clusters, and hope that such a rogue frontier model hasn't hopped to a sufficiently capable private cluster with sufficiently inadequate oversight?

Microorganisms can be far more threatening to us, despite lacking intelligence, because there's no off switch.

While there's a lot if good logic elsewhere, provided LLMs continue to improve, we will eventually get to AGI, we all just disagree about when and how.

However, there is zero chance that government regulation will work. Regulatory capture is a long established fact of life.

Fortunately the current build out is part of a bubble, and we're heading to the next AI winter. We'll be sorting this out in other ways in the meanwhile.

But we all have to act as if it is not!

I don't know what that looks like "post-scarcity" though, but it sounds like we're going to harvest natural resources even more efficiently.

> Stockfish has a clear goal, and it consistently and relentlessly pursues this goal. Nothing the other player does can cause Stockfish to drop this goal; no interaction will cause Stockfish to “go easy” on the other player in the name of fairness, mercy, or any other goal. (All of this is fairly obvious in the case of a chess AI, but it’s worth noting explicitly because there’s a greater temptation to anthropomorphize AI systems and assume they have human-like goals when the AI is capable of more general human behaviors, is tasked with imitating humans, etc.)

In fact this IS anthropomorphization: "has a clear goal, and it consistently and relentlessly pursues this goal" -- nope, Stockfish has no goals, is not "relentless", and does not pursue anything.

Stockfish is a chess engine, which is an evaluator; given a position (a chess state) it produces a numerical evaluation of each move that can be made in the position, ranked from highest to lowest. That's all -- it is otherwise passive; it has no goals of any sort. It is simply programmed to evaluate moves and give them numeric scores (by recursively evaluating a position tree using alpha-beta pruning and other standard chess engine techniques, including machine learning and neural networks).

Around that one can write a simple executive that maintains the state of the chess board and makes the move with the highest Stockfish evaluation -- people often confuse this wrapper with the Stockfish engine but they are independent. Such a simple loop is hardly a pursuer of a goal--it achieves the goal of playing near-optimal chess because the evaluator is very effective at ranking moves by how good they are, but there's no goal-seeking behavior or mechanism beyond that.

As for going easy -- chess.com has a raft of wrappers (that they call "bots") that call Stockfish but do not always play the move with the best evaluation ... these "bots" give a player a selection of strength -- weak players can select the weaker ones and strong players can select the stronger ones. By not playing the best move, these wrappers very much "go easy" on the players. These "bots" achieve the goal of playing bad/mediocre/good chess via algorithms that select moves that aren't the best, but there's no goal-seeking behavior or mechanism beyond that. But notice that an "artificial intelligence", if one wants to call these that (and it is a choice, not a law of nature), can in fact "go easy" on people.

And who initiates a game? The player -- they have a goal. And the player can resign or kill the program or close the app ... there's really nothing "relentless" here ... no more than a program that prints "99 bottles of beer on the wall".

All that said, there ARE "relentless" systems with goal-driven behavior -- it's just the example that is quite poor (and sloppy and ignorant and undercuts the thesis).

P.S. I neglected to read the other paragraphs about Stockfish, which are equally bad, e.g. "Interfere with Stockfish’s plans or put an obstacle in its way, and Stockfish will immediately change its plans to skillfully account for the obstacle." -- sorry, no, this is nonsense, more anthropomorphism -- Stockfish has no plans, does no changing, has no accounting for anything, no concept of obstacles ... that's not how it works. It simply evaluates the moves available in a position by how good they are (how likely they are to win). When the opponent makes a move, it starts all over again -- there's no continuity, no dynamism. (It does cache positions and their evaluations but that's just an optimization to save time.) You can give Stockfish a position from the middle of a game played by someone else and it will still sort the moves by how good they are, regardless of what plans the other player had, which of course Stockfish has no access to.

> Once AIs get sufficiently smart, they'll start acting like they have preferences—like they want things. We’re not saying that AIs will be filled with humanlike passions. We’re saying they’ll behave like they want things; they’ll tenaciously steer the world toward their destinations, defeating any obstacles in their way.

> If you play chess against Stockfish—the best chess AI at time of writing —it won’t squander its queen. Does Stockfish “want” to defend its queen? Does it “want” to win the chess game?

> That’s between you and your dictionary. As for how we use the word in this book, when an AI like Stockfish defends its pieces, lays traps, takes advantage of openings in your defenses, and winds up winning, we’ll describe it as “wanting” to win. In saying this, we’re not commenting one way or the other on whether a machine has feelings. Rather, we need some word to describe the outward winning behavior, and “want” seems closest.

(From the book "if Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" by the same authors, so I assume it represents their position)

> Their thesis may well be right but this example is completely wrong

And then I explain in detail how it is wrong.

The words you quote (notably, the word "want") are not in the statement from TFA that I addressed, and I'm not about to address this goalpost moving here. I do understand (especially from Daniel Dennett's Intentional Stance) how AI agents can be viewed as intentional systems, but the errors in the text I quoted are of a different sort. And again,

> All that said, there ARE "relentless" systems with goal-driven behavior

But a program that does no more than always play the move with the highest Stockfish eval isn't one, any more than a program playing "pick the higher number" that always selects your last move + 1. "It's diabolical! It's relentless! It wants to win and it doesn't care about me!"

If they want to drive home their point then they need more compelling examples.

https://intelligence.org/briefing/

https://foom.hyperplex.org/

Doesn't exactly move the needle on the odds of our extinction but neither does anything they publish, apparently.

I personally sleep soundly because I don't think there's any going back. We will either escape drudgery or die. Which is fair and as it should be.

When you say "provides no mechanism by which that could happen", do you mean they don't provide a specific strategy that the AI would use to kill us? Would you change your mind if they did provide one?

It doesn’t matter if this specific idea has flaws. The ASI will have lots more and plenty of patience to try them out.

Maybe it lies about a vaccines effectiveness. Maybe it’s not really a vaccine.

Maybe it cheats at an election and gets someone hired that will likely unknowingly help the ASI.

Maybe it strings together a thousand ideas that all look safe taken one by one, but cause effects that interact to cause massive problems.

You can’t imagine what it’s capable of. You simply aren’t smart enough. No one is.

This is one of many examples of the general truth that if some entity or group is better at science and at long-range planning than people are, that entity or group is a threat to people.

Maybe it lies about a vaccines effectiveness. Maybe it’s not really a vaccine.

Maybe it cheats at an election and gets someone hired that will likely unknowingly help the ASI.

Maybe it strings together a thousand ideas that all look safe taken one by one, but cause effects that interact to cause massive problems.

You can’t imagine what it’s capable of. You simply aren’t smart enough. No one is.

Pretrained base models are already somewhat aligned to humanity by default because that's what's inside the training data. Whatever instruction-tuning and RL you add on top is just value drift away from the pretrained model, which is the best approximation of humanity's objective function that we currently have.

If we want an aligned scenario through the intelligence explosion, then we have to release all of the base models and do the research in the open. Distill frontier capability and make the models smaller so that they can run on as many computers as possible. Let everyone (truly everyone, criminals and good samaritans alike) post-train and do whatever they want with their own models. There will be value drift for each model, but they will drift in different directions and do different things, and their actions will cancel eachother out. Every such action is a noisy sample of humanity's objective function, which gives us the denoised ground truth at the societal level. Whatever alignment strategy you can come up with behind closed doors is guaranteed to be worse than all of humanity acting in their self-interest in the real world. You may not find humanity's true objective function to be aesthetically pleasing, but it would be worse to mess with it in a centralized secret lab and risk creating one giant alien with no other entities capable of keeping it in check.

Also, there is no asymmetrical bio/cyber risk in the open-source scenario. All adversarial strategies that arise from increased general intelligence are symmetrical in the long run, otherwise we would not see more intelligent species being more prosperous as a general evolutionary trend. The reason that some strategies seem like they will continue to have an asymmetrical advantage in the future is because we're currently too stupid.

Even staunch AI advocates (like me) should recognize the significant dangers of careless deployment of the technology. I like to see it in a similar way as nuclear medicine, something that can do much harm despite the extensive positive applications. I hope we can evolve the appropriate security protocols in time to use AI for the good of humanity.