I can't say which people believe which things, because most of them communicated with me in confidence, except for Stuart Russell and Shane Legg because they've made public comments about it about their worries about intelligence explosion:
http://futureoflife.org/PDF/stuart_russell.pdf
http://lesswrong.com/lw/691/qa_with_shane_legg_on_risks_from...
A world of difference actually.
Disclaimer: I have read a bunch of the LessWrong "canon" and believe many of their points, sans perhaps the timescale on which recursive self improvement can happen. I think most of my acceptance comes from the relatively poor quality of their critics, who seem to attribute many strawmanish positions to them or who seem more concerned with namecalling-via-cult.
I cannot help but think that if a better criticism exists, why hasn't anyone said it yet?
The whole lesswrong/MIRI thing is built around the strawman of unfriendly AI, as though it were already real. What you are asking is, why aren't there better arguments against strawmen and radical pontification?
It's like if I said, "There is a chance that mean aliens will come soon, therefore we need to start building defense systems." Ok, show me any proof that there are aliens coming or even an avenue for aliens to come here and be unfriendly.
Sure, it's a possibility that there are mean aliens who are going to attack us, but there is absolutely nothing to think that is a thing that is going to happen soon.
Granted, this is not a perfect analogy but I think it makes my point well. I am uncharitable because it's charlatanism and seems to be gaining traction - in the same vein as antivaxxers.
Consider that the general position seems to be "we don't know when SMI would happen, but if we use the metric that our critics say is more reliable than ours we see that a survey of many AI experts we can find seem to say that human level AI is possible in about 30-50 years at 50% probability." (numbers are quoted from memory and most likely incorrect)
Yet here you are saying that MIRI/LW claims "it's a thing that's going to happen soon", that there is "absolutely nothing to think that is a thing". I can't help but think most of the "charlatanism" you see is manufactured in your own head and not a product of reading and understanding your opponent's position.
Yes, this is an unabashed ad hominem, but I wish people would attack arguments that exist rather than arguments that are easy to knock down. It's upsetting to me that, when I say that your arguments are lacking, your response is "So what? The Enemy is Evil and Stupid and I do not need to understand them."
As Ben said in your link, "once we have AGI systems that are massively smarter than people, they are going to do what they want to do, or what other powerful forces in the universe want them to do, but not necessarily what we want them to do." That's not the most reassuring comment ever.
No one who has put any serious thought into AGI denies the possibility of an existential threat from it. The fact is though that we have absolutely no clue what chain of events would lead to that. In fact we have (almost) no clue what chain of events will lead to AGI in the first place.
The best way to know what will come from AGI is to start building it and seeing where the controls and capabilities are going. I personally think the AGI community needs to put more effort into a roadmap, which is done at every AGI conference to some degree. The problem though is that it's just too early and there just aren't enough researchers and funds to have any inkling about what is (are) going to be the best approaches to AGI. I could go all day and caveat everything, but the bottom line is, just start building because we are so far from it absolutely anything helps.
"once we have AGI systems that are massively smarter than people, they are going to do what they want to do, or what other powerful forces in the universe want them to do, but not necessarily what we want them to do." That's not the most reassuring comment ever.
Right. My personal proposition is:
AGI:Humans::Humans:Ants
Ben seems to share this approach. So to think we could control it after it's fifth iteration or so is silly. We also share the transhumanist philosophy which I think is still pretty fringe even within the tech community so I try not to go into that too much because it's just a whole ball of wax. I do think though that we need to have some of these conversations about what is next if human work is not necessary and later what we do if humanity itself is not at the top of the intelligence chain.
In fact a number of the signatories that Luke cites are quoted as saying on no uncertain terms that fear of AI is widely out of proportion to its capabilities now and for the foreseeable future. The most prominent I'm aware of saying thing to this effect are Yoshua Bengio, Geoff Hinton, and Yann LeCun.
I think however that says more about the lack of awareness on the part of the readers than anything. That combination is a sure sign of a very narrow field of study with big political footprint and is typical of similar fields such as climatology, macroeconomics etc... where rank amateur thinks they have insight to the same degree as expert by virtue of "just thinking about it."
I wouldn't worry, you and the parent already have solid footing in "appeal to authority" territory.
They aren't making individually cogent thought out and articulated arguments, they are all just saying "LOUD NOISES, this is a scary thing that someone said could be bad, therefore I think it's a scary thing." If they could give some good timelines, facts and steps toward AGI then we could debate that on merits. As it is no one is doing that, the whole thing is an appeal to authority from the beginning.
So yes, the sources for these people need to be inspected further.
Unlike climatology, superintelligence is not yet an established scientific field. It does not currently exist to study. There are no experts. There is no consensus to be had. Everyone is technically unqualified to speak on the subject.
Artificial intelligence experts today may be able to render guesses more accurate than most as to the arrival of superintelligence via the AGI path. However, this does not confer upon them any sort of authoritative high ground on the matter, nor does it place the issue squarely in their domain.
Doing so would be analogous to trusting a group of explosives experts circa 1944 in saying that we have nothing to fear from atomic weapons, because such devices are to utilize conventional explosive mechanisms in their operation.
Unlike climatology, superintelligence is not yet an established scientific field. It does not currently exist to study. There are no experts. There is no consensus to be had. Everyone is technically unqualified to speak on the subject.
How do you figure? There are AGI journals[1], conferences[2], speaker circuits, hackathons etc...So I think you just don't know about them.
Doing so would be analogous to trusting a group of explosives experts circa 1944 in saying that we have nothing to fear from atomic weapons, because such devices are to utilize conventional explosive mechanisms in their operation.
This is a great analogy and I often make the comparison between nuclear technologies (power, radiometry, weapons) to AGI because of scope and potential. The problem however with your analogy is that the current experts aren't analogous to explosives experts, they are more analogous to Szilárd/Einstein. This is why I advocate for an AGI Manhattan project. We need about between 5-10 years of the smartest people alive working on building it. Not thinking about it, building towards it.
>There are actually people who are studying AGI full time and have made it their life work, regardless of whether you know about it or not.
You mean like the people at MIRI? In a previous post, you suggest that most of them don't deserve any play at all on the topic.
>How do you figure? There are AGI journals[1], conferences[2], speaker circuits, hackathons etc...So I think you just don't know about them.
Oh but I do, and my statement still stands regardless. AGI does not yet exist. The field itself is in its infancy, and hardly established relative to other fields. As such, there are no experts, nor any consensus, at least not in any authoritative sense.
If you insist upon dismissing the input of select people entirely, then the bar for such a decision should be that they are authoritatively incorrect, or that they are authoritatively unqualified to speak. The problem is that there is nothing to derive such authority from yet, precisely because the field is in its infancy.
>The problem however with your analogy is that the current experts aren't analogous to explosives experts, they are more analogous to Szilárd/Einstein.
Unlike atomic weapons prior to the first test shot (or even prior to Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 experiment), AGI does not yet have a solid theoretical underpinning, let alone a proof of concept. Perhaps the best analogy lies somewhere in between our interpretations.
>This is why I advocate for an AGI Manhattan project.
Funny enough we're in total agreement here. I was even advocating for the same thing via another post in this thread.
>Not thinking about it, building towards it.
There is the question of timing. If the Manhattan Project itself was initiated earlier than it had been, there may not have been enough time for the aforementioned theoretical underpinnings to have been reasoned about to the level they were.
No, like Joscha Bach, Yoshua Bengio, Ben Goertzel etc... the MIRI people are thinking about AI, not working on it. I should have made that point clearer and said as much. For AGI building = research, thinking =/= research. So for example, my Masters thesis is AGI implications of a nation state building it. This includes several rough roadmaps to AGI. I would not call myself anything close to an expert or researcher working on AGI because I am not building systems that are testing hypotheses about machine intelligence.
AGI does not yet exist.
Once it does, the field (in theory) doesn't really exist anymore really. So there can only be a research into it before it is complete. Arguably an AGI's (if you fall on the side of it being complete at "birth") recursive self improvement makes human input basically worthless.
The only consensus we will come to is when we all agree that the thing we built is actually an AGI. I can talk about those measures but at the end of the day most of the leading people think it's going to be "we'll know it when we see it."
Unlike atomic weapons prior to the first test shot (or even prior to Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 experiment), AGI does not yet have a solid theoretical underpinning, let alone a proof of concept.
Exactly. Which has been my point all along. Arguing about safety is totally a worthless effort, and harmful in my opinion, when we have no idea what the foundations are or the paths to it. When people are calling for regulation before we have anything like real funding for it it totally stifles the field. At best it diverts resources to making "provably safe" AI which is an endless rabbit hole in my opinion because it's an impossible metric.
there may not have been enough time for the aforementioned theoretical underpinnings to have been reasoned about to the level they were.
Enough time? That makes no sense. Lets instead call it an "Delta project" for AI - the entire front end of the project can be building the theoretical framework. There are no rules stating that a project has to be turnkey to realize a goal.
While they're not building AGI, I would argue that their thinking constitutes not only work, but progress. MIRI is attempting to flesh out the murky, abstract nature of the control problem and translate it into something more concrete, specifically mathematical models that may one day evolve into provably-sound foundations for future work.
>Once it does, the field (in theory) doesn't really exist anymore really. So there can only be a research into it before it is complete.
It is possible and perhaps even likely that the first AGI we create will be contained, but otherwise unsatisfactory to release or utilize without further iteration and study of the design. After all, it's probably a bad idea (in most cases) to leverage its superhuman intelligence if you believe the thing is malicious or otherwise has motives that do not align with human interests.
That said, I cannot imagine research proceeding in any sort of public fashion once that threshold has been passed, so in a way you're likely correct.
>Arguing about safety is totally a worthless effort, and harmful in my opinion, when we have no idea what the foundations are or the paths to it.
While I agree regulation is premature, prominent people like Musk advocating for AGI safety, if only in a general sense, strikes me as a positive thing due to the cultural effects.
Prior to Musk, Hawking, et al., if you mentioned the prospect of unsafe AI, you'd be laughed at in all but the most niche communities. The notion was clearly just something confined to the realm of science fiction movies. Nothing with similarly catastrophic ramifications could ever happen in real life, or otherwise such things were indefinitely far off in the future.
I'm not advocating fear mongering, just saying that when AGI actually does become a serious safety concern, it's better to have the cultural climate already primed and receptive to addressing the problem. On the other hand, if the safety angle is pushed too hard now, it may backfire and have the opposite effect later, and that would be unfortunate.
>There are no rules stating that a project has to be turnkey to realize a goal.
No, but in practice there are political and financial constraints that can sometimes have a similar effect. If a project isn't properly aligned with those constraints, then it becomes more likely to fail. The longer and more expensive a project is, the harder it is to justify or continue to justify in such climates.
I signed the document because I wanted to signal to Max Tegmark and his colleagues that I am in favor of research aimed at figuring out how to maximize the odds that AGI systems are robust and beneficial.
The letter helps give visibility and to that end better avenues for funding for AGI projects.
[1]http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.hk/