LessWrong 2.0 Reader

That depends on how bad things are perceived. They might be more optimistic than is warranted, but probably not by that much. I don't believe that so many people could decrease their worries by 40% for example (just my opinion). Not to mention all of the government monitoring people who approve of the models.

The issue is that no matter how much good stuff they do, one can always call it marginal and not enough. There aren't really any objective benchmarks for measuring it.

The justification for creating AI (at least in the heads of its developers) could look something like this (really simplified): Our current models seem safe, we have a plan on how to proceed and we believe that we will achieve a utopia.

You can argue that they are wrong and nothing like that will work, but that's their justification.

I asked for the place where the cofounders of that particular multi-billion dollar company lay out why they have chosen to accept riches and glory in exchange for building potentially omnicidal machines, and engage with serious critics and criticisms. 

In your response, you said that this was implicitly such a justification. 

Yet it engages not once with arguments for the default outcome being omnicide or omnicide-adjacent, nor with the personal incentives on the author. 

So this article does not at all engage with the obvious and major criticisms I have mentioned, nor the primary criticisms of the serious critics like Hinton, Bengio, Russell, and Yudkowsky, none of whom are in doubt about the potential upside. Insofar as this is an implicit attempt to deal with the serious critics and obvious arguments, it totally fails.

Yes, it is very rare to see someone to unflinchingly kill themselves and their family. But all of this glory and power is sufficient to get someone to do a little self-deception, a little looking away from the unpleasant thoughts, and that is often sufficient to cause people to make catastrophic decisions.

"Who can really say how the future will go? Think of all the good things that might happen! And I like all the people around me. I'm sure they're working as hard as they can. Let's keep building."

Sorry, is there a timezone for when the applications would close by, or is it AoE?

Thank you, I found it useful for me.

It might be easier to try to establish some track record by doing a small research project first. I don't know if you have enough runway for this though.

To the extent that complexity makes succesfully red-teaming our approaches too difficult, then we could try to mostly depend on simple approaches and only use more complex approaches only if we are confident that at least they won't can't make the situation worse.

My general view is that complex methods are only productive if you have a good feedback loop (either empirical feedback or a very robust theoretical feedback (e.g. proofs)). In the case of control, so long as we do a good job with red teaming^[1], we can build a good feedback loop such that complex methods can be productive. I think a similar process is often used in computer security and I think computer security often involves complex measures^[2].

As an aside, this also makes me relatively pessimistic about developing complex and unprincipled alignment (non-control) approaches for hard-to-experiment-on threat models like scheming (aka deceptive alignment). It will be difficult to make scheming model organisms which realistically reproduce the internal structure and capability level of models we're worried about and thus it will be hard to effectively iterate on complex and unprincipled measures.

An alternative approach for empirics is to focus on highly principled measures where we have a story for why they should generalize to scheming that we can test and iterate against (e.g. we'll understand how the model works which we can test by seeing if we can understand models in general).

I think that these examples are quite different. People who were voting for a president who ultimately turned out to be corrupt most likely predicted that the most likely scenario won't be totally horrible for them personally. And most of the times they are right, corrupt presidents are bad for countries, but you could live happily under their rule. People would at least expect to retain whatever valuable stuff they already have.

With AI the story is different. If a person thinks that the most likely scenario is the scenario where everyone dies, then they would not only expect to not win anything, but to lose everything they have. And media is actively talking about it, so it's not like they are not at least aware of the possibility. Even if they don't see them as personally responsible for everything, they sure don't want to feel the consequence of everyone dying.

This is not the case of someone doing something that they know is wrong but benefits them. If they truly believe that we are all going to die, then it's doing something they know is wrong and actively hurts them. And allegedly hurts them much more than any scenario that has happened so far (since we are all still alive).

So I believe that most people working on it, actually believe that we are going to be just fine. Whether this belief is warranted is another question.

I think the justification of this articles goes something like this: "here is the vision of future where we successfully align AI. It is utopian enough that it warrants pursuing it". Risks from creating AI just aren't the topic. They deal with them elsewhere. These essays were specifically focused on the "positive vision" part of the alignment. So I think you are critiquing the articles for lacking something they were never intended to have in the first place.

OpenAI seems to have made some basic commitments here. The word commit is mentioned 29 times. Other companies did it as well here, and here. Here Anthropic makes promises for optimistic, intermediate and pessimistic scenarios of AI development.