Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

Hanson often takes his turn to speak this way: he summarizes Yudkowsky's last argument, in a way that at least superficially does not seem unfair or tendentious, then explains why he doesn't find it compelling, then explains why his own position is more compelling.

Yudkowsky seems to respond to Hanson's points without summarizing them first.

I find Hanson to be hugely more effective in the recording. Is it because of this? I was less sympathetic to Yudkowsky's point of view before I started listening, so it's hard for me to tell if this is an illusion.

Modifiers like "new" or "old" in titles or filenames quickly become unhelpful. It's generally better to use dates (in this case, something like "Jun 2011" would do the trick).

Can someone who agrees with Yudkowsky do an extended summary of Yudkowsky's position and arguments in text, the way Hanson summarized his position and arguments in text?

Now on Youtube: Yudkowsky vs Hanson on the Intelligence Explosion - Jane Street Debate 2011.

72:00 - Hanson cites the AAAI white paper which rails against alarmism.

That seems more likely to be a tussle over funding. If the panic-stricken screechers make enough noise, it might adversely affect their member's funding. Something rather like that has happened before:

It was rumoured in some of the UK national press of the time that Margaret Thatcher watched Professor Fredkin being interviewed on a late night TV science programme. Fredkin explained that superintelligent machines were destined to surpass the human race in intelligence quite soon, and that if we were lucky they might find human beings interesting enough to keep us around as pets. The rumour is that Margaret Thatcher decided that the ``artificial intelligentsia'' whom she was just proposing to give lots of research funds under the Alvey Initiative were seriously deranged.

• http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/Robots_Wont_Rule2.shtml#Bad

In both of these debates, the change in "margin of victory" between people was smaller than the number of people who voted the first time but not the second. In the debate with Yudkowsky, Hanson's margin of victory went from -5 to 1, and 20 voters dropped out. In the debate with Caplan the margin went from 32 to 5--actually getting smaller--and 17 voters dropped out. I'm not sure if we can even determine a "winner" in terms of audience popularity, with that many disappearing votes. Is it normal in debates for large numbers of audience members to not vote at the end?

My two cents:

1. Is it really useful to debate such a difficult and completely unintuitive concept in 90 minutes? It took me at least 20 hours pure reading time to finish the AI-foom debate, which consists of over 50 blog-posts.
2. Hanson uses simpler analogies than Yudkowsky and tries to explain basic concepts, whereas Yudkowsky's information-dense arguments often aim too high, especially considering the short time.

Legg's Is there an Elegant Universal Theory of Prediction? is somewhat relevant to parts of this discussion.

How about a LW poll regarding this issue?

(Is there some new way to make one, since the site redesign, or are we still at vote-up-down-karma-balance pattern?)

Hanson seems to agree that if we get human-level agents that are cheap to run, this gets us a local takeover. I don't think that having cheap chimp-level agents widely available at that time overturns the advantage of gaining access to cheap human-level agents. So if we grant that the capability of AIs gets increased gradually and publicly, all that a local group needs to take over the world is make the step from chimp-level state-of-the-art agents to human-level agents before any other group does that. If chimp-level agents are not that different from human-level agents, this could be a relatively simple step, that a single group is capable of making in secret.

(I understand the limitations of this classification, but we could as well see this as an analogy to how the evolution developed humans from their ancestors with just a little bit of extra capacity, and that little bit mattered a lot, given sufficient time to express its capability. The local team is not developing the human culture, it is making humans where we previously had only chimps. And then it gives the humans cheap computing power to run on and develop their powerful culture.)

Hanson has made a lot of comments recently about how intellligence is poorly defined and how we don't really know what it is - e.g. 77:30 and 83:00 minutes in. I think we do now have a pretty good idea about that - thanks to the Hutter/Legg work on universal intelligence. If Hanson was more familiar with this sort of material, I rather doubt he would say the kinds of things he is currently saying.

Whoever asked Robin about his opinion that social skills separated humans from chimpanzees "Can you envision a scenario where one of the computers acquired this 'Social Skill' then said to all the other computers "hey guys lets go have a revolution" " Love that comment

73:00 - this seems to be a mis-summary by Hanson. I am pretty sure that Norvig was saying that complex models were still useful - not that simpler ones didn't even exist.

The situation is similar to that with compression. If you can compress a bit that is still useful - and it is easier to do than compressing a lot.

It's not a brain in a box in a basement - and it's not one grand architectural insight - but I think the NSA shows how a secretive organisation can get ahead and stay ahead - if it is big and well funded enough. Otherwise, public collaboration tends to get ahead and stay ahead, along similar lines to those Robin mentions.

Google, Apple, Facebook etc. are less-extreme versions of this kind of thing, in that they keep trade secrets which give them advantages - and don't contribute all of these back to the global ecosystem. As a result they gradually stack up know-how that others lack. If they can get enough of that, then they will gradually pull ahead - if they are left to their own devices.

The issue of whether a company will eventually pull ahead is an issue which has quite a bit to do with anti-trust legislation - as I discuss in One Big Organism.

The issue of whether one government will eventually pull ahead is a bit different. There's no government-level anti-trust legislation. However expansionist governments are globally frowned upon.

I don't think there are too many other significant players besides companies and governments.

The "silver bullet" idea doesn't seem to be worth too much. As Eray says: "Every algorithm encodes a bit of intelligence". We know that advanced intelligence necessarily highly complex. You can't predict a complex world without being that complex yourself. Of course, human intelligence might be relatively simple - in which case it might only take a few leaps to get to it. The history of machine intelligence fairly strongly suggests a long gradual slog to me - but it is at least possible to argue that people have been doing it all wrong so far.

Hanson gets polite and respectful treatment for his emulation scenario. I am not convinced that is the right approach. Emulations first is a pretty crazy idea - and Hanson doesn't appear to have been advised about that a sufficiently large number of times yet.

Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con.

The thesis seems pretty obviously true to me, though there is some issue over how much is "much".

Google or Facebook control a much larger fraction the world compared to farmers or industy folk from decades ago. Essentially technological progress promotes wealth inequality by providing the powerful with technology for keeping control of their wealth and power. So, we have more wealth inequality than ever - and will most likely have even more wealth inequality in the future.

Hanson's debating success is all the more impressive given that he was fighting with a handicap. Imagine how potent his debating would be if he was actually arguing for a correct position!