Fighting For Our Lives - What Ordinary People Can Do

And if you think that Yudkowsky is justified in his predications... then what are you doing just sitting there?

I am sitting here having no idea how to solve the problem.

There are two parts to the problem. One is getting people to realise how dangerous the fire is that we're playing with right now, both the generality of people and the people working on making more fire. I can't see that happening short of a few actual but not world-destroying fires, compared with which Sydney is a puff of smoke. Starting such fires deliberately would be counterproductive: the response would be "well then, don't start fires, dum-dum". The other part is finding a way to safely make and use that fire. I have no good ideas about that, and my impression is that a lot of people have only bad ideas.

Finding nothing for me to do about this, I do nothing.

No, "raising awareness" is not a solution. Saying "all we need is awareness" is a lazy copout, somewhere between an appeal to magic and a pyramid scheme.

If other people here agree with this, I will have to add it to https://www.newslettr.com/p/contra-lesswrong-on-agi

Cool that you wanna get involved! I recommend the most important thing to do is coordinate with other people already working on AI safety, because they might have plans and projects already going on you can help with, and to avoid the unilateralist's curse. 
So, a bunch of places to look into to both understand the field of AI safety better and find people to collaborate with : 
http://aisafety.world/tiles/ (lists different people and institutions working on AI safety)
https://coda.io/@alignmentdev/alignmentecosystemdevelopment (lists AI safety communities, you might join some international ones or local ones near you)

I have an agenda around outreach (convincing relevant people to take AI safety seriously) and think it can be done productively, though it wouldn't look like 'screaming on the rooftops', but more expert discussion with relevant evidence. 

I'm happy to give an introduction to the field and give initial advice on promising directions, anyone interested dm me and we can schedule that. 

No, really. Climate change, cancer and war don't matter anymore when AGI is about to arrive.

Disagree, sort of - those are all instances of the same underlying generalized problem. Yeah, maybe we don't need to solve them all literally exactly the same way - but I think a complex systems view of learning gives me hunches that the climate system, body immune systems, geopolitical systems, reinforcement learning ai systems, and supervised learning systems all share key information theoretic properties.

I know that sounds kind of crazy if you don't already have a mechanistic model of what I'm trying to describe, and it might be hard to identify what I'm pointing at. I've been collecting resources intended to make it easier for "ordinary people" to get involved.

(Though nobody is ordinary, humans are very efficient, even by modern ML standards; current smart models just saw a ton of data. And, yeah, maybe you don't have time to see as much data as they saw.)

In general I think some of your claims about how to raise awareness are oversimplified; in general shouting at people is not a super effective way to change their views and hadn't been working until evidence showed up that was able to change people's views without intense shouting. Calmly showing examples and describing the threat seems to me to be more effective. But, it is  in fact important to (gently) activate your urgency and agency, because ensuring that we can create universalized <?microsolidarity/coprotection/peer-free-will-protection?> across not just social groups but species is not gonna be trivial. We gotta figure out how to make hypergrowth superplanners not eat literally all beings, including today's AIs, and a key part of that is figuring out how to create a big enough and open enough co-protection network.

As with most things I post, this was written in a hurry. Feedback welcome. I'm available to talk in realtime on discord at your whim.

How do you address the "capabilities overhang" argument?

If you keep capabilities research at the same pace, or speed it up, capable AGIs will be built at an earlier date.

Iff they are dangerous/uncontrollable, there will be direct evidence of this.  Perhaps science fiction scenarios where the AGIs commit murders before getting caught and shut down - something that clearly demonstrates the danger.  (I hope no one is ever killed by rogue AI, but in the past, most of the rules for industrial safety were written using the blood of killed workers as the ink.  I'm not sure there are OSHA rules that aren't directly from someone dying.)

Right now you are telling people about a wolf that doesn't even exist yet.  

If the AGIs are built in this earlier era, it means there is less compute available.  Right now, it might require an unfeasible amount of compute to train and host an AI - easily tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware just to host 1 instance.  This makes "escapes" difficult if there is only a few sets of the necessary hardware on the planet.

There is also less robotics available - with the recent tech company funding cuts to robotics efforts, even less robotics than that.  

There is not currently a stock solution to convince someone of the -realistic- dangers of AI who is not willfully engaged already.  There are many distracting stories about AI, which are worse than nothing. But describing a bad AI ought to be a far easier problem than aligning AI.  I believe we should be focused, paradoxically, perhaps dangerously, on finding and illustrating very clearly the shortest, most realistic and most impactful path to disaster.  

The most common misconception I think that people make is to look at the past, and our history of surviving disasters.  But most disasters thus far in planetary history have been heavily based in physics and biology - wars, plagues, asteroids.  An intelligence explosion would likely have only trivial constraints in either of these domains.  

I would try to start in illustrating that point.

Have just watched E.Y's "Bankless" interview

I don't disagree with his stance, but am struck that he sadly just isn't an effective promoter for people outside of his peer group.  His messaging is too disjointed and rambling. 

This is, in the short term clearly an (existential) political rather than technical problem, and needs to be solved politically rather than technically to buy time.  It is almost certainly solvable in the political sphere at least.

As an existence proof we have a significant percentage of western world's pop stressing about (comparatively) unimportant environmental issues (generally 5-15% vote Green in western elections) and they have built up an industry that is collecting and spending 100's of billions a year in mitigation activities - equivalent to something on the order of a million workers efforts directed toward it.

That psychology could certainly be redirected to the true existential threat of AI mageddon - there is clearly a large fraction of humans with patterns of belief needed to take this on this and other existential issues as a major cause if they have it explained in a compelling way.  Currently Eliezer appears to lack the charismatic down-to-earth conversational skills to promote this (maybe media training could fix that), but if a lot of money was directed towards buying effective communicators/influencers with large reach into youth markets to promote the issue it would likely quickly gain traction.  Elon would be an obvious person to ask for such financial assistance.  And there are any number of elite influencers who would likely take a pay check to push this.

Laws can be implemented if there is are enough people pushing for it, elected politicians follow the will of the people - if they put their money where their mouths are, and rogue states can be economically and militarily pressured into compliance. A real Butlerian Jihad.