Five Worlds of AI (by Scott Aaronson and Boaz Barak)

post by mishka · 2023-05-02T13:23:41.544Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

This is a link post for https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7266

A relatively short April 27, 2023 post attempting to classify AI outcomes into 5 main cases:

• AI-Fizzle
• Not-AI-Fizzle
  • Civilization recognizably continues
    • Futurama
    • AI-Dystopia
  • Civilization does not recognizably continue
    • Singularia
    • Paperclipalypse

In other words, no one has done for AI what Russell Impagliazzo did for complexity theory in 1995, when he defined the five worlds Algorithmica, Heuristica, Pessiland, Minicrypt, and Cryptomania, corresponding to five possible resolutions of the P vs. NP problem along with the central unsolved problems of cryptography.

The authors elaborate:

Like in Impagliazzo’s 1995 paper on the five potential worlds of the difficulty of NP problems, we will not try to be exhaustive but rather concentrate on extreme cases. It’s possible that we’ll end up in a mixture of worlds or a situation not described by any of the worlds. Indeed, one crucial difference between our setting and Impagliazzo’s, is that in the complexity case, the worlds corresponded to concrete (and mutually exclusive) mathematical conjectures. So in some sense, the question wasn’t “which world will we live in?” but “which world have we Platonically always lived in, without knowing it?” In contrast, the impact of AI will be a complex mix of mathematical bounds, computational capabilities, human discoveries, and social and legal issues. Hence, the worlds we describe depend on more than just the fundamental capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, and humanity could also shift from one of these worlds to another over time.

Extensive discussion in the comments. Eliezer writes a comment, and some of the replies to that comment are quite informative.

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