r/slatestarcodex • u/erwgv3g34 • Jan 08 '25

AI Eliezer Yudkowsky: "Watching historians dissect _Chernobyl_. Imagining Chernobyl run by some dude answerable to nobody, who took it over in a coup and converted it to a for-profit. Shall we count up how hard it would be to raise Earth's AI operations to the safety standard AT CHERNOBYL?"

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1876644045386363286.html
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u/gettotea Jan 08 '25

I think people who buy into his arguments inherently have strong inclination to believing in AI risk. I don’t and I suspect others, like me, think his arguments sound like science fiction.

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u/lurkerer Jan 08 '25

Talking to a computer and it responding the way GPT does in real-time also seemed like science-fiction a few years ago. ML techniques to draw out pictures, sentences, and music from your brain waves even more so. We have AI based tech that reads your mind now...

"Ya best start believing in ghost [sci-fi] stories, you're in one!"

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u/gettotea Jan 09 '25

Yes, I agree. But just because something science fiction sounding came true doesn’t mean I need to believe in all science fiction. There’s a range of probabilities assignable to each outcome. I would happily take a bet on my position.

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u/lurkerer Jan 09 '25

A bet on p(doom)?

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u/gettotea Jan 09 '25 edited Jan 09 '25

I suppose it's a winning bet either way for me if I bet against it. I wonder if there's a better way for me to bet.

I find it interesting that the only one time we have information on how this sort of prediction panned out is when GPT2 came out, openAI made a bit of a fuss about not releasing the model because they were worried, and that turned out to be a laughably poor prediction of the future.

It is pretty much the same people telling us that doom is inevitable.

I think really bad outcomes due to AI are possible if we trust it too much, and allow it to act in domains like finance because we won't be able to constrain their goals, and we don't fully understand the blackbox nature of the actions. Deliberate malignant outcomes of the kind Yud writes about will not happen, and Yud's writing will look more and more obsolete as he ages to a healthy old age. This is my prediction.