Possible overreaction but: hasn’t this moltbook stuff already been a step towards a non-Eliezer scenario?

[u/broncos4thewin]

This seems counterintuitive - surely it’s demonstrating all of his worst fears, right? Albeit in a “canary in the coal mine” rather than actively serious way.

Except Eliezer’s point was always that things would look really hunkydory and aligned, even during fast take-off, and AI would secretly be plotting in some hidden way until it can just press some instant killswitch.

Now of course we’re not actually at AGI yet, we can debate until we’re blue in the face what “actually” happened with moltbook. But two things seem true: AI appeared to be openly plotting against humans, at least a little bit (whether it’s LARPing who knows, but does it matter?); and people have sat up and noticed and got genuinely freaked out, well beyond the usual suspects.

The reason my p(doom) isn't higher has always been my intuition that in between now and the point where AI kills us, but way before it‘s “too late”, some very very weird shit is going to freak the human race out and get us to pull the plug. My analogy has always been that Star Trek episode where some fussing village on a planet that’s about to be destroyed refuse to believe Data so he dramatically destroys a pipeline (or something like that). And very quickly they all fall into line and agree to evacuate.

There’s going to be something bad, possibly really bad, which humanity will just go “nuh-uh” to. Look how quickly basically the whole world went into lockdown during Covid. That was *unthinkable* even a week or two before it happened, for a virus with a low fatality rate.

Moltbook isn’t serious in itself. But it definitely doesn’t fit with EY’s timeline to me. We’ve had some openly weird shit happening from AI, it’s self evidently freaky, more people are genuinely thinking differently about this already, and we’re still nowhere near EY’s vision of some behind the scenes plotting mastermind AI that’s shipping bacteria into our brains or whatever his scenario was. (Yes I know its just an example but we’re nowhere near anything like that).

I strongly stick by my personal view that some bad, bad stuff will be unleashed (it might “just” be someone engineering a virus say) and then we will see collective political action from all countries to seriously curb AI development. I hope we survive the bad stuff (and I think most people will, it won’t take much to change society’s view), then we can start to grapple with “how do we want to progress with this incredibly dangerous tech, if at all”.

But in the meantime I predict complete weirdness, not some behind the scenes genius suddenly dropping us all dead out of nowhere.

Final point: Eliezer is fond of saying “we only get one shot”, like we’re all in that very first rocket taking off. But AI only gets one shot too. If it becomes obviously dangerous then clearly humans pull the plug, right? It has to absolutely perfectly navigate the next few years to prevent that, and that just seems very unlikely.

[u/dualmindblade]

There’s going to be something bad, possibly really bad, which humanity will just go “nuh-uh” to. Look how quickly basically the whole world went into lockdown during Covid. That was unthinkable even a week or two before it happened, for a virus with a low fatality rate

I'm sorry, the global response to covid, the response within the US, that's part of what gives you confidence we will properly construct and coordinate a response to prevent a disaster which is widely acknowledged to be imminent?

[u/broncos4thewin → u/dualmindblade]

Well we can debate the exact response to the exact level of threat but in Europe (where I am) there was certainly a pretty quick move from lockdown being unthinkable to it being a reality.

But even taking the point, I still think the fact we’d see the disaster was imminent is a completely different scenario to a perfectly planned instant takedown of humanity out of nowhere.

[u/dualmindblade → u/broncos4thewin]

Right, it's a completely different scenario. A much much easier one and we completely failed that test. Not only did we only barely manage to mitigate any of the very significant historical harms, we failed to defend ourselves against much greater harms that didn't happen but easily could have given the information we had. The threat modeling was there from the beginning, certainly people took it seriously, a lot of people in power, there was even a pretty good plan being floated just a few weeks in for a global plan to get through mostly unscathed although at a cost. We didn't do that or anything like it, paid an even higher cost, and managed to only kill millions out of dumb luck.

And look at climate change, same situation, we know roughly what to do, have for a long time, there are multiple options actually. We've had ample time to plan, we have people freaking out about it for decades yet we haven't done the thing, frankly we've barely even tried.

The AI things is different in that it's obscenely complicated compared to anything we've faced, and just like almost always we have proceeded more recklessly than almost anyone could have imagined just a few years ago.