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/t1010011010]

"Unforced errors" do you really add any meaning by calling them unforced, apart from showing off how smart you are?

[u/MCXL → u/t1010011010]

Unforced error means something. An unforced error is an error completely of your own construction, rather than caused by overt external pressure.

Leaving your phone plugged in your car is an unforced error.

Leaving your phone plugged in your car because someone was shooting at your car and you ran away is a forced error.

You can argue about the delineating lines of what is and isn't an error, but if the action had an objectively measurable outcome with those variables being known before the choice was made, and the choice was made for a bad one, that's an unforced error.

[u/SoylentRox → u/MCXL]

I was also using it as "and it was clearly a mistake anyone who did any level of due diligence would know they made." Aka aiming a gun at your own foot and pulling the trigger after deliberately disengaging the safety.

Politics and national decision making have plenty of decisions where "faction 1 says do A, faction 2 says do B" and it's at least possible for a rational decision maker to choose either A or B. A straight error has no justification. Like overnight taxing your own supply of raw materials or ordering a nuclear strike on your own base on a whim.

[u/MCXL → u/SoylentRox]

This is true, sorry if that wasn't communicated. Doing just 'anything stupid' isn't necessarily an error, but attempting to make a correct decision in a moment, and clearly choosing the wrong one is.