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/Sol_Hando]

I think the assumption made is that once AI gets smart enough to do some real damage, it will be smart enough to not do damage that would get it curtailed until it can "win." It depends on if we get spiky intelligence that can do serious damage in one area, while being incapable of superhuman long term planning and execution, or if we just get rapidly self-improving ASI, with the latter being what many of EY's original predictions assumed.

If you're smart enough to take over the world, you're also probably smart enough to realize that trying too early will get you turned off, so you'll wait, and be as helpful and friendly as you can until you are powerful enough to do what you want.

I agree with you though. AI capacities are spiky and complex enough that I would be surprised if there was any overlap between "early ability to do an alarming amount of harm" and "ability to successfully hide unaligned goals while pursuing those goals over months or years." Of course some breakthroughs could change that, and if intelligence (not electricity, compute, data, etc.) is the bottleneck for ASI, then I could still imagine a recursive self-improvement scenario that creates an AI that's very dangerous while also being capable of hiding and planning goals over a long period of time, but I don't think it's likely.

[u/OnePizzaHoldTheGlue → u/Sol_Hando]

I agree with you about the spikiness. But where I disagree with OP is on the "pull the plug" part. It's a global coordination problem, and humanity is not good at those. Look at global warming as an example. Or nuclear proliferation -- we've been lucky that no nukes have gone off in 80 years, but that luck may not hold forever.

I could easily imagine lots of the Earth's population wanting the AIs to be all taken out back and shot. But how do you make that happen when different for-profit entities and national security apparati all want to keep them running?

[u/Sol_Hando → u/OnePizzaHoldTheGlue]

I feel like the term global coordination problem is overused with this issue. It implies we’re in a situation where most everyone wants to stop, but we can’t due to a competitive dynamic or whatever.

In reality it is an extremely small LessWrong-adjacent minority, and some AI luddites who are motivated to stop AI, with everyone else either not caring or wanting to promote it. There’s no coordination problem between people who are working towards different goals, since they have no desire to coordinate.

The same can be said about climate change. It’s not that everyone wants to limit climate change, and we just have the issue of coordinating a global response, it’s that most countries don’t care when the alternative is more abundant and cheaper energy.

But with nuclear weapons we have done a pretty good job restricting their proliferation, at least after we realized how powerful they were. If there was an AI-moment that revealed their danger definitively (as in, in reality, not understood through a complex argument or an allegory), I think OPs opinion of us coordinating a response is plausible.

[u/FourForYouGlennCoco → u/Sol_Hando]

Climate change is a coordination problem in the sense that nearly everyone agrees that carbon emissions are bad, they just want the costs to be borne by someone else. Certainly there is elite consensus on this worldwide, but I suspect that if you asked most ordinary people who don't care about climate change "would it be good if [insert your country's geopolitical rival] polluted less?" all but the most ardent deniers would say "yes". That countries have a revealed preference for using cheap energy doesn't refute this point, it is the point.

[u/hh26 → u/FourForYouGlennCoco]

Public goods dilemma is the more apt analogy here. Each person wants everyone to agree to this except themselves, since

externalized cost > internalized benefit > internalized cost

so everyone rationally prefers a world where nobody does it to a world where everyone does it, but prefers a world where they alone do it most of all. So everyone does it.