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0 pointsAndrewKemendo10y ago0 comments

I know you don't particularly subscribe to the "AGI is extremely dangerous" line of thinking

I think the question in my mind is "dangerous to who and when?"

Is AGI an existential threat? Probably. But on what time horizon? Through what mechanism? And can we evolve and collaborate with AGI instead of de-facto competing with it?

None of the AGI warning people (Bostrom, Yudkowski, Barrat et al.) have come up with a plausible chain of events that leads to human irrelevance or extinction. They always make a few assumptions and then claim "and then exponential growth happens" and boom everyone's a paperclip.

The USG doesn't have a position at this point and it's ill prepared to react. In reality if there is some kind of world ending gray goo scenario that an AGI creates - nothing the US or any other Government can do will matter. I think that's about as likely as Roko's Basilisk being true though (eg. 0% chance).

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rl310y ago· 1 in thread

>The USG doesn't have a position at this point and it's ill prepared to react.

That's what I thought. Kind of bizzare considering USG usually tends to stay far ahead of the curve when dealing with technology that has potentially profound national security implications. Yet at the same time, programs such as DARPA SyNAPSE exist (though only at moderate funding levels).

>In reality if there is some kind of world ending gray goo scenario that an AGI creates - nothing the US or any other Government can do will matter.

For sure. My hypothetical was intended more as taking place prior to any such disaster—in a world where AGI is viewed in the same light as WMDs, but where nothing catastrophic has yet happened. In that scenario, USG could potentially have great influence (for better or worse) over any outcome.

For my money, counter-proliferation measures would be ultimately worthless in that situation, except as a stop-gap to buy time for a larger project to solve AGI correctly.

AndrewKemendoOP10y ago

Kind of bizzare considering USG usually tends to stay far ahead of the curve when dealing with technology that has potentially profound national security implications.

It's basically impossible to have a plan of response for something that nobody even knows how to build. That said, we have a lot crisis action plans that might apply depending on whatever actions are happening. It would likely fall into the realm of contingency plans that have "Complex electromagnetic environments" as core assumptions.

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