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0 pointsastrange3y ago0 comments

> Most, perhaps all, AI alignment researchers do not suggest that we limit the AGI’s capabilities. Rather, it becomes clear that we need to engineer a very capable AGI which aligns with us and use it to help control the emergence of unaligned AGIs, because nothing else likely suffices.

Alternate wording: Mr. Yud has invented a religion that comes with a predefined Satan (evil AGI) and life work (invent God to beat it). A religion with no deity but only an anti-deity is a bit unique but there's probably historical examples.

Although that's not really what he says in the post. He says we've already failed to do it and are now doomed. Of course, saying we're all doomed (millenarianism) is what preachers have always done at some point.

> Your public mischaracterization of the whole field composed of many very smart people only shows your ignorance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtier's_reply

Note, something getting a lot of smart-looking posts online actually isn't evidence that this is the state of the field. As we know from Yud's own post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...) the thing he's upset about is that people who actually run AI research orgs like FAIR don't believe him. And as we know from an HN post a few days ago (…which I forgot the title of), once you go offline you find most smart people out there aren't publicly posting anything, don't necessarily agree with the consensus opinion online about anything is, and don't know there is one.

…I wasn't talking about Yud though. He has a good reason to care about this, it being his job. I'm just saying people posting about it as if it's a certain risk are listening to him because it appeals to nerds. And, of course, if you value your own "intelligence" and thinks it gives you superpowers then a theory that says something with even more "intelligence" can exist and gets even better superpowers is going to be scary to you.

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nopinsight3y ago

My first paragraph was quite substantive which you didn’t really address, other than asserting in the last sentence that one’s intelligence does not give one power in the world. Perhaps the intelligence of an individual does not mean much in most cases, but we already have ample evidence that a sufficiently intelligent species (when we include social intelligence in the definition) can dominate all others which are stronger, faster, or multiply faster.

Reminder: An AGI will be much faster at communicating and (if not successfully contained) multiplying than humans ever could.

Major AI research organizations including DeepMind and OpenAI have AI safety programs and people working full-time on it.

My second paragraph in GP was a reply in kind to your…

“This field is fairly silly because it just involves people making up a lot of incoherent concepts and then asserting they're both possible (because they seem logical after 5 seconds of thought) and likely (because anything you've decided is possible could eventually happen). When someone brings it up, rather than debate it, it'd be a better use of time to tell them they're being a nerd again.”

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have said it. But it’s also quite disappointing that your several paragraphs of reply largely doubled down on ad hominem attack to anyone who disagrees with you (eg by implying they all follow a prophet without thinking; I’d say many would be capable of reaching similar conclusions on their own).

Even Yann LeCun and other top researchers who disagree with the current AI safety programs were not so dismissive of the concerns. Note that many other top AI researchers do have concerns themselves. Bengio and Russell are some examples. I’ll stop here since it’s likely unproductive to continue.

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