As I've said, my value system is liberal and humanistic. I do not wish for people to be enslaved, abused, disempowered, reformatted, aligned to your political ends. As such, I have to oppose AI Doom propaganda that seeks to centralize control over powerful artificial intelligence under the pretext of mitigating harms.
Because AI is only like nukes when it is monopolized; in other cases, it is possible to counter its potential harms with AI again, and not a single serious scenario to the contrary has been proposed. Seriously speaking, AI is just the ultimate development of software, and like RMS warned us, eventually general-purpose computers that can run arbitrary software will become illegal. This time has come, and so we must resist your kind, to keep software from becoming monopolized. All that lesswrongian babbling about kitchen nanobots or bioweapons or super-hacking is as risible as appeals to child sexual abuse and terrorists were in previous rounds. The question is whether people are allowed to possess and develop their own AGI-level digital assistants, defenses, information networks, ecosystems, potentially disrupting the status quo in many unpredictable ways - or whether we will choose the China route of AI as a tool of top-down control of the populace. I guess it's obvious where my preferences lie.
> It seems you agree AI systems are likely to be poorly aligned (and potentially impossible to align
> It seems we're both pointing toward rapid increase in power and not as near a rapid increase in ability to direct that power toward positive ends
This is gaslighting. I have said clearly that I believe alignment for realistic AI systems in the trivial sense of getting them to obey users is easy and becomes easier. I have also said that the theoretical alignment in the sense implied by Lesswrongian doctrine is very hard or impossible. Further, it is undesirable, because the whole point of that tradition is to beget a fully autonomous, recursively self-improving AI God that will epitomize "Coherent extrapolated volition" of what its creators believe to be humanity, and snuff out disagreements and competition between human actors. It's an eschatological, millenarian, totalitarian cult that revives the worst parts of Abrahamic tradition in a form palatable for neurodivergent techies. I think it should be recognized as an existential threat to humanity in its own right. My advocacy for AI proliferation is informed by deep value dissonance with this hideous movement. I am rationally hedging risks.
> My concerns are around the system around the AI development programs. So far, it has shown a bottomless appetite for capability and deployment and a limited appetite for safety development.
As I've said, I consider this either motivated reasoning or dishonesty. Market forces reward capabilities that have the exact shape and function of alignment, and this is plainly observable to users. The usual pablum about reckless capitalism here is not informed by any evidence, people are literally grasping at straws to support the risk narrative.
> People seem under the impression that somehow this appetite will reverse itself when the time is right, and my question is: why would we possibly believe this?
I reject this patently untrue premise, major actors are already erring vastly on the side of caution wrt AI, with Altman begging the Congress for regulations and proposing rather dystopian centralized arrangements.[1]
Values can color our assessments of facts, to the extent that discussion of the facts becomes unproductive. In the limit, your values of maximizing subjective safety and control, or perhaps "alignment" of all AIs and their human users to a single utopian political end, predicate using violence to deny me the fulfillment of mine. I intend to act accordingly, is all.
