Comment by toasterlovin
5 days ago
Dead reckoning is a great analogy for coming to conclusions based on reason alone. Always useful to check in with reality.
5 days ago
Dead reckoning is a great analogy for coming to conclusions based on reason alone. Always useful to check in with reality.
And always worth keeping an eye on the maximum possible divergence from reality you're currently at, based on how far you've reasoned from truth, and how less-than-sure each step was.
Maybe you're right. But there's a non-zero chance you're also max wrong. (Which itself can be bounded, if you don't wander too far)
My preferred argument against the AI doom hypothesis is exactly this: it has 8 or so independent prerequisites with unknown probabilities. Since you multiply the probabilities of each prerequisite to get the overall probability, you end up with a relatively low overall probability even when the probability of each prerequisite is relatively high, and if just a few of the prerequisites have small probabilities, the overall probability basically can’t be anything other than very small.
Given this structure to the problem, if you find yourself espousing a p(doom) of 80%, you’re probably not thinking about the issue properly. If in 10 years some of those prerequisites have turned out to be true, then you can start getting worried and be justified about it. But from where we are now there’s just no way.