Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human?
It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified humans. Man-machine hybrids etc.
(A great exploration of the substance/structure matrix, by the way. My favorite question in AI and consciousness. Is the special sauce in the material, or its shape, both, or neither?)
The very question of aligning the AI with humans assumes that we have a very robust definition of what human means in the first place.
Ostensibly the AI was aligned. It did succeed in keeping humans alive! But it did that in all sorts of ways that mostly made them wish it hadn't.
One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story.
Spoiler warning for those that havent played--
I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.
SOMA was a cognito-hazard for me and my roommate in college; we played it in the dark together while on some sort of mild hallucinogen and when it came time for Simon to find that high-pressure dive suit, we lost our minds (no pun intended). Watching the WAU twist its way through PATHOS II in whatever way worked first is a particularly jarring analogy for what has happened to our own profession. I can't help but think it would be nice for Frictional Games to revisit this topic again soon.
Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.
I just love this game. So many good things about it. Not only the one about AI you mentioned, also the issue of consciousness and the self. I simply love how the game tackles this in a way that can only be done with an interactive first person PoV.
Also, I just love this phrase:
> "I woke up in my bed today... a hundred years ago."
I like this essay, and have very often referred to it when someone talks about AGI.
There is a common narrative bias to look at AGI as the Abrahamic God, if not explicitly, then just by saying that it is omniscient, omnipotent, immortal - and will judge us for our deeds.
It is tempting for anyone raised in the West, and immersed in Judeo-Christian culture. And for anyone, in general, as it offers an epic narration of a personal entity.
Yet, the reality might be messier - IMHO closer to biology than to a weird mixture of computer science and theology. There is no ultimate intelligence (see Karpathy’s starfish shapes), just a collection of adaptability, learning, generalization and self-reference. Also, even an extremely smart being (or process) can be fragile.
So, less God, more WAU from SOMA or the Ocean from Solaris.
> If you encountered a cheetah in pre-industrial times (and survived the meeting), you might think it was impossible for anything to go faster.
Fun fact, there is no historical evidence of an adult human ever dying from a cheetah attack. They are naturally shy, and a lot smaller than you may realize.
> The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June.
> ...
> The event started in 1980, when local landlord Gordon Green overheard a discussion between two men in his pub, the Neuadd Arms. One man suggested that over a significant distance across country, man was equal to any horse. Green decided that the challenge should be tested in full public view, and organised the first event.
While the horses had a string of wins from 2008 to 2019, 2022 to 2025 had three wins for humans and one win for a horse.
I think the term is persistence hunting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). There was an intriguing blog post years ago (which sadly I can’t find) about how terrifying a fictional portrayal of persistence hunting would be- grinding down prey through exhaustion, thinking you’ve escaped but being slowly tracked down.
Yep. That said, unlike cheetahs, there’s plenty of evidence of leopards attacking humans. And these days, it’s the leopards, the closed-AI types and misanthropes -- telling everyone, “AI will take your job and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"
Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out.
It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!"
It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this.
Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!
Some of the themes remind me of themes mentioned in this matrix analysis. Specifically I am reminded of the Dune concept of control: "you control what you can destroy" and then asking "do you control your refrigerator?". Sure, you can turn it off but then your food would rot and you might starve. So in a real sense humans have not controlled machines for a long time but have been co evolving in symbiosis. Sure, it's not driven by natural selection and standard rules of life, but it is important to frame our relationship with machines in new ways if we're ever going to make some sort of artificial intelligence.
I can destroy my refrigerator pretty easily. If I care about food inside, I can take it out into a new one. So, seems I control it by that definition. Your idea "but food will spoil"/"I will lose a small amount of wealth" seems irrelevant to the strict definition.
Conversely I think it's a bad definition, it's a show of what is the frame of the mind of the person who states that: "I want to show my control by destroying my things, look how powerful I am" which sounds like a toddler. That's how you portray psychopathic/narcissistic disorders in movies.
I didn't mean it as in changing our framing enables technological progress but something we should do if we don't want to lose the control we have. e.g. if we lose all principle and intention then it doesn't really matter what happens with computers. In order to do something with intention we must first understand what we're doing. Skipping that step is an admission of defeat.
> The AI is all-powerful and gives you what you ask for, but interprets everything in a super-literal way that you end up regretting.
I like imagining similar discourse when a more basic tool was invented: "A hammer is like a genie, it's all powerful, but, when you hit something with it, it interprets that super-literally, and it hits it."
Isn't this a misinterpretation of what everyone in the AI safety space is worried about, though? I think the idea is that having an AI that interprets everything in a super-literal way would probably be catastrophic, but we can't even build that. It would be a nice world-ending problem to have.
It very well could be, I don't really follow those discussions. Honestly, if I were worried about something on Earth intellectually evolving at a suboptimal pace, it would be humans.
It's amusing to read people in the past writing about the prospect of superhuman intelligence. The real problems have turned out to be different. Sycophancy and hallucinations, which are part of being confidently wrong, remains a big problem. Needing square miles of data centers was an issue in 1950s science fiction, and disappeared by the 1980s. Yet now they're being built, with private funding and the prospect of profit. The need for way too much training data indicates something is still wrong with the current approach.
I predicted on this site in 2016 the massive social and economic impacts AGI would have and specifically when RL data loops are not available to anyone but major players:
> Reinforcement Learning tasks rely on ridiculous amounts of data. Whereas with traditional software architecture, where you accomplish tasks through explicit task instruction, RL trains for tasks based on millions of tests through a reward system. Most importantly once you have trained it to some minimum level, if you deploy it correctly, then it should continue improving — so long as you bake feedback into the UX. Imagine that instead of telling excel what to do, you and every other user will have a conversation with excel, improving the system incrementally.
> Hopefully you see the resemblance between this vision of AI and a genie from folklore. The AI is all-powerful and gives you what you ask for, but interprets everything in a super-literal way that you end up regretting.
The monkey's paw. You know, you don't need superintelligence for that.
Civilization was already doing this. "What if we just gave ourselves exactly what we wanted." Well, it turns out often that's not so good!
Your assumption that minds come in all shapes and sizes is wrong. Read up on embodied cognition. If anything at all, AI are true aliens, unlike known minds.
The main problem of the hard takeoff theory is not the abstract nature of the scenario but rather the fact that it makes the same mistake as the unconstrained optimization paradigm, it takes intelligence to be an unconstrained optimization process.
In fact, if we consider the strongest version of the safety argument for AI, namely one in which the danger is not coming from robots but rather from a disembodied AI controlling our global finances and/or infrastructure, the assumption still does not correspond to reality.
If anything the hard takeoff theory is too conservative. It turns out you don't need self-improvement to get to superintelligence. You just need a ridiculous amount of money. Where can you get a ridiculous amount of money? The market will give it to you because FOMO.
AI is easier than people 10 years ago thought it would be. It's also easier to align than people feared it would be. It's the humans using the AI that are hard to control.
I think it's a bit premature to say aligning is easier than expected. Our current AIs are sycophants, they lie about their progress, they circumvent access restrictions, they notice when they are being evaluated and change their behaviors, they find answers and tell you they came up with them themselves, they blindly download malware. A lot of this is excusable as hallucination, bad RLHF human evaluators, etc, but I don't think we can speculate how challenging generally aligning superintelligences is until we actually have an aligned subintelligence in at least the narrow domain of programming.
Eh, I have a feeling the game hasn't played out yet when it comes to AI control.
If and when the feedback loop on self improvement becomes more efficient and the window on training significantly narrows then things getting out of control rather quickly seems likely. Especially that it's likely we'll have a metric fuckton of compute by that point.
>Sam Altman, the man who runs YCombinator, is my favorite example of this archetype. He seems entranced by the idea of reinventing the world from scratch, maximizing impact and personal productivity. He has assigned teams to work on reinventing cities, and is doing secret behind-the-scenes political work to swing the election.
>Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.
It’s not advances on the underlying operation of matrix multiplication that have driven ai progress to date. It’s the layers above that; trying different neural architectures (transformers w/attention mechanisms), and also different data and training regimes (different ways of doing reinforcement learning) that are the main drivers of improved performance. Perpetual motion is a physical impossibility. Whereas Ai is already being used to improve the workflow of ai researchers, thus speeding up improvements in said research. It’s not hard to see that AI could well be spun up to continue to try new arrangements of the aforementioned levers that drive ai progress on its own.
Presumably there's more efficient hardware foundations to perform these efficiently, and potential at the various abstraction layers for more efficiency. Obviously this is not unbounded - simple things would seem to have a physical limit to the potential improvement.
But if you think of the optimization space: different physical representations, different approaches (photo, quantum, etc), more parallelism - there's undoubtedly a lot of headroom even on the matrix multiplication side. I would imagine there's a lot left on the table when it comes to the abstractions we've built. Infinite? No, but lots of potential.
And what does a machine with a few orders of magnitude more power come up with? I'm not readily able to predict what something like that could create (maybe it's tapped out, but I doubt it).
It seems to come down to an article of faith (as referenced in the article) that there's a lot more potential to be extracted in our current exploitation paths. Which I think is probably reasonable.
Heck, even if a theoretical machine tops out at 3-5 orders of magnitude faster/more complex, I'm sure that could do some amazing things that look like magic to us.
I actually agree. At some point, a RSI system has to interact with real-world, and that imposes serialization constraints. It is harder to know how much that slow-down would be and how much speed-up we will get before that. But a RSI cannot simply be a exponential growth forever.
"So I'd like to engage AI risk from both these perspectives. I think the arguments for superintelligence are somewhat silly, and full of unwarranted assumptions.
But even if you find them persuasive, there is something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously.
First, let me engage the substance. Here are the arguments I have against Bostrom-style superintelligence as a risk to humanity"
--
The framing here seems to me to equate "AI risk" and "AI alarmism" with buying in to belief in "Bostom-style superintellgence".
I'm not sure if the author meant to put anyone who is alarmed by developments in what we're calling "AI" into the same bucket as "AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, by designing a God-like machine", but I think this conflation is unfair and, frankly, dangerous.
I don't know what superintelligence is. I don't even know what intelligence is. And I don't really know what either "artificial" or "general" mean either when talking about "AGI".
You can believe, as I do, that these things can be, and will inevitably will be if we don't radically correct course, used to do very bad things independent and short of being "God-like". When you have systems which can hypothesize, synthesize, and test thousands if not millions of potential infectious agents in bulk [0], and can then order the ingredients for you from dodgy websites via some "claw", and then when you put these systems under the unsupervised control of millions of people with varying levels of stability and altruism, something extremely bad is exceedingly likely to happen.
I understand that 2016 is ages ago and things change, but I came away from the article with the impression that if I'm worried about AI risk then I'm a clown like the three pictured in the "Outside Argument" section (you're a Google-Glass-wearing cringe nerd if you're alarmed). Maybe that's my fault and I'm not smart enough to understand the actual point of the article. If I have misinterpreted, I welcome the correction.
>Is superintelligence just a memetic hazard? [Overblown fear by smart people who are too easily convinced.]
Well we can do the wager. If it's a nothingburger, then the worst case scenario is that we approached AI too cautiously. (Ha. What are the odds of that?)
If it's not a nothingburger, then we all die, unless the whole world agrees on the correct course of action in advance and coordinates perfectly. Hmm.
Well, maybe we don't all die, but the world is irreversibly transformed into something incomprehensible and repulsive.
Although, I don't really think we needed AI's help for that one. We should probably figure out how to align ourselves before we try to preach to the next species. I'm not exactly holding my breath though :/
AI Superintelligence doesn't scare me for the same reasons "grey goo" doesn't scare me.
We are awash in self-replicating machines. The biosphere is already a grey-goo apocalypse. Any new competitors have a serious moat to cross to out compete any existing self-replicators.
We are awash in intelligent agents. Our society (and meta society) is full of superhuman agents already. There is a huge moat for any new intelligence paradigm to cross.
What I am afraid of is the existing superhuman agents (companies, governments and religons) will produce AGI or superintelligence and then proceed to use it as cognitive mitocondria, even further deepening thier supremacy in the cognitive ecosystem.
I have the same feeling. I'm not worried about superintelligent AI because we are only training them on human level intelligence. By what mechanism does our current AI technology take the leap to technologies that humans have never conceived of?
Our current AI is more like a fancy Google search than some kind of machine God.
I'm old enough to remember when grey goo and nanotechnology was the apocalyptic scenario du jour for a short time after some guy at MIT wrote a book, and because he was at MIT people took it seriously even though it was ridiculous. If someone at the University of Kentucky or Kansas had written such a book, it would have been ignored. When prestige manages to align with bad ideas, it's pretty awful, and it can derail the entire civilization for a while.
I was like... nanotechnology and grey goo already exist. It's called biology. The scenarios I was reading were silly. They violated conservation laws and laws of physics. But people were believing it and calling for limits on nanotechnology research.
I remember arguing with smart people on this, and that was when I started to realize that there's two kinds of dumb. I had the same realization later when I argued with an incredibly intelligent guy who was absolutely convinced the moon landings didn't happen. See, there's dumb-dumb and smart-dumb, and the people who thought grey goo would eat Earth or that the Apollo landings were a hoax were the latter. Smart-dumb is high-IQ rationalization of ultimately irrational and absurd ideas, and the smarter you are the more effectively you can do this.
I've met some really shockingly brilliant fools over the years who believe in all kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories, absolute literalist religious fundamentalism, idiotic political doctrines that directly contradict basic logic and all of lived human history, and so on. All of them can engage in sophisticated airtight rationalizations.
I sometimes wonder if this is one of the evolutionary forces constraining intelligence. In my experience, smarter people are somewhat more likely to believe highly sophisticated and complex stupid things, and they are much better at convincing others of these things. That's probably more dangerous to them, their family and friends, and the species than dumb people believing simple silly things that are easily debunked.
On AI...
Is AI potentially dangerous? Very. It's already dangerous in a number of ways. The biggest right now is probably mass production of personalized propaganda, mass surveillance, and mass manipulation. There's also the potential that bad actors could use it to accelerate their ability to make things like garage WMDs (biotech, chemical weapons, etc.). None of this requires hard take-off superintelligence. It's just inherent risks to a powerful technology.
These are not entirely new risks. They were already present in the Internet and computing. AI just raises them to a higher level.
The extreme hard take-off stuff is silly, and it actually distracts us from talking about the much more realistic dangers and coming up with reasonable solutions that don't also throw away the huge benefits of these technologies.
One of the differences between MIT and other schools is that MIT has paid staff to promote in the media anything their faculty does. A book by professors at most universities has zero promotion and most of the time will go nowhere.
In the big 2026, everything certain people worried about with superintelligence came to fruition and they were vindicated. The people closest to ASI are indicating recursive self improvement is imminent, the smartest engineers in the labs themselves are autonomously using agents to develop and improve the models. The arms race is evident. NVDA is the world's most valuable company determined by the worlds' collective wisdom of those with skin-in-the-game.
If there exists a path of runaway superintelligence, the trajectory we've experienced has been following it to a tee. Their predictive power was affirmed.
All the "AI is a nothingburger" predictions of the last decade, including many here even in the last year, have aged incredibly poorly.
The fact that AI researchers and heads of labs aren't being assassinated tells me that the people who claim they are concerned about the end of the world aren't actually that serious.
It has been frequently discussed amongst Less-Wrong / "doomers", especially after the Sam Altman home attack, why violence won't solve the coming problem with unaligned ASI.
I don't follow that argument at all. Many people who claim they're concerned about the end of the world think that the one sliver of hope we have is that the specific people in charge of modern AI research take existential concerns seriously. Even if you expect that won't be enough to save us, it could hardly help the situation to replace them with other people who are less sympathetic to and probably radicalized against existential concerns.
Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human?
It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified humans. Man-machine hybrids etc.
(A great exploration of the substance/structure matrix, by the way. My favorite question in AI and consciousness. Is the special sauce in the material, or its shape, both, or neither?)
The very question of aligning the AI with humans assumes that we have a very robust definition of what human means in the first place.
Ostensibly the AI was aligned. It did succeed in keeping humans alive! But it did that in all sorts of ways that mostly made them wish it hadn't.
One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story.
Spoiler warning for those that havent played--
I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.
SOMA is existentialism 2.0.
To concepts you menton, I would add grey goo and x-risk.
SOMA was a cognito-hazard for me and my roommate in college; we played it in the dark together while on some sort of mild hallucinogen and when it came time for Simon to find that high-pressure dive suit, we lost our minds (no pun intended). Watching the WAU twist its way through PATHOS II in whatever way worked first is a particularly jarring analogy for what has happened to our own profession. I can't help but think it would be nice for Frictional Games to revisit this topic again soon.
Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.
The same theme was present in season 2 of Raised By Wolves. (RIP my favorite show in some years)
I just love this game. So many good things about it. Not only the one about AI you mentioned, also the issue of consciousness and the self. I simply love how the game tackles this in a way that can only be done with an interactive first person PoV.
Also, I just love this phrase:
> "I woke up in my bed today... a hundred years ago."
I like this essay, and have very often referred to it when someone talks about AGI. There is a common narrative bias to look at AGI as the Abrahamic God, if not explicitly, then just by saying that it is omniscient, omnipotent, immortal - and will judge us for our deeds.
It is tempting for anyone raised in the West, and immersed in Judeo-Christian culture. And for anyone, in general, as it offers an epic narration of a personal entity.
Yet, the reality might be messier - IMHO closer to biology than to a weird mixture of computer science and theology. There is no ultimate intelligence (see Karpathy’s starfish shapes), just a collection of adaptability, learning, generalization and self-reference. Also, even an extremely smart being (or process) can be fragile.
So, less God, more WAU from SOMA or the Ocean from Solaris.
> If you encountered a cheetah in pre-industrial times (and survived the meeting), you might think it was impossible for anything to go faster.
Fun fact, there is no historical evidence of an adult human ever dying from a cheetah attack. They are naturally shy, and a lot smaller than you may realize.
There's a story about some Kenyans outrunning a Cheetah in 6km. It had been killing their livestock, so they decided to go after it.
Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.
> Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
> The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June.
> ...
> The event started in 1980, when local landlord Gordon Green overheard a discussion between two men in his pub, the Neuadd Arms. One man suggested that over a significant distance across country, man was equal to any horse. Green decided that the challenge should be tested in full public view, and organised the first event.
While the horses had a string of wins from 2008 to 2019, 2022 to 2025 had three wins for humans and one win for a horse.
The next race event: https://www.green-events.co.uk/man-v-horse
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I think the term is persistence hunting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). There was an intriguing blog post years ago (which sadly I can’t find) about how terrifying a fictional portrayal of persistence hunting would be- grinding down prey through exhaustion, thinking you’ve escaped but being slowly tracked down.
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Yep. That said, unlike cheetahs, there’s plenty of evidence of leopards attacking humans. And these days, it’s the leopards, the closed-AI types and misanthropes -- telling everyone, “AI will take your job and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I keep seeing this and I want to speak to it.
When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"
Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out.
It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!"
It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this.
Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!
Some of the themes remind me of themes mentioned in this matrix analysis. Specifically I am reminded of the Dune concept of control: "you control what you can destroy" and then asking "do you control your refrigerator?". Sure, you can turn it off but then your food would rot and you might starve. So in a real sense humans have not controlled machines for a long time but have been co evolving in symbiosis. Sure, it's not driven by natural selection and standard rules of life, but it is important to frame our relationship with machines in new ways if we're ever going to make some sort of artificial intelligence.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BETHWKaXX4k
I can destroy my refrigerator pretty easily. If I care about food inside, I can take it out into a new one. So, seems I control it by that definition. Your idea "but food will spoil"/"I will lose a small amount of wealth" seems irrelevant to the strict definition.
Conversely I think it's a bad definition, it's a show of what is the frame of the mind of the person who states that: "I want to show my control by destroying my things, look how powerful I am" which sounds like a toddler. That's how you portray psychopathic/narcissistic disorders in movies.
Could you elaborate on that last part?
I didn't mean it as in changing our framing enables technological progress but something we should do if we don't want to lose the control we have. e.g. if we lose all principle and intention then it doesn't really matter what happens with computers. In order to do something with intention we must first understand what we're doing. Skipping that step is an admission of defeat.
> The AI is all-powerful and gives you what you ask for, but interprets everything in a super-literal way that you end up regretting.
I like imagining similar discourse when a more basic tool was invented: "A hammer is like a genie, it's all powerful, but, when you hit something with it, it interprets that super-literally, and it hits it."
You forgot the Luddites. No AI-is-a-tool fallacy is complete without the Luddites! Alternatively, one can use the Antichrist.
I'm not aware of this fallacy.
Isn't this a misinterpretation of what everyone in the AI safety space is worried about, though? I think the idea is that having an AI that interprets everything in a super-literal way would probably be catastrophic, but we can't even build that. It would be a nice world-ending problem to have.
It very well could be, I don't really follow those discussions. Honestly, if I were worried about something on Earth intellectually evolving at a suboptimal pace, it would be humans.
It's amusing to read people in the past writing about the prospect of superhuman intelligence. The real problems have turned out to be different. Sycophancy and hallucinations, which are part of being confidently wrong, remains a big problem. Needing square miles of data centers was an issue in 1950s science fiction, and disappeared by the 1980s. Yet now they're being built, with private funding and the prospect of profit. The need for way too much training data indicates something is still wrong with the current approach.
None of that was predicted.
I predicted on this site in 2016 the massive social and economic impacts AGI would have and specifically when RL data loops are not available to anyone but major players:
https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/the-ai-revolution-will-be-...
> Reinforcement Learning tasks rely on ridiculous amounts of data. Whereas with traditional software architecture, where you accomplish tasks through explicit task instruction, RL trains for tasks based on millions of tests through a reward system. Most importantly once you have trained it to some minimum level, if you deploy it correctly, then it should continue improving — so long as you bake feedback into the UX. Imagine that instead of telling excel what to do, you and every other user will have a conversation with excel, improving the system incrementally.
> Hopefully you see the resemblance between this vision of AI and a genie from folklore. The AI is all-powerful and gives you what you ask for, but interprets everything in a super-literal way that you end up regretting.
The monkey's paw. You know, you don't need superintelligence for that.
Civilization was already doing this. "What if we just gave ourselves exactly what we wanted." Well, it turns out often that's not so good!
Your assumption that minds come in all shapes and sizes is wrong. Read up on embodied cognition. If anything at all, AI are true aliens, unlike known minds.
The main problem of the hard takeoff theory is not the abstract nature of the scenario but rather the fact that it makes the same mistake as the unconstrained optimization paradigm, it takes intelligence to be an unconstrained optimization process.
In fact, if we consider the strongest version of the safety argument for AI, namely one in which the danger is not coming from robots but rather from a disembodied AI controlling our global finances and/or infrastructure, the assumption still does not correspond to reality.
If anything the hard takeoff theory is too conservative. It turns out you don't need self-improvement to get to superintelligence. You just need a ridiculous amount of money. Where can you get a ridiculous amount of money? The market will give it to you because FOMO.
AI is easier than people 10 years ago thought it would be. It's also easier to align than people feared it would be. It's the humans using the AI that are hard to control.
I think it's a bit premature to say aligning is easier than expected. Our current AIs are sycophants, they lie about their progress, they circumvent access restrictions, they notice when they are being evaluated and change their behaviors, they find answers and tell you they came up with them themselves, they blindly download malware. A lot of this is excusable as hallucination, bad RLHF human evaluators, etc, but I don't think we can speculate how challenging generally aligning superintelligences is until we actually have an aligned subintelligence in at least the narrow domain of programming.
Hard to say if AI with true agency is so ‘easy’. We had a breakthrough with language but not necessarily other things.
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Eh, I have a feeling the game hasn't played out yet when it comes to AI control.
If and when the feedback loop on self improvement becomes more efficient and the window on training significantly narrows then things getting out of control rather quickly seems likely. Especially that it's likely we'll have a metric fuckton of compute by that point.
>Sam Altman, the man who runs YCombinator, is my favorite example of this archetype. He seems entranced by the idea of reinventing the world from scratch, maximizing impact and personal productivity. He has assigned teams to work on reinventing cities, and is doing secret behind-the-scenes political work to swing the election.
>Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.
How right the author was.
"Recursive self-improvement" is in the same league as "perpetual motion".
What would be a way to recursively self-improve algorithms for matrix multiplication (foundations of machine learning and inference)?
It’s not advances on the underlying operation of matrix multiplication that have driven ai progress to date. It’s the layers above that; trying different neural architectures (transformers w/attention mechanisms), and also different data and training regimes (different ways of doing reinforcement learning) that are the main drivers of improved performance. Perpetual motion is a physical impossibility. Whereas Ai is already being used to improve the workflow of ai researchers, thus speeding up improvements in said research. It’s not hard to see that AI could well be spun up to continue to try new arrangements of the aforementioned levers that drive ai progress on its own.
Presumably there's more efficient hardware foundations to perform these efficiently, and potential at the various abstraction layers for more efficiency. Obviously this is not unbounded - simple things would seem to have a physical limit to the potential improvement.
But if you think of the optimization space: different physical representations, different approaches (photo, quantum, etc), more parallelism - there's undoubtedly a lot of headroom even on the matrix multiplication side. I would imagine there's a lot left on the table when it comes to the abstractions we've built. Infinite? No, but lots of potential.
And what does a machine with a few orders of magnitude more power come up with? I'm not readily able to predict what something like that could create (maybe it's tapped out, but I doubt it).
It seems to come down to an article of faith (as referenced in the article) that there's a lot more potential to be extracted in our current exploitation paths. Which I think is probably reasonable.
Heck, even if a theoretical machine tops out at 3-5 orders of magnitude faster/more complex, I'm sure that could do some amazing things that look like magic to us.
I actually agree. At some point, a RSI system has to interact with real-world, and that imposes serialization constraints. It is harder to know how much that slow-down would be and how much speed-up we will get before that. But a RSI cannot simply be a exponential growth forever.
"So I'd like to engage AI risk from both these perspectives. I think the arguments for superintelligence are somewhat silly, and full of unwarranted assumptions.
But even if you find them persuasive, there is something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously.
First, let me engage the substance. Here are the arguments I have against Bostrom-style superintelligence as a risk to humanity"
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The framing here seems to me to equate "AI risk" and "AI alarmism" with buying in to belief in "Bostom-style superintellgence".
I'm not sure if the author meant to put anyone who is alarmed by developments in what we're calling "AI" into the same bucket as "AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, by designing a God-like machine", but I think this conflation is unfair and, frankly, dangerous.
I don't know what superintelligence is. I don't even know what intelligence is. And I don't really know what either "artificial" or "general" mean either when talking about "AGI".
You can believe, as I do, that these things can be, and will inevitably will be if we don't radically correct course, used to do very bad things independent and short of being "God-like". When you have systems which can hypothesize, synthesize, and test thousands if not millions of potential infectious agents in bulk [0], and can then order the ingredients for you from dodgy websites via some "claw", and then when you put these systems under the unsupervised control of millions of people with varying levels of stability and altruism, something extremely bad is exceedingly likely to happen.
I understand that 2016 is ages ago and things change, but I came away from the article with the impression that if I'm worried about AI risk then I'm a clown like the three pictured in the "Outside Argument" section (you're a Google-Glass-wearing cringe nerd if you're alarmed). Maybe that's my fault and I'm not smart enough to understand the actual point of the article. If I have misinterpreted, I welcome the correction.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53759-4
>Is superintelligence just a memetic hazard? [Overblown fear by smart people who are too easily convinced.]
Well we can do the wager. If it's a nothingburger, then the worst case scenario is that we approached AI too cautiously. (Ha. What are the odds of that?)
If it's not a nothingburger, then we all die, unless the whole world agrees on the correct course of action in advance and coordinates perfectly. Hmm.
Well, maybe we don't all die, but the world is irreversibly transformed into something incomprehensible and repulsive.
Although, I don't really think we needed AI's help for that one. We should probably figure out how to align ourselves before we try to preach to the next species. I'm not exactly holding my breath though :/
Some previous discussions:
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36098332
AI Superintelligence doesn't scare me for the same reasons "grey goo" doesn't scare me.
We are awash in self-replicating machines. The biosphere is already a grey-goo apocalypse. Any new competitors have a serious moat to cross to out compete any existing self-replicators.
We are awash in intelligent agents. Our society (and meta society) is full of superhuman agents already. There is a huge moat for any new intelligence paradigm to cross.
What I am afraid of is the existing superhuman agents (companies, governments and religons) will produce AGI or superintelligence and then proceed to use it as cognitive mitocondria, even further deepening thier supremacy in the cognitive ecosystem.
I have the same feeling. I'm not worried about superintelligent AI because we are only training them on human level intelligence. By what mechanism does our current AI technology take the leap to technologies that humans have never conceived of?
Our current AI is more like a fancy Google search than some kind of machine God.
I'm old enough to remember when grey goo and nanotechnology was the apocalyptic scenario du jour for a short time after some guy at MIT wrote a book, and because he was at MIT people took it seriously even though it was ridiculous. If someone at the University of Kentucky or Kansas had written such a book, it would have been ignored. When prestige manages to align with bad ideas, it's pretty awful, and it can derail the entire civilization for a while.
I was like... nanotechnology and grey goo already exist. It's called biology. The scenarios I was reading were silly. They violated conservation laws and laws of physics. But people were believing it and calling for limits on nanotechnology research.
I remember arguing with smart people on this, and that was when I started to realize that there's two kinds of dumb. I had the same realization later when I argued with an incredibly intelligent guy who was absolutely convinced the moon landings didn't happen. See, there's dumb-dumb and smart-dumb, and the people who thought grey goo would eat Earth or that the Apollo landings were a hoax were the latter. Smart-dumb is high-IQ rationalization of ultimately irrational and absurd ideas, and the smarter you are the more effectively you can do this.
I've met some really shockingly brilliant fools over the years who believe in all kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories, absolute literalist religious fundamentalism, idiotic political doctrines that directly contradict basic logic and all of lived human history, and so on. All of them can engage in sophisticated airtight rationalizations.
I sometimes wonder if this is one of the evolutionary forces constraining intelligence. In my experience, smarter people are somewhat more likely to believe highly sophisticated and complex stupid things, and they are much better at convincing others of these things. That's probably more dangerous to them, their family and friends, and the species than dumb people believing simple silly things that are easily debunked.
On AI...
Is AI potentially dangerous? Very. It's already dangerous in a number of ways. The biggest right now is probably mass production of personalized propaganda, mass surveillance, and mass manipulation. There's also the potential that bad actors could use it to accelerate their ability to make things like garage WMDs (biotech, chemical weapons, etc.). None of this requires hard take-off superintelligence. It's just inherent risks to a powerful technology.
These are not entirely new risks. They were already present in the Internet and computing. AI just raises them to a higher level.
The extreme hard take-off stuff is silly, and it actually distracts us from talking about the much more realistic dangers and coming up with reasonable solutions that don't also throw away the huge benefits of these technologies.
> because he was at MIT people took it seriously
One of the differences between MIT and other schools is that MIT has paid staff to promote in the media anything their faculty does. A book by professors at most universities has zero promotion and most of the time will go nowhere.
Any of this kinda talk these days is just part of the hype train for the LLM companies tulipomania pyramid scheme.
Afaik no-one that is actually working on AGI is anywhere close atm.
In the big 2026, everything certain people worried about with superintelligence came to fruition and they were vindicated. The people closest to ASI are indicating recursive self improvement is imminent, the smartest engineers in the labs themselves are autonomously using agents to develop and improve the models. The arms race is evident. NVDA is the world's most valuable company determined by the worlds' collective wisdom of those with skin-in-the-game.
If there exists a path of runaway superintelligence, the trajectory we've experienced has been following it to a tee. Their predictive power was affirmed.
All the "AI is a nothingburger" predictions of the last decade, including many here even in the last year, have aged incredibly poorly.
Nobody cares what we (people who have been working on AGI a long time) think.
We were dismissed as cranks before and now we’re just ignored by whomever is promising the most money to investors.
So, par for the course. Everyone in AI has lived through all the cycles so far so this is just the biggest one yet.
The fact that AI researchers and heads of labs aren't being assassinated tells me that the people who claim they are concerned about the end of the world aren't actually that serious.
It has been frequently discussed amongst Less-Wrong / "doomers", especially after the Sam Altman home attack, why violence won't solve the coming problem with unaligned ASI.
If you're actually curious, here's a good summary: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866
I don't follow that argument at all. Many people who claim they're concerned about the end of the world think that the one sliver of hope we have is that the specific people in charge of modern AI research take existential concerns seriously. Even if you expect that won't be enough to save us, it could hardly help the situation to replace them with other people who are less sympathetic to and probably radicalized against existential concerns.