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Comment by d_silin

11 hours ago

To add a bit more constructive feedback, think of the "AI cornucopia" and "Superintelligence destroys humanity" as opposite ends of all possible outcomes distribution (low probability event).

The most likely one is the "business as usual, but with AI" - some things will get better, some things will get worse, but overall state of affairs will remain mostly the same.

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d_silin

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holmesworcester  11 hours ago

The people who've thought the most about this put it differently:

Think of a new, superintelligent model as if it was a new v1 Starship launching for the first time, with a full fuel tank. On the one hand, rockets have existed for some time, and some have gone to space successfully, including by this company.

On the other hand, this is a tube of metal full of highly explosive liquid going faster than most human objects ever go, for the first time ever in this novel and state of the art configuration.

If someone said, "really, the first Starship exploding is just at one end of the probability distribution, where the other is that everything goes fine and all its passengers have a nice trip in space," would you get on that rocket?

Or, more aptly, if you and every other living human was already on that rocket, would you push the launch button?

The analogy works because superintelligence is, like rocket fuel, an extremely powerful force that has a default tendency to break containment and go boom (consume lots of energy and heat and matter in a chain reaction, to pursue more intelligence to pursue whatever goal it is pursuing.)

  • stillpointlab  8 hours ago

    > superintelligence is, like rocket fuel, an extremely powerful force that has a default tendency to break containment and go boom

    what evidence do we have this is the case?

    • ForHackernews  8 hours ago

      We can learn from history: Albert Einstein famously tricked humanity into building nuclear weapons for him and was only prevented from wiping out all sentient life by the Princeton IAS Board of Alignment who published a very compelling blog post about realigning the A-bomb contra paperclips.

      1 reply →

  • qlte  2 hours ago

    This is the sort of pseudo-scientific reasoning by analogy that leads Elizier Yudkowsky to argue we should be terrified that an unfriendly ASI could rapidly develop "diamondide" nanobot viruses, because it will be super-intelligent and super-intelligence can do anything by first-principles:

      > The concrete example I usually use here is nanotech, because there's been pretty detailed analysis of what definitely look like physically attainable lower bounds on what should be possible with nanotech, and those lower bounds are sufficient to carry the point.  
  ...
  > The nanomachinery builds diamondoid bacteria, that replicate with solar power and atmospheric CHON, maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the jetstream to spread across the Earth's atmosphere, get into human bloodstreams and hide, strike on a timer.

    Thought experiments ungrounded by any realistic technological constraints or scientific evidence are pretty much useless for actual forecasting except as an exercise in sci-fi worldbuilding.

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bc8Ssx5ys6zqu3eq9/diamondoid...

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

  • konmok  5 hours ago

    Eh. An intelligence with perfect knowledge of the entire universe, unlimited memory, and infinite processing speed, would have a tendency to go boom. But the real world has limits, and intelligence, even superintelligence, does not equate to godhood. Some tasks are still hard no matter how smart you are.

    Plus, we have no real reason to think LLMs are anywhere close to AGI or ASI. So arguments like these are just distracting from the very real, very present danger that LLMs pose: information breakdown, societal collapse and environmental destruction. In other words, this is criti-hype.

  • d_silin  10 hours ago

    Current AIs are closer to bottle rockets than to the Starship on the intelligence scale. Some property damage already happened, but you can't master the art of rocketry without trial and error.

elteto  11 hours ago

But will “business as usual, but with AI” justify the current capital expenditures? I think the market is pricing things as being closer to “AI cornucopia”.

What happens if/when we don’t deliver?

  • dgellow  11 hours ago

    > What happens if/when we don’t deliver?

    I wish we had real journalism, the AI labs CEO should be asked that question in every single interview