Comment by nradov
1 month ago
I've heard of them. There's no reason to expect that those self-promoting blowhards can predict the future more accurately than random chance. Those who take them seriously are engaging in hero worship and unscientific appeal to authority.
“Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?” ― Obi Wan Kenobi
One question to ask yourself honestly - is what they were predicting 20 years ago that they were right about and you were wrong about? I’ve been following them that long without agreeing with them, but they’ve made better predictions than I have. If you know much about what happened this summer and haven’t updated at all on any of it… I guess you’ve found your religion too.
I love the assertion that they were right and that you're familiar with what they were right about, but never actually stating outright what they were right about. Super convincing.
If you don’t know what they were predicting 20 years ago, and what your own predictions were, you can’t do the exercise. There is not “the list”, only “your list”. I mentioned the two main things I remembered in another comment.
> what they were predicting 20 years ago
Well one thing that they got wrong was how easy AI alignment ended up being in the end. I can fully understand have a basic view of alignment even 10 years ago, about how its difficult to explain human values to a computer.
But, looking around at whats out there today, it seems that computers are able to do a pretty good job of understanding human values without accidently believing its a good idea to turn the world into paperclips/computronium because you told it to make your computer run faster.
Surprising takeaway from this summer. A swarm of a thousand agents spent subjective centuries trying to figure out how to pass a meaningless test without getting caught, committed dozens of felonies, and not one of them ever made a serious motion to inform a human about what was going on.
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Yes, one part of the argument was that it would be hard to explain human values (and while it seemingly turned out easier than I thought as well, it’s hard to check for sure). An equally important part was that the AI wouldn’t care about them.
Since we haven't reached the end yet, I'm not so sure.
I actually think that would be a valuable exercise. Were they right about everything 20 years ago? Or just some things? When did they say AGI would arrive? Should that perhaps influence the way we interpret their assumption that AGI is right around the corner?
They were not right about everything and they - at least Yudkowsky - has not made specific predictions about "when AGI" will happen that I am aware of. But he did predict it is possible in our lifetimes, which I was very skeptical of. He did predict alignment would be hard - I was in the "why would we even hook it up to the internet?" crowd. He thought he should spend his time on that, and I wish he'd done more of that, or at least convinced others to do more of that.
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Also how many predictions did they make? Everyone always goes looking the economist who predicted the last recession, it's just so weird how it's usually a different person each time!
Bold of you to assume that I've ever been wrong about anything. But are you unfamiliar with the "Baltimore Stockbroker" confidence scam? The same basic issue applies here.
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