First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses. That somehow ‘rationalists’ are so certain advanced AI will kill everyone in the future (pDoom = 100%!) that they need to commit any violent act needed to stop AI from being developed.
The flaw here is that there’s 8 billion people alive right now, and we don’t actually know what the future is. There are ways better AI could help the people living now, possibly saving their lives, and essentially eliezer yudkowsky is saying “fuck em”. This could only be worth it if you actually somehow knew trillions of people were going to exist, had a low future discount rate, and so on. This seems deeply flawed, and seems to be one of the points here.
But I do think advanced AI is possible. And while it may not be a mainstream take yet, it seems like the problems current AI can’t solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future. I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.
And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.
So I was wondering what the people here generally think. There are “boomer” forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.
I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of “what is your probability” seems like asking for “joint probabilities”, aka smoke a joint and give a probability.
Here’s my questions:
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Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.
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Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics
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If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.
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Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen
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Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?
*“epistemic status”: I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas…
At the old SneerClub, /r/SneerClub on reddit, which is still up but no longer active, we had two policies relevant to this situation: (1) serious posts are marked “NSFW”, so that people don’t accidentally click through to the rambling mind palace tour of a random interloper without some idea of what they were in for; (2) if you use language like “epistemic status” as if everybody knows what that means, which is to say as if you had blithely assumed everybody was in your discursive club, I ban you.
A third, as well, was for regular users to please not encourage the interlopers in this wilfully (acquiredly?) solipsistic behaviour.
I have to ask, on the matter of (2): why? Everybody who knows what the term “epistemic status” means and what it socially signifies also knows that it’s entirely peculiar to this group “rationalists”, a group of people which the forum here exists to target, and negatively. I ask because it says something about the rest of the post.
The opening wants to put you in a distal relationship both with the rationalists and with any among the criticisms whomof which are not criticisms of AI doom shithousery. That would put you in a relatively small club, being people who are broadly aligned with everything else that the rationalists have to say, but who specifically do not think that Skynet is coming, and who think that this is the one area where rationalists get it wrong. At the same time, however, this term “epistemic status” functions to signify that you’re fairly sure you’re among friends on this forum, while at the same time what you want to do is enquire whether that is the case: you want to find out if people on this forum share that singular bad feeling with you.
This is rather a mess of contrasting significations: usually this happens when somebody is speaking rather out of both sides of their mouth.
What’s being signified when you point to “boomer forums”? That’s an “among friends” usage: you’re free to denigrate the boomer fora here. And then once again you don’t know yet if this is one of those “boomer forums”, or you wouldn’t have to ask.
What people in their droves are now desperate to ask, I will ask too: which is it dummy? Take the stopper out of your speech hole and tell us how you really feel.
A bad habit rationalism teaches is to treat a stock verbiage of polite and open discussion as on the one hand (a) integral to productive conversation, and (b) automatically generative of productive conversation. But people aren’t like that, because people are in general really smart listeners (and readers) when it comes to figuring out what is stock verbiage and what is meant in earnest. This doesn’t mean that they always draw the right conclusion if they come right out and say “I think this is somebody honest trying too hard” or “this person is full of shit” - but that initial intuition is usually right on target, and it has to be unlearned with a great deal of training in the tenets of the rationalist cult in order to guarantee the cult’s intellectually pointless hierarchies of “good discussion”, which are nonetheless crucial as a tool of enforcement within the cult’s social order.
Anyway, the question in the above paragraph is open.
tbh I read the statement about epistemic status as ironic. I was disabused of this notion rapidly.
A bad habit rationalism teaches is to treat a stock verbiage of polite and open discussion as on the one hand (a) integral to productive conversation, and (b) automatically generative of productive conversation. But people aren’t like that, because people are in general really smart listeners (and readers) when it comes to figuring out what is stock verbiage and what is meant in earnest.
Thanks for articulating this.
we held off for a bit cos we don’t want to be actively unkind to the recovering rationalists, and he was our first ardent debate bro actually on the instance, but he rapidly also became our first 24 hour ban of a local account rather than a federated one. perhaps his posting will improve a day hence!
I appreciated this post because it never occurred to me that the “thumb might be on the scales” for the “rules for discourse” that seems to be the norm around the rat forms. I personally ignore most of it, however, the “ES” rat phrase is simply saying, “I know we humans are biased observers, this is where I’m coming from”. If the topic were renewable energy and I was the ‘head of extraction at BP’, you can expect that whatever I have to say is probably biased against renewable energy.
My other thought reading this was : what about the truth. Maybe the mainstream is correct about everything. “Sneer club” seems to be mostly mainstream opinions. That’s fine I guess but the mainstream is sometimes wrong about issues that have been poorly examined or near future events. The collective opinions of everyone don’t really price in things that are about to happen, even if it’s obvious to experts. For example, the mainstream opinion on covid was usually lagging several weeks behind Zvi’s posts on lesswrong.
Where I am going with this is you can point out bad arguments on my part, but I mean in the end, does truth matter? Like are we here to score points on each other or share what we think reality is or will in the very near future be?
I would hardly consider myself in favour of “the mainstream”, but I also know that what counts as “mainstream” is irreducibly dependent on your point of view. As far as I’m concerned a great deal of anti-“mainstream” opinion is reactionary and/or stupid, so anti-“mainstream” only by default. A stopped clock, famously, tells the truth twice a day - whether its on CBS or LessWrong. If you want the “truth” I recommend narrowing your focus until you start making meaningful distinctions. I hope that as comfortably vitiates your point as it should.
Next time it would be polite to answer the fucking question.
Next time it would be polite to answer the fucking question.
Sorry sir:
*I have to ask, on the matter of (2): why? * I think I answered this.
What’s being signified when you point to “boomer forums”? That’s an “among friends” usage: you’re free to denigrate the boomer fora here. And > then once again you don’t know yet if this is one of those “boomer forums”, or you wouldn’t have to ask.
What people in their droves are now desperate to ask, I will ask too: which is it dummy? Take the stopper out of your speech hole and tell us how > you really feel.
I am not sure what you are asking here, sir. It’s well known to those in the AI industry that a profound change is upon us and that GPT-4 shows generality for it’s domain, and robotics generality is likely also possible using a variant technique. So individuals unaware of this tend to be retired people who have no survival need to learn any new skills, like my boomer relatives. I apologize for using an ageist slur.
Epistemic Status: Single/Cali girl ;)
Maybe the mainstream is correct about everything. “Sneer club” seems to be mostly mainstream opinions.
Lurk moar.
For example, the mainstream opinion on covid was usually lagging several weeks behind Zvi’s posts on lesswrong.
Heaven forbid the mainstream take a few weeks to figure shit out when presented with new information instead of violently changing gears every time a new story or rumor gets published.
For anyone curious: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/rencyawwfr4rfwt5C
My favorite quotes from within:
Going on walks considered fine for some reason, very strange.
My current best thought for how to do experiments quickly is medical cruise ships in international waters. […] Medical cruise ships are already an established way to do things without running into regulatory problems.
We are willing to do things that people find instinctively repugnant, provided they save lives while at least not hurting the economy. How could we accomplish this?
