Prompted by the recent troll post, I’ve been thinking about AI. Obviously we have our criticisms of both the AI hype manchildren and the AI doom manchildren (see title of the post. This is a Rationalist free post. Looking for it? Leave)
But looking at the AI doom guys with an open mind, sometimes it appear that they make a halfway decent argument that’s backed up by real results. This YouTube channel has been talking about the alignment problem for a while, and I think he probably is a bit of a Goodhart’s Law merchant (as in, by making a career out of measuring the dangers of AI, his alarmism is structural) so he should be taken with a grain of salt, it does feel pretty concerning that LLMs show inner misalignment and are masking their intentions (to anthropomorphize) under training vs deployment.
Now, I mainly think that these people are just extrapolating out all the problems with dumb LLMs and saying “yeah but if they were AGI it would become a real problem” and while that might be true if taking the premise at face value, the idea that AGI will ever happen is itself pretty questionable. The channel I linked has a video arguing that AGI safety is not a Pascal’s mugging, but I’m not convinced.
Thoughts? Does the commercialization of dumb AI make it a threat on a similar scale to hypothetical AGI? Is this all just a huge waste of time to think about?
I think the conception of AGI as a machine is holding back its development ontologically speaking. Reductionism too. A consciousness is dynamic, and fundamentally part of a dynamic organism. It can’t be removed from the context of the broader systems of the body or the world the body acts on. Even its being comes secondary to activities it takes. So I’m not really scared of it existing in the abstract. I’m a lot more afraid of mass production commodifying consciousness itself. Everything that people fear in AGI is a projection of the worst ills of the system we live in. Roko’s basilisk is dumb as fuck also