I consider the burden of proof to fall on those proclaiming AGI to be an existential threat, and so far I have not seen any convincing arguments. Maybe at some point in the future we will have many anthropomorphic robots and an AGI could hack them all and orchestrate a robot uprising, but at that point the robots would be the actual problem. Similarly, if an AGI could blow up nuclear power plants, so could well-funded human attackers; we need to secure the plants, not the AGI.
It doesn't sound like you gave serious thought to the arguments. The AGI doesn't need to hack robots. It has superhuman persuasion, by definition; it can "hack" (enough of) the humans to achieve its goals.
Voldemort is fictional and so are bumbling wizard apprentices. Toy-level, not-yet-harmful AIs on the other hand are real. And so are efforts to make them more powerful. So the proposition that more powerful AIs will exist in the future is far more likely than an evil super wizard coming into existence.
And I don't think literal 5-word-magic-incantation mind control is essential for an AI to be dangerous. More subtle or elaborate manipulation will be sufficient. Employees already have been duped into financial transactions by faked video calls with what they assumed to be their CEOs[0], and this didn't require superhuman general intelligence, only one single superhuman capability (realtime video manipulation).
> Toy-level, not-yet-harmful AIs on the other hand are real.
A computer that can cause harm is much different than the absurd claims that I am disagreeing with.
The extraordinary claims that are equivalent to saying that the imperious curse exists would be the magic computers that create diamond nanobots and mind control humans.
> that more powerful AIs will exist in the future
Bad argument.
Non safe Boxes exist in real life. People are trying to make more and better boxes.
Therefore it is rational to be worried about Pandora's box being created and ending the world.
That is the equivalent argument to what you just made.
And it is absurd when talking about world ending box technology, even though Yes dangerous boxes exist, just as much as it is absurd to claim that world ending AI could exist.
Instead of gesturing at flawed analogies, let's return to the actual issue at hand. Do you think that agents more intelligent than humans are impossible or at least extremely unlikely to come into existence in the future? Or that such super-human intelligent agents are unlikely to have goals that are dangerous to humans? Or that they would be incapable of pursuing such goals?
Also, it seems obvious that the standard of evidence that "AI could cause extinction" can't be observing an extinction level event, because at that point it would be too late. Considering that preventive measures would take time and safety margin, which level of evidence would be sufficient to motivate serious countermeasures?
Less than a month ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14380 "We found that participants who debated GPT-4 with access to their personal information had 81.7% (p < 0.01; N=820 unique participants) higher odds of increased agreement with their opponents compared to participants who debated humans."
Yes, and I am sure that when people do a google search for "Good arguments in favor of X", that they are also sometimes convinced to be more in favor of X.
Perhaps they would be even more convinced by the google search than if a person argued with them about it.
That is still much different from "The AI mind controls people, hacks the nukes, and ends the world".
Its that second part that is the the fantasy land situation that requires extraordinary evidence.
But, this is how conversations about doomsday AI always go. People say "Well isn't AI kinda good at this extremely vague thing Y, sometimes? Imagine if AI was infinitely good at Y! That means that by extrapolation, the world ends!".
And that covers basically every single AI doom argument that anyone ever makes.
If the only evidence for AI doom you will accept is actual AI doom, you are asking for evidence that by definition will be too late.
"Show me the AI mindcontrolling people!" AI mindcontrolling people is what we're trying to avoid seeing.
The trick is, in the world in which AI doom is in the future, what would you expect to see now that is different from the world in which AI doom is not in the future?
> If the only evidence for AI doom you will accept is actual AI doom
No actually. This is another mistake that the AI doomers make. They pretend like a demand for evidence means that the world has to end first.
Instead, what would be perfectly good evidence, would be evidence of significant incremental harm that requires regulation on its own, independent of any doom argument.
In between "the world literally ends by magic diamond nanobots and mind controlling AI" and "where we are today" would be many many many situations of incrementally escalating and measurable harm that we would see in real life, decades before the world ending magic happens.
We can just treat this like any other technology, and regulate it when it causes real world harm. Because before the world ends by magic, there would be significant real world harm that is similar to any other problem in the world that we handle perfectly well.
Its funny because you committing the exact mistake that I was criticizing in my original post, where you did the absolutely massive jump and hand waved it away.
> what would you expect to see now that is different from the world in which AI doom is not in the future?
What I would expect is for the people who claim to care about AI doom to actually be trying to measure real world harm.
Ironically, I think the people who are coming up with increasingly thin excuses as for why they don't have to find evidence are increasing the likelyhood of such AI doom much more than anyone else because they are abandoning the most effective method of actually convincing the world of the real world damage that AI could cause.
Well, at least if you see escalating measurable harm you'll come around, I'm happy about that. You won't necessarily get the escalating harm even if AI doom is real though, so you should try to discover if it is real even in worlds where hard takeoff is a thing.
> What I would expect is for the people who claim to care about AI doom to actually be trying to measure real world harm.
Why bother? If escalating harm is a thing, everyone will notice. We don't need to bolster that, because ordinary society has it handled.
> You won't necessarily get the escalating harm even if AI doom is real though
Yes we would. Unless you are one of those people who think that the magic doom nanobots are going to be invented overnight.
My comparisions to someone who is worried about literal magic, from harry potter, is apt.
But at that point, if you are worried about magic showing up instantly, then your position is basically not falsifiable. You can always retreat to some untestable, unfalsifiable magic.
Like there is actually nothing I could say, no evidence I could show to ever convince someone out of that position.
On the other hand, my position is actually fasifiable. There is absolutely all sorts of non world ending evidence that could convince me to think that AI is dangerous.
But nobody on the doomer side seems to care about any of that. Instead they invent positions that seem almost tailor made to avoid being falsifiable or disprovable so that they can continue to believe them despite any evidence to the contrary.
As in, if I were to purposeful invent an idea or philosophy that is impossible to be disproved or convinced out of the "I can't show you evidence because the world will end" position is what I would invent.
> you'll come around,
Do you admit that you won't though? Do you admit that no matter what evidence is shown to you, that you can just retreat and say that the magic could happen at any time?
Or even if this isn't you literally, that someone in your position could dismiss all counter evidence, no matter what, and nobody could convince someone out of that with evidence?
I am not sure how someone could ever possibly engage with you seriously on any of this, if that is your position.
> Like there is actually nothing I could say, no evidence I could show to ever convince someone out of that position.
There is, it is just very hard to obtain. Various formal proofs would do. On upper bounds. On controllability. On scalability of safety techniques.
The manhattan project scientists did check whether they'd ignite the atmosphere before detonating their first prototype. Yes, that was much simpler task. But there's no rule in nature that says proving a system to be safe must be as easy as creating the system. Especially when the concern is that the system adaptive and adversarial.
Recursive self-improvement is a positive feedback loop, like nuclear chain reactions, like virus replication. So if we have an AI that can program then we better make sure that it either cannot sustain such a positive feedback loop or that it remains controllable beyond criticality.
Given the complexity of the task it appears unlikely that a simple ten-page paper proving this will show up on arxiv. But if one did that'd be great.
>> You won't necessarily get the escalating harm even if AI doom is real though
> Yes we would.
So what does guarantee a visible catastrophe that won't be attributed to human operators using a non-agentic AI incorrectly? We keep scaling and the systems will be treated as assistants/optimizers and it's always the operators fault. Until we roughly reach human-level on some relevant metrics. And at that point there's a very narrow complexity range from idiot to genius (human brains don't vary by orders of magnitude!). So as far as hardware goes this could be a very narrow range and we could shoot straight from "non-agentic sub-human AI" to "agentic superintelligence" in short timescales once the hardware has that latent capacity.
And up until that point it will always have been a human error, lax corporate policies, insufficient filtering of the training set or whatever.
And it's not that it must happen this way. Just that there doesn't seem anything ruling it and similar pathways out.
What do you think mind control is? Think President Trump but without the self-defeating flaws, with an ability to stick to plans, and most importantly the ability to pay personal attention to each follower to further increase the level of trust and commitment. Not Harry Potter.
People will do what the AI says because it is able to create personal trust relationships with them and they want to help it. (They may not even realize that they are helping an AI rather than a human who cares about them.)
The normal ways that trust is created, not magical ones.
The magic technology that is equivalent to the imperious curse from Harry Potter.
> The normal ways that trust is created, not magical ones.
Buildings as a technology are normal. They are constantly getting taller and we have better technology to make them taller.
But, even though buildings are a normal technology, I am not going to worry about buildings getting so tall soon that they hit the sun.
This is the same exact mistake that every single AI doomers makes. What they do is they take something normal, and then they infinitely extrapolate it out to an absurd degree, without admitting that this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
The central point of disagreement, that always gets glossed over, is that you can't make a vague claim about how AI is good at stuff, and then do your gigantic leap from here to over there which is "the world ends".
Yes that is the same as comparing these worries to those who worry about buildings hitting the sun or the imperious curse.
You say you have not seen any arguments that convince you. Is that just not having seen many arguments or having seen a lot of arguments where each chain contained some fatal flaw? Or something else?
