[ExI] Elon Musk, Emad Mostaque, and other AI leaders sign open letter to 'Pause Giant AI Experiments'

[Darin Sunley]

ChatGPT-4 is not an existential threat to humanity in its current form. No
one who understands anything about the field is saying that it is.

What it is, is a HUGE pile of Bayesian evidence that should shift all of
our priors about 2 bazillion bits in the direction of "Human-level AGIs are
entirely possible, are basically knocking on our door, and their
superintelligent cousins are about 5 minutes behind them."

The Waluigi effect, and related similar observations of recent LLMs
should give us all great concern that we don't have anything like even the
slightest ability to put any kind of deep and rigorous post-hoc external
controls on the behavior of several hundred billion parameters of linear
algebra. We just don't know how to do that. I think OpenAI may have thought
they knew how to do that 6 months ago. They have admitted they were wrong.

So yeah - human level AGIs are basically a few small architectural tweaks
away from being here, and superintelligence is now much more obviously
plausible than it was 6 months ago - there was some hope that training data
would be a bottleneck on capabilities, but GPT4 is massively superior to
GPT3 with roughly the same training data corpus.

Drexerlian nanotech remains elusive (or at least highly classified) so
there's that at least. But as we've all seen, you can do enough damage with
simple gain-of-function research on virii. You can't eat the planet with
it, but it's still not great.

If I wasn't already pretty confident that we were /already/ under the
absolute control of an omniscient, omnipotent superintelligence
[significant fractions of humanity worked this out a few thousand years
ago, it's only recently that we've allowed ourselves to forget], I'd be
quite concerned.

On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 1:26 PM Darin Sunley <dsunley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Eliezer's position is extreme - and his rhetoric regarding nuclear
> exchanges may be an intentionally rhetorically extreme reductio - but it is
> not absurd.
>
> A unaligned superintelligent AGI with access to the internet and the
> capability to develop and use Drexlerian nanotech can trivially
> deconstruct the planet. [Yes, all the way down to and past the extremophile
> bacteria 10 miles down in the planetary crust.] This is a simple and
> obvious truth. This conclusion /is/ vulnerable to attack at its constituent
> points - superintelligence may very well be impossible, unaligned
> superintelligences may be impossible, Drexlerian nanotech may be
> impossible, etc. But Eliezer's position is objectively not false, given
> Eliezer's premises.
>
> As such, the overwhelming number of voices in the resulting twitter
> discourse are just mouth noises - monkeys trying to shame a fellow monkey
> for making a [to them] unjustified grab for social status by "advocating
> violence". They aren't even engaging with the underlying logic. I'm not
> certain if they're capable of doing so.
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 1:03 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 2:13 AM Giovanni Santostasi <
>> gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The AI doomers would say, but this is different from everything else
>>> because.... it is like God.
>>>
>>
>> Indeed, and in so doing they make several errors often associated with
>> religion, for example fallacies akin to Pascal's Wager (see: Roko's
>> Basilisk).
>>
>>
>>> Take Russia, or North Korea. Russia could destroy humanity or do
>>> irreparable damage. Why doesn't it happen? Mutual Destruction is part of
>>> the reason.
>>>
>>
>> To be fair, given what's been revealed in their invasion of Ukraine (and
>> had been suspected for a while), it is possible that Russia does not in
>> fact - and never actually did - have all that many functioning long-range
>> nuclear weapons.  But your point applies to why we've never had to find out
>> for sure yet.
>>
>>
>>> One thing is to warn of the possible dangers, another this relentless
>>> and exaggerated doom sayers cries.
>>>
>>
>> Which, being repeated and exaggerated when the "honest" reports fail to
>> incite the supposedly justified degree of alarm (rather than seriously
>> considering that said justification might in fact be incorrect), get melded
>> into the long history of unfounded apocalypse claims, and dismissed on that
>> basis.  The Year 2000 bug did not wipe out civilization.  Many predicted
>> dates for the Second Coming have come and gone with no apparent effect; new
>> predictions rarely even acknowledge that there have been said prior
>> predictions, let alone give reason why those proved false where this
>> prediction is different.   Likewise for the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse, which
>> was literally just their calendar rolling over (akin to going from
>> 12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000) and may have had the wrong date anyway.
>> _______________________________________________
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>
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