Greg_Colbourn

4890 karmaJoined Sep 2014

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Participation
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Global moratorium on AGI, now (Twitter). Founder of CEEALAR (née the EA Hotel; ceealar.org)

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955

More like, some people did share their concerns, but those they shared them with didn't do anything about it (because of worrying about bad PR, but also maybe just as a kind of "ends justify the means" thing re his money going to EA. The latter might actually have been the larger effect.).

Maybe half the community sees it that way. But not the half with all the money and power it seems. There aren't (yet) large resources being put into playing the "outside game". And there hasn't been anything in the way of EA leadership (OpenPhil, 80k) admitting the error afaik.

What makes you think the consciousness is expressed in human language by LLMs? Could it not be that the human language output is more akin to our unconscious physiological processes, and the real consciousness is in inscrutable (to us) floating point numbers (if it is there at all)?

What does Claude 3 produce from a null prompt (inc no pre-prompt)? Is it just gibberish? Does it show signs of consciousness? Has anyone done this experiment?

See all my comments and replies on the anti-pause posts. I don't think any of the anti-pause arguments stand up if you put significant weight on timelines being short and p(doom) high (and viscerally grasp that yes, that means your own life is in danger, and those of your friends and family too, in the short term! It's no longer just an abstract concern!).

As part of an AMA I put on X, I was asked for my "top five EA hot takes". If you'll excuse the more X-suited tone and spiciness, here they are:

1. OpenAI, Anthropic (and to a lesser extent DeepMind) were the worst cases of Unilateralists Curse of all time. EAs love to discourage enthusiastic newcomers by warning to not do "net negative" unilateralist actions (i.e. don't start new projects in case they crowd out better, more "well thought through" projects in future, with "more competent" people doing them), but nothing will ever top the monumental unilateralist curse fuck up that was supporting Big AGI in it's beginnings. 

2. AI Safety is nothing without a Pause. Too many EAs are stuck in the pre-GPT-4 paradigm of maxing research, when it'll all be for nothing unless we get a Pause first. More EAs should switch to Notkilleveryoneism/PauseAI/StopAGI. 

3. EA is too elitist. We should be triaging the world's problems like crazy, and the top 1-2% of people are more than capable of that (most jobs that need doing in EA don't require top 0.1%). 

4. EA is too PR focused - to the point where it actually backfires spectacularly and now there is lots of bad press [big example: SBF's bad character being known about but not addressed].

5. Despite all it's flaws, EA is good (and much better than the alternatives in most cases).

[Separating out this paragraph into a new comment as I'm guessing it's what lead to the downvotes, and I'd quite like the point of the parent paragraph to stand alone. Not sure if anyone will see this now though.]

I think it's imperative to get the leaders of AGI companies to realise that they are in a suicide race (and that AGI will likely kill them too). The default outcome of AGI is doom. For extinction risk at the 1% level, it seems reasonable (even though it's still 80M lives in expectation) to pull the trigger on AGI for a 99% chance of utopia. This is totally wrong-headed and is arguably contributing massively to current x-risk.

Also, in general I'm personally much more sceptical of such a moonshot paying off, given shorter timelines and the possibility that x-safety from ASI may well be impossible. I think OP was 2022's best idea for AI Safety. 2024's is PauseAI.

People from those orgs were aware, but none were keen enough about the idea to go as far as attempting a pilot run (e.g. the 2 week retreat idea). I think general downside risk aversion was probably a factor. This was in the pre-chatGPT days of a much narrower Overton Window though, so maybe it's time for the idea to be revived? On the other hand, maybe it's much less needed now there is government involvement, and national AI Safety Institutes attracting top talent.

At vastly superhuman capabilities (including intelligence and rationality), it should be easier to reduce existential-level mistakes to tiny levels. They would have vastly more capability for assessing and mitigating risks and for moral reflection

They are still human though, and humans are famous for making mistakes, even the most intelligent and rational of us. It's even regarded by many as part of what being human is - being fallible. That's not (too much of) a problem at current power differentials, but it is when we're talking of solar-system-rearranging powers for millions of subjective years without catastrophic error...

a temporary pause only delays the inevitable doom.

Yes. The pause should be indefinite, or at least until global consensus to proceed, with democratic acceptance of whatever risk remains.

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