Framing this stuff as sci-fi is an easy rhetorical move but silly IMO. Turing and I.J. Good at the dawn of the field could see the common-sense concern: if you succeed at building something smarter than humans, it might be hard to control. It‘s not just MIRI folks, see the CAIS extinction statement.
I mean, hundreds of folks signed the CAIS extinction statement that don't fall into either of those camps. It's not just Daniel and folks at MIRI etc. And from experience, a lot of policymakers on both sides take this seriously, they're just starting to say so publicly.
This tracks. In my experience, for a lot of folks the reaction is usually pretty different once they actually sit down and engage with the arguments/evidence directly. My sense is that's basically what happened when Bernie started to look into this stuff.
Speaking from personal experience, the list of policymakers who take this seriously, on both sides of the aisle, is longer than most people realize and growing.
Grateful to @sanders.senate.gov for being one of them.
We’re honored to have had the opportunity to host you at MIRI (@intelligence.org).
Thanks for taking the time to chat with us (and many others during your trip to the Bay Area) and raising awareness about the threat we all face from the reckless race to superintelligence.
I was on ABC News Live last week!
My first live interview. I think it went pretty well, especially considering I only had ~20 mins notice :p
We’re so close!
Very grateful for all our donors. Your support enables everything we do. Also grateful for the awesome gang at MIRI who worked their asses off this year. You guys crushed it!
Thanks everyone 🙏 Happy New Year 🎉
Final Update: From ~$450k earlier today, we’re now down to just over $250k left in unclaimed matching funds!
4 hours left to go, and by golly it looks like we’ve got a real shot at securing all the matching.
Thanks everyone! Happy New Year 🎉
Update 2: We’re down to ~$450k left of unclaimed matching funds, with just over 12 hours to go!
Thanks to all those who stepped up in the last couple of days to close the gap by ~$500k. ❤️
Update: We’ve received over $250k since this was posted.
~$700k in matching funds remaining.
Donations to MIRI before Jan 1 are high-leverage. We’ve got ~$1.6M in 1:1 matching from SFF, over half of which has yet to be claimed!
This is real counterfactual matching: whatever doesn’t get matched by the end of Dec 31, we don’t get. 🧵
You don't have to take my word for it. LLMs are dumb in a bunch of ways, but I think this is a powerful and convincing consensus on this question.
Seems like you’re confusing a punchy post title about a standard norm in Bayesian epistemology (i.e., don’t give empirical claims credence 0 or 1, or you can’t update) with a claim about the formal definition of probability, where 0 and 1 are of course valid probabilities.
Of course, by definition probabilities are real numbers on [0,1], which includes the endpoints.
I understand that you believe I’m a huckster. I was hoping you might elaborate on why you think that.
Huckster? Say more. Conversations I was having in the comments seemed pretty reasonable and polite, with me just sharing context/info/perspective, and folks following up on that.
... and banned almost immediately. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
”If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” was recently added to the New Yorker's “The Best Books of the Year So Far” list!
newyorker.com/best-books-2...
@hankgreen.bsky.social rarely does interviews or 30+ min long videos.
His latest video, an hour+ long interview with Nate Soares about “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” is a banger. My new favorite!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKu...
In the Bay Area? Come join Nate Soares, in conversation with Semafor Tech Editor Reed Albergotti, about Nate's NYT bestselling book “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”
🗓️ Tuesday Oct 28 @ 7:30pm at Manny’s in SF.
Get your tickets:
IDK man, feels like you are fixated on one particular thing he said (and your interpretation of what he meant by it), as part of a longer conversation on the pod about the analogy. I’m not trying to pick a fight here, just wanted to clarify that he’s not making the mistake you think he’s making.
I listened to it. Also, I run org (@intelligence.org) that he founded, so I’m quite familiar with the argument he’s making. This interview didn’t result in the best exposition of the analogy in question, but I can assure you he isn’t making the mistake you think he is.
How is he anthropomorphizing natural selection? One can think of evolution as an optimization process, and the analogy is between that optimization process and the one used to train AI systems.
It is by no means a "nearly unanimous view" that LLMs are a dead end among AI experts. Also the argument for future very powerful AI systems being an extinction threat does not depend on those systems being LLM based.
😮 Whoopie Goldberg recommends “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” on The View!
Should be a fun conversation.
I'll be there, if you're in town come say hi!
LFG!
This was a great event. Really enjoyed chatting with Joel and Ollie on the first panel.
Thanks @scientistsorg.bsky.social and @futureoflife.org for putting this event together.
(Totally above board. Sharing full-length episodes is one of the benefits of being a subscriber.)
