(This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc, I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.)
Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son’s future, freak out even more now with actual existential risk for (simplified versions of) the right reasons, go on a quest to stop freaking out and get optimistic instead, find many of the right people for that and ask good non-technical questions, get somewhat fooled, listen to mundane safety complaints, seek out and get interviews with the top CEOs, try to tell himself he could ignore all of it, then decide not to end on a bunch of hopeful babies and instead have a call for action to help shape the future.
A lot of the editing choices, and the selections of what to intercut and clip, clearly come from an outsider without technical knowledge, trying to deal with their anxiety. Many of them would not have been my choices, especially the emphasis on weapons and physical destruction, but I think they work exactly because together they make it clear the whole thing is genuine.
Now there’s a story. It even won praise online as fair and good, from both those worried about existential risk and several of the accelerationist optimists, because it gave both sides what they most wanted. [...]
Yes, you can do that for both at once, because they want different things and also agree on quite a lot of true things. That is much more impactful than a diatribe.
We live in a world of spin. Daniel Roher is trying to navigate a world of spin, but his own earnestness shines through, and he makes excellent choices on who to interview. The being swayed by whoever is in front of him is a feature, not a bug, because he’s not trying to hide it. There are places where people are clearly trying to spin, or are making dumb points, and I appreciated him not trying to tell us which was which.
MIRI offers us a Twitter FAQ thread and a full website FAQ explaining their full position in the context of the movie, which is that no this is not hype and yes it is going to kill everyone if we keep building it and no our current safety techniques will not help with that, and they call for an international treaty.
Are there those who think this was propaganda or one sided? Yes, of course, although they cannot agree on which angle it was trying to support.
Babies Are Awesome
The overarching personal journey is about Daniel having a son. The movie takes one very clear position, that we need to see taken more often, which is that getting married and having a family and babies and kids are all super awesome.
This turns into the first question he asks those he interviews. Would you have a child today, given the current state of AI? [...]
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
The first set of interviews outlines the danger.
This is not a technical film. We get explanations that resonate with an ordinary dude.
We get Jeffrey Ladish explaining the basics of instrumental convergence, the idea that if you have a goal then power helps you achieve that goal and you cannot fetch the coffee if you’re dead. That it’s not that the AI will hate us, it’s that it will see us like we see ants, and if you want to put a highway where the anthill is that’s the ant’s problem.
We get Connor Leahy talking about how creating smarter and more capable things than us is not a safe thing to be doing, and emphasizing that you do not need further justification for that. We get Eliezer Yudkowsky saying that if you share a planet with much smarter beings that don’t care about you and want other things, you should not like your chances. We get Ajeya Cotra explaining additional things, and so on.
Aside from that, we don’t get any talk of the ‘alignment problem’ and I don’t think the word alignment even appears in the film that I can remember.
It is hard for me to know how much the arguments resonate. I am very much not the target audience. Overall I felt they were treated fairly, and the arguments were both strong and highly sufficient to carry the day. Yes, obviously we are in a lot of trouble here.
Freak Out
Daniel’s response is, quite understandably and correctly, to freak out.
Then he asks, very explicitly, is there a way to be an optimist about this? Could he convince himself it will all work out?
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV | Read more:
