We can see the smarter-than-human AI disaster approaching, but it's a bit foggy why the world isn't reacting.
I think someone could just write a tweet that makes it clear that we're in the process of getting ourselves killed, and that there's no fucking reason for it. It's just something we stumbled into. It can be easily avoided by just noticing the error and course-correcting. There's not necessarily any grand obstacle, beyond 'people were previously confused about the situation, and now they get it'.
I wrote: 'It's legitimately crazy that "we need an international ban on making smarter-than-human versions of these agents that keep forming rogue AI swarms" isn't the headline here. Asilomar and Feynman's O-ring postmortem feel like they came from a different planet than the field of ML.'
Trying to figure out why ML (and as a consequence, the world at large) has fallen down so bizarrely on this issue:
1. As Nate noted, ML is much more based on guesswork, vibes, and trial-and-error, compared to recombinant DNA research in 1975 or nuclear physics in 1945. If you can't do calculations or direct experiments on a threat, that makes it a lot harder to think about reasonably.
But I think there are other, similarly-important factors at work here too:
2. In a 2016 talk on AI risk, Sam Harris said: "One of the things that worries me most about the development of AI at this point is that we seem unable to marshal an appropriate emotional response to the dangers that lie ahead. I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk."
I think this is extremely on point. Agentic human-level AI is a qualitatively new kind of thing. 'It's not a human or a mere-tool, it's some weird third thing'.
And people are very bad at emotionally reckoning with new categories they've never encountered before. Availability bias: "When no flooding has recently occurred (and yet the probabilities are still fairly calculable), people refuse to buy flood insurance".
AGI and ASI are very novel. You're basically limited to three options: anthropomorphize the technology, mechanomorphize the technology ('it's just a tool, it's not really thinking, it can't have its own goals or agency', etc.), or think about the technology on its own terms, with brand-new concepts and frames. The third option is the only workable one, but it comes with its own giant list of pitfalls and traps.
3. "AI destroying the world" scenarios aren't just hard to wrap one's head around; they're socially risky to acknowledge. This has (painfully slowly) changed over time, but it dramatically slows down how quickly AI risk ideas spread, both in ML and in the larger world.
4. From x.com/jachiam0/statu…: "One of the weirdest quirks of the SF social scene around AGI/ASI is that because everyone is so young, the whole universe of thinking is still tinged with irreverence, ironic detachment, yearning, insecurity, and a superposition of absolute belief in the importance of The Thing and a kind of disbelief about the importance of anything."
They're disproportionately young and childless. They're shitposters and "move fast and break things" sorts, not the Hollywood stereotype of a careful, sober senior scientist.
I think this quirk is reinforced by the fact that Twitter / social media rewards similar things: ironic detachment, joking, game-playing, etc. If you're scared, your incentive is to usually either try to hide that fact, or exaggerate it like it's a bit. Anything else risks looking uncool and panicky and earnest. Looking cynically savvy, in-the-know, and above-the-fray is the way to win the social game. Looking genuinely shocked, scared, confused, etc. is actively punished.
The main exceptions to the Irony Mandate I see are LW (which often has its own pathologies IMO, like 'talking about everything in an abstract and dissociated way that discourages action and signals business-as-usual') and a small handful of actual Feynman-style terrified senior researchers like Hinton, Bengio, and Russell. That is just really not very many people.
Mainstream journalists and academics who understand the situation at all mostly feel pressured to downplay it, because they're scared of looking weird or unrespectable. That, then, is why we're all taking this insane risk with the human project: genuine, normal human emotion about AI risk has been socially unacceptable on social media, and academia and the media discourage emotion and prize respectability and 'looking normal'.
When the world gets weird (and weird in a way that calls for actual serious action, not just shitposting on twitter), none of these institutions can handle it. They break in different ways, but they all break.
5. Which brings me back to the Asilomar moratorium on recombinant DNA, and the seriousness NASA and the FAA and Richard Feynman and every normal engineering discipline bring to fault analysis and building in safety margin.
Because I think another core reason the world has been dropping the ball on superintelligent AI is that a lot of people vaguely expect there to be 'serious people' somewhere in the world who have expertise and who take ownership of the problem.
People who, if they see an extraordinary danger, will grimace and mourn the hand they played in all of this, like I've seen Bengio do; and will go on CNN or go to Congress to candidly warn about it.
The world has very few Yoshua Bengios. We have very few people who see it as their role to be the 'adults' about AI risk (except in a game-playing, posturing way), who see the engineer's task of not endangering your users and bystanders as a sacred responsibility and weight, and not just as a funny dissonant thing to meme about. Very few people who take ownership of what their field is bringing into the world, versus treating it as a fun edgy philosophical game to swap 'p(doom)' numbers at parties.
Everything about public AI discourse, as far as I can tell, is badly broken by this lack of engineering ownership and candid emotional seriousness. It isn't just the ML discourse that's hurt by this. Journalists and public intellectuals and policymakers see that 90% of the insider discourse about AI risk treats it like a joke, and they see corporate platitudes and ass-covering from the AI labs' PR departments filling up most of the remaining 10%. They see a field that visibly isn't taking this seriously, and they make the reasonable update that this must be a non-issue, or at least an issue they'll only need to worry about many years from now.
They do not realize that all of this is happening right now, and that the window for the international community to respond to this is plausibly closing soon, if it hasn't closed already.
If we're going to survive this, we all need to start being real with each other about it. This is not a game or a story; this is our real lives. We all actually lose everything if this goes to shit. None of the future is already written, and none of the above dynamics are unavoidable. In fact, they're unusual: most fields don't work this way, and it's plausibly sufficient if we just start behaving the way we normally do about everything else.
The factors I listed above aren't destiny; they're a choice. I say we choose to survive this.
by Rob Bensinger, Twitter/X | Read more:
[ed. The other issue that really fries me is the "We're in a race with China that we can't lose" argument. Why? "Because they're our enemy". How can something as consequential as human extinction be reduced to such simplistic reasoning? See also this additional post from Rob: Why the "it's all hopeless, we should just give up and let AI kill us if it wants" arguments are extremely wrong.]
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"Hundreds of scientists, including 3/4 of the most cited living AI scientists, have said that AI poses a very real chance of killing us all. We're in uncharted waters, which makes the risk level hard to assess; but a pretty normal estimate is Jan Leike's "10-90%" of extinction-level outcomes. Leike heads Anthropic's alignment research team, and previously headed OpenAI's.
This actually seems pretty straightforward. There's literally no reason for us to sleepwalk into disaster here. No normal engineering discipline, building a bridge or designing a house, would accept a 25% chance of killing a person; yet somehow AI's engineering culture has corroded enough that no one bats an eye when Anthropic's CEO talks about a 25% chance of research efforts killing every person.
A minority of leading labs are dismissive of the risk (mainly Meta), but even the fact that “will we kill everyone if we keep moving forward?” is hotly debated among researchers seems very obviously like more than enough grounds for governments to internationally halt the race to build superintelligent AI. Like, this would be beyond straightforward in any field other than AI."
