I have to wonder if some us are just much more inured to salespeople and thus also to "AI Safety" propaganda. I've yet to have a logical discussion with anyone who thinks the "AI Safety" people should be in charge and I think they just truly don't that what most them actually want is to be the one holding the keys to power.
The problem is the "AI Safety" people seem entirely focused on a sci-fi "the computer is a vengeful god" plot and not at all on the AI talking people into suicide or ruining children's educations. This makes them seem unserious and out of touch.
I don't disagree with your point, but I did read a post by Sean Goedecke[1] (whose opinions on the world of LLM-stuff I've generally come to respect) that I found relevant. It's not that the second-order effects don't matter to them, it's more that both the cat's probably out of the bag on those negative externalities regardless of the progress of frontier models, and that they are truly, sincerely, in-their-bones worried about the first thing and therefore focused on it since that's something that they might still have some agency over.
[1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/they-really-do-think-ai-might-k...
OK understood. But you understand this makes them sound like the type of person who doesn't believe any of the "worldly concerns" are worth addressing because "the end is near" right?
There's no logical error here if the end is actually near.
So it all hinges on an empirical disagreement you have with them. There's nothing particularly unserious about that.
“It all hinges on [an entirely presupposed conclusion that we can’t prove is any more likely than the opposite]” is about as unserious as it gets lol
Maybe compare the argument that AI has large detrimental environmental impacts to the argument that it has economic impacts. Why would the environmental impacts even be a major argument vs. the worldly economic concerns? Because there is climate science predicting extremely negative effects on humans from warming, e.g. "the end is near" on limiting climate damage. The environmental argument wouldn't have been reasonable to bring up in the 1950s if AI had gone according to the earliest optimistic plans and not required giant data centers.
There is quite a lot of mathematical research into agentic behavior that suggests a combination of instrumental convergence and the orthogonality thesis make it very likely a superintelligent agent will have arbitrary goals that lead it to attempting a takeover of Earth's resources to achieve them.
There can't be a science of superintelligence because it doesn't exist yet, but the best theories I have read seem sound, similar to how 19th century theories of anthropogenic climate change turned out to be sound.
Please link some of the mathematical research which concludes takeover of Earth’s resources by a superintelligent agent is “very likely.”
I am worried about those things too.
But those things fall in a category of "things that are awful and I'd like to see solved", which is different than "existential risks which could see my kids dead, and there's nothing I can personally do to shield them from it".
Doesn't it feel like the exact opposite? If you care a lot about the AI being a vengeful god, you do not do what OpenAI and Anthropic are doing. These companies only pay lip service to the idea of that aspect of AI safety in the hope that they can use it to regulate open source AI out of existence.
Instead, they are focused on stuff like "can I ask the AI to help me build a nuclear bomb" or "is the AI willing to generate pornographic stories", which is neither trying to protect us from unleashing a vengeful god NOR preventing (in any honest way) the today-level problems you (very correctly) bring up.
It's the problem of the banality of evil. Stopping someone from dramatically pressing a big red button doesn't solve humanity's largest problems because that's not what caused them. We need to stop millions "boring" actions done by systems blindly following instructions without regard for the consequences.
And the real threats are mostly economic and environmental - the concentration of the means of production in the hands of few who use it to exploit us all, and a surge in energy usage accelerating climate change.
Even the sci-fi scenario assumes there is a discrepancy of capability between attacker or defender. If the 'attacking' system is (by some reasonable measure), 1000% as capable as a human, and the 'defending' systems are 60%, then it is a problem. If the 'attacking' system is 1000% as capable as a human, but there are hundreds of thousands of systems that are 900% as capable as a human, it's probably not going to take over everything successfully.
So unequal distribution of AI technology, and lax regulation and opacity of the biggest companies which actually make the risks the worst.
I don't think the "AI Safety" people are "unserious and out of touch" - I think they are actively making AI Safety problems worse by being advocates for consolidation of AI development and lack of transparency.
I suspect they know exactly what they are doing.
And the non-techies who have seen Terminator and other movies blindly line up behind them…
There’s also an element of it which is total misdirection.
We should be paying at least as much attention to the people who want to use AI to consolidate their wealth and power, and how they’re trying to do that. They’re a clear and present immediate danger to our societies, not something we can only speculate about. And if we deal with them, better control of AI will be a side effect.
Yeah, there are very real effects happening now regarding labor as well but to dismiss it all and worry about science fiction that is on par with evangelical beliefs is just extremely weird.
With wealthy and powerful investors being promised a $30 trillion total addressable market, they need to deliver god.
One of the times I regret that I have only one upvote.
I think you accidentally a word. Did you mean:
> I've yet to have a logical discussion with anyone who thinks the "AI Safety" people should be in charge and I think they just truly don't [know] that what most them actually want is to be the one holding the keys to power.
I am an AI Safety Person and I want the government to nationalize or have a significant stake in the frontier labs and to have democratic control of the development of the technology. The AI Safety movement is not a monolith. I do not think Eliezer Yudkowsky nor his acolytes should hold the reins, but a lot of folks sure like to create a strawman that anyone who wants to regulate OpenAI is somehow an EA/MIRI weirdo
>but a lot of folks sure like to create a strawman that anyone who wants to regulate OpenAI is somehow an EA/MIRI weirdo
Anytime I see a random person on X who makes these kind of safety alarmism posts >90% of the time can be directly tied back to EA / LessWrong / related offshoots. You can not deny the amount of people, employees of Antrhopic / OpenAI, CEO and employees of various AI companies, etc are related to these groups.
Yes I trust this government with that power. /extreme sarcasm
Yes I trust sama/dario/elon with that power
/even more extreme sarcasm than you
I don't trust them, which is why I inherently question the validity of their RSI/bioweapon/extinction claims.
You trust trump more than any of those three? Really?
You can have an arbitrarily low opinion of Trump and still trust in democracy as a form of government over autocracy or oligarchy, which is what the AI labs have.
That's an extremely fair objection! But despite the many, many flaws of our government and the current administration, I still have (hopefully) a chance to vote them out of power. I have no such hopes with Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
> and to have democratic control of the development of the technology
Why? I don't care about democratically participating in a closed model's development. It doesn't belong to me.
China will develop whatever they want, a federal stake in OpenAI or Anthropic punishes Americans and shields US labs from legitimate competition.
In my mind, democratic control of the technology means that we (the govt, or other empowered agency) take ownership of their assets and IP, solve or find a level of alignment or guardrails that society is comfortable with. Then we distribute the technology, or access to it, to avoid power concentration. This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause, which I think is possible.
> This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause
Personally I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system that also just outright kills you if you sell weed will have a hard time sympathizing with Bay Area thinkers who talk about AI killing us all during their ayahuasca breakfast before returning to their meth fueled crunch towards releasing the next version of the AI that will kill us all.
>I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system
Not really relevant to the broader discussion, but this simply isn’t an accurate description of China. Starting with the gaokao, admission quotas are set by province and admits to Peking university and Tsinghua are disproportionately from the urban professional class. Candidate party members must be politically vetted, which means that people whose families have expressed anti-communist views, are members of banned organizations (e.g. falun gong), or have substantial criminal records will not be permitted to advance. And once you make it into the party and enter political service, your advancement relies upon opaque patronage networks that someone without connections is unlikely to be able to navigate, even if they successfully satisfy the economic metrics the state assigns them.
I don’t want to overstate this, the Chinese system does filter out a lot of chaff and the current Chinese leadership has a lot of very capable people in positions of power. But I do not think it is substantially more meritocratic than Western political institutions
> substantially more meritocratic
It is substantially more meritocratic on domains that matter for governance, your analysis of the incentive structure between systems is off.
1) this 2026, old school CCP patronage networks are broadly dismantled.
2) even in the mass patronage, mass corruption days, system selects for BOTH corruption competence AND performance competence for the simple reason a CCP bureaucrat has to start from the bottom and climb up, which means they need to be good with patronage AND they need to be good with hitting development KPIs. More meritocratic they are at doing their jobs, the higher they climbed, the more they get promoted and more $$$ to graft, because ability to graft directly tied to actual job competence. Hence even cliques/patronage network has to select for actual competence. This works in PRC because there are many people, and hence pool of competence is high, they can have BOTH corruption and competence, i.e. whatever pool they draw from is ultimately filtered by performance meritocracy due to incentive structure. There is reason why PRC only country where positive corruption levels was correlated to positive growth.
This is not the western system where any idiot can enter politics at anytime, and they only domain they need to optimize for is popularity to get votes.
CCP cadre evaluation strictly does not evaluate on popularity domain. It focuses on administration/execution and in so much it needs to focus on patronage... which btw any political system has (factions/cliques)... the patronage system still selects for execution, not popularity. On side, functionally what west politics selects for IS mass patronage (popularity), so attention meritocracy and not performance meritocracy, aka completely stupid incentive structure for governance. West also has ample, ample corruption, "legalized" under lobbying and paper pushing industries, so I suppose west also meritocratically selects, except for lawyers etc, and KPIs is # of document generated and not # of things build. The two are not the same when it comes to nation building.
You're in luck, neither I nor anyone else want those people near a negotiation table.
Yikes. Hopefully you never gain any power or influence. The last thing we need is more economic central planning. I sincerely hope that you fail.
Do you think things like the Manhattan Project were a mistake? Comparing AI to nuclear weapons is perhaps a stretch, but I think most people recognize that certain technologies or artifacts are best monopolized by our governing bodies. I think if the capabilities of AI systems keep growing on trend, it is not unreasonable to think wonton usage could disrupt society or cause mass harm.
Roosevelt and Stimson cannot be compared to Trump and Hegseth. (Notwithstanding the latter's renaming of the DoD to what it was in Stimson's day).
Entirely different class of people altogether.
to have democratic control of the development of the technology
Not super interested in what the people who elected Donald Trump POTUS twice think about AI.
(Of course, with Musk and Brockman in the C-suites at two of three major labs, that's what we'll get either way.)
Fair objection, but I still think it is lower risk to diffuse power and control of a potentially dangerous and revolutionary technology than to leave it in the hands of the few elites who have not show much ethical integrity so far.
Is Greg Brockman right wing?
He's the largest single private donor to the Trump 2024 campaign, as I understand it, at $25 million.
Interesting, I did not know this.
I'm yet to have a productive conversation with anyone who whinges about not being able to have a logical discussion about things they feel strongly about, but given that safety and control are interchangeable when the intentions are removed, this comes across as a particularly demagogue depiction of the subject matters involved.
A lack of control is not equivalent to freedom, the same way the totality of it is not equivalent to tyranny. There's a reason we have separate words for these things. This constant motivated conflation of the two is beyond grating. You're crying wolf until nobody believes you when they should. Don't go acting all surprised when that happens.
The issue is with the ownership of control, not necessarily with control. Attacking the latter sidesteps this rather than address it.