First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses. That somehow ‘rationalists’ are so certain advanced AI will kill everyone in the future (pDoom = 100%!) that they need to commit any violent act needed to stop AI from being developed.
The flaw here is that there’s 8 billion people alive right now, and we don’t actually know what the future is. There are ways better AI could help the people living now, possibly saving their lives, and essentially eliezer yudkowsky is saying “fuck em”. This could only be worth it if you actually somehow knew trillions of people were going to exist, had a low future discount rate, and so on. This seems deeply flawed, and seems to be one of the points here.
But I do think advanced AI is possible. And while it may not be a mainstream take yet, it seems like the problems current AI can’t solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future. I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.
And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.
So I was wondering what the people here generally think. There are “boomer” forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.
I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of “what is your probability” seems like asking for “joint probabilities”, aka smoke a joint and give a probability.
Here’s my questions:
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Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.
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Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics
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If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.
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Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen
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Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?
*“epistemic status”: I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas…
Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.
Domains that humans can do are not quantifiable. Many fields of human endeavor (e.g. many arts and sports) are specifically only worthwhile because of the limits of human minds and bodies. Weightlifting is a thing even though we have cranes and forklifts. People enjoy paintings and drawing even though we have cameras.
I do not find likely that 25% of currently existing occupations are going to be effectively automated in this decade and I don’t think generative machine learning models like LLMs or stable diffusion are going to be the sole major driver of that automation.
Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics
Humans are capable of designing a robot, procuring the components to build the robot, assembling it and using the robot to perform a task. I don’t expect (or desire) a computer program to be able to do the same independently during any of our expected lifetime. It is entirely plausible that tools which apply ML techniques will be used more and more in robotics and other industries, but my money is on those tools being ultimately wielded by humans for the foreseeable future.
If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.
No. Even if Skynet had full control of a robot factory, heck, all the robot factories, and staffed them with a bunch of sleepless foodless always motivated droids, it would still face many of the constraints we do. Physical constraints (a conveyor belt can only go so fast without breaking), economic constraints (Where do the robot parts and the money to buy them come from? Expect robotics IC shortages when semiconductor fabs’ backlogs are full of AI accelerators), even basic motivational constraints (who the hell programmed Skynet to be a paperclip C3PO maximizer?)
Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen
No. A transition like that brought by mechanization and industrialization of agriculture, or the outsourcing of manufacturing industry accompanied by the shift to a service economy, seems plausible, but not by 2040 and it won’t be driven by just machine learning alone.
Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?
Yes, system design is an important issue with all technology. We are already seeing real damage from “AI” technology getting to make important decisions: self-driving vehicle accidents, amplified marginalization of minorities due to feedback of bias into the models, unprecedented opportunities for spam and propaganda, bottlenecks of technology supply chains and much more.
Automation will absolutely continue to replace more and more different kinds of human labor. While this does and will drive unemployment to some extent, there is a more subtle issue with it as well. Productivity of human labor per capita has been soaring decade by decade, but median wages and work hours have stagnated. AI, like many other technologies before and after, is probably gonna end up creating more bullshit jobs, with some people coming into them from already bullshit jobs. If AI can replace half of human labor, that should then mean the average person has to work half as hard, but instead they will have to deliver double the results.
I just think the threat model of autonomous robot factories making superhuman android workers and replicas of itself at an exponential rate is pure science fiction.
Having trouble with quotes here **I do not find likely that 25% of currently existing occupations are going to be effectively automated in this decade and I don’t think generative machine learning models like LLMs or stable diffusion are going to be the sole major driver of that automation. **
- I meant 25% of the tasks, not 25% of the jobs. So some combination of jobs where AI systems can do 90% of some jobs, and 10% of others. I also implicitly was weighting by labor hour, so if 10% of all the labor hours done by US citizens are driving, and AI can drive, that would be 10% automation. Does this change anything in your response?
No. Even if Skynet had full control of a robot factory, heck, all the robot factories, and staffed them with a bunch of sleepless foodless always motivated droids, it would still face many of the constraints we do. Physical constraints (a conveyor belt can only go so fast without breaking), economic constraints (Where do the robot parts and the money to buy them come from? Expect robotics IC shortages when semiconductor fabs’ backlogs are full of AI accelerators), even basic motivational constraints (who the hell programmed Skynet to be a paperclip C3PO maximizer?)
- I didn’t mean ‘skynet’. I meant, AI systems. chatGPT and all the other LLMs are an AI system. So is midjourney with controlnet. So humans want things. They want robots to make the things. They order robots to make more robots (initially using a lot of human factory workers to kick it off). Eventually robots get really cheap, making the things humans want cheaper and that’s where you get the limited form of Singularity I mentioned.
At all points humans are ordering all these robots, and using all the things the robots make. An AI system is many parts. It has device drivers and hardware and cloud services and many neural networks and simulators and so on. One thing that might slow it all down is that the enormous list of IP needed to make even 1 robot work and all the owners of all the software packages will still demand a cut even if the robot hardware is being built by factories with almost all robots working in it.
**I just think the threat model of autonomous robot factories making superhuman android workers and replicas of itself at an exponential rate is pure science fiction. **
- So again that’s a detail I didn’t give. Obviously there are many kinds of robotic hardware, specialized for whatever task they do, and the only reason to make a robot humanoid is if it’s a sexbot or otherwise used as a ‘face’ for humans. None of the hardware has to be superhuman, though obviously industrial robot arms have greater lifting capacity than humans. Just to give a detail what the real stuff would look like : most robots will be in no way superhuman in that they will lack sensors where they don’t need it, won’t be armored, won’t even have onboard batteries or compute hardware, will miss entire modalities of human sense, cannot replicate themselves, and so on. It’s just hardware that does a task, made in factory, and it takes many factories with these machines in it to make all the parts used.
think:
