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…
I will answer these sincerely in as much detail as necessary. I will only do this once, lest my status amongst the sneerclub fall.
- I don’t think this question is well-defined. It implies that we can qualify all the relevant domains and quantify average human performance in those domains.
- See above.
- I think “AI systems” already control “robotics”. Technically, I would count kids writing code for a simple motorised robot to satisfy this. Everywhere up the ladder, this is already technically true. I imagine you’re trying to ask about AI-controlled robotics research, development and manufacturing. Something like what you’d see in the Terminator franchise- Skynet takes over, develops more advanced robotic weapons, etc. If we had Skynet? Sure, Skynet formulated in the films would produce that future. But that would require us to be living in that movie universe.
- This is a much more well-defined question. I don’t have a belief that would point me towards a number or probability, so no answer as to “most.” There are a lot of factors at play here. Still, in general, as long as human labour can be replaced by robotics, someone will, at the very least, perform economic calculations to determine if that replacement should be done. The more significant concern here for me is that in the future, as it is today, people will still only be seen as assets at the societal level, and those without jobs will be left by the wayside and told it is their fault that they cannot fend for themselves.
- Yes, and we already see that as an issue today. Love it or hate it, the partisan news framework produces some consideration of the problems that pop up in AI development.
Time for some sincerity mixed with sneer:
I think the disconnect that I have with the AGI cult comes down to their certainty on whether or not we will get AGI and, more generally, the unearned confidence about arbitrary scientific/technological/societal progress being made in the future. Specifically with AI => AGI, there isn’t a roadmap to get there. We don’t even have a good idea of where “there” is. The only thing the AGI cult has to “convince” people that it is coming is a gish-gallop of specious arguments, or as they might put it, “Bayesian reasoning.” As we say, AGI is a boogeyman, and its primary use is bullying people into a cult for MIRI donations.
Pure sneer (to be read in a mean, high-school bully tone):
Look, buddy, just because Copilot can write spaghetti less tangled than you doesn’t mean you can extrapolate that to AGI exploring the stars. Oh, so you use ChatGPT to talk to your “boss,” who is probably also using ChatGPT to speak to you? And that convinces you that robots will replace a significant portion of jobs? Well, that at least convinces me that a robot will replace you.
Well, that at least convinces me that a robot will replace you.
i am sincerely convinced that VCs who fearmonger about AI are worried that GPT-3 would already do twitter better than them
Oh, they’re quaking in those VC boots. That’s what’ll set off the Big One.
the singularity will be caused by hooking GPT-4 to an account at Silicon Valley Bank
1, 2 : since you claim you can’t measure this even as a thought experiment, there’s nothing to discuss 3. I meant complex robotic systems able to mine minerals, truck the minerals to processing plants, maintain and operate the processing plants, load the next set of trucks, the trucks go to part assembly plants, inside the plant robots unload the trucks and feed the materials into CNC machines and mill the parts and robots inspect the output and pack it and more trucks…culminating in robots assembling new robots.
It is totally fine if some human labor hours are still required, this cheapens the cost of robots by a lot.
- This is deeply coupled to (3). If you have cheap robots, if an AI system can control a robot well enough to do the task as well as a human, obviously it’s cheaper to have robots do the task than a human in most situations.
Regarding (3) : the specific mechanism would be AI that works like this:
Millions of hours of video of human workers doing tasks in the above domain + all video accessible to the AI company -> tokenized compressed description of the human actions -> llm like model. The llm like model thus is predicting “what would a human do”. You then need a model to transform the what to robotic hardware that is built differently than humans, and this is called the “foundation model”: you use reinforcement learning where actual or simulated robots let the AI system learn from millions of hours of practice to improve on the foundation model.
The long story short of all these tech bro terms is robotic generality - the model will be able to control a robot to do every easy or medium difficulty task, the same way it can solve every easy or medium homework problem. This is what lets you automate (3), because you don’t need to do a lot of engineering work for a robot to do a million different jobs.
Multiple startups and deepmind are working on this.
since you claim you can’t measure this even as a thought experiment, there’s nothing to discus
You’re going to have to lose the LessWrongy superstition that you have to be able to assign numbers to something for it to be meaningful. Sometimes when talking about this big, messy, complicated world, your error bars are so large that assigning any number at all would be meaningless and lead to error. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk qualitatively about what you do know or believe.
- +2, You haven’t made the terms clear enough for there to even be a discussion.
- see above (placeholder for list formatting)
- Uh, OK? Then no (pure sneer: the plot thins). Robots building robots probably already happens in some sense, and we aren’t in the Singularity yet, my boy.
- Sure, why not.
(pure sneer response: imagine I’m a high school bully, and that I assault you in the manner befitting someone of my station, and then I say, “How’s that for a thought experiment?”)
The thing about AI designing and building robots is that making physical things is vastly more expensive than pooping out six-fingered portrait jpegs. All that trial-and-error learning would not come cheap. Even if the AI were controlling CNC machining centers.
There’s no guarantee that the AI would have access to enough parts and materials to be able to be trained to a level of sufficient competence.
Just to engage with the high school bully analogy, the nerd has been threatening to show up with his sexbot bodyguards that are basically T-800s from terminator for years now, and you’ve been taking his lunch money and sneering. But now he’s got real funding and he goes to work at a huge building and apparently there are prototypes of the exact thing he claims to build inside.
The prototypes suck…for now…
