Like, 'AI risk' felt like a super abstract thing, depending on *way* too many variables that I couldn't even begin to understand. My ability to navigate it felt just like "which experts should I trust more," and experts were saying different things, so ???
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I've often had the experience of learning about an abstract field, thinking hard about it based on my intuitions, and then once I learn more about the field I realize all my intuitions were misguided due to lack of hands-on knowledge. This made me assume I couldn't think about AI
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But discourse about AI has gotten louder, and I did srsly date the director of MIRI for a while, and though he didn't try to AI-risk-pill me much, I started to absorb the concern by osmosis. Should I be really concerned about this? Should I trust him/others around me?
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I suspect I'm more susceptible to socially-driven beliefs than most rationalists; for weird, abstract, high-variance things like AI risk, I tend to try to look to the highest-confidence voice around me and absorb that. I know this about myself, and thus don't trust it.
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I couldn't tell if I was feeling increased worries about AI because all the smartest people around me were worried about it, or because I actually was learning about it. I also had some embarrassment in not "landing on" ai risk by myself, in isolation. This all confused me.
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But recently, with releases of stuff like Dall-E, I saw the landscape of concern suddenly increase. The prediction markets forecasting the arrival of artificial general intelligence suddenly dropped closer and closer. And *this* was the thing that freaked me out the most.
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Not because I updated in the direction of AI research happening faster than I thought, but because *everyone else* updated on this. From my perspective, if you were thinking clearly about AI risk, then cool new stuff like Dall-E should *not* have changed your risk assessment much
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my gut instinct tells me that there's a good chance that people (in general, so idk if the rationalist-y x-risk people are immune to this) will "never waste a crisis" and use the opportunity to raise a scare at a development like dall-e, because it gets more attention, resources
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which is to say, i doubt the people who are seriously thinking about x-risk are actually truly/deeply shocked at dall-e, but they are certainly incentivized to perform their surprise to the public in a somewhat alarmist-ish way. makes strategic sense
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my impression is that the big smart people didn't update off of all the recent developments, because it was entirely predictable. I thought it was mostly people who were unreasonably thinking that Tuesday never happens bc it's Monday rn that updated
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What strange inputs other people require instead of the empty string, to arrive at conclusions that they could have figured out for themselves earlier; if they hadn't waited around for an obvious whack on the head that would predictably arrive later. I didn't update off this. twitter.com/davidad/status…
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it was a good event for creating common knowledge around. a bunch of people individually thinking things through is one thing but a clear signal that everyone can know that everyone knows that it's gotten bad is quite another
related-ish I spotted a gap here
everyone agrees that there's a need for an agi fire alarm
nobody afaik proposed an agi fire alarm drill day
obvious choice is obvious:
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oh like "let's overthrow the government" festival!! :D (reference to EY works)
I tbh am not exactly sure what to do on agi fire alarm day. Deep breaths? Not like anyone has any idea on how to safely align an agi :'D
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