A year and two and a half months since his Time magazine doomer article.
No shut downs of large AI training - in fact only expanded. No ceiling on compute power. No multinational agreements to regulate GPU clusters or first strike rogue datacenters.
Just another note in a panic that accomplished nothing.
It’s also a bunch of brainfarting drivel that could be summarized:
Before we accidentally make an AI capable of posing existential risk to human being safety, perhaps we should find out how to build effective safety measures first.
Or
Read Asimov’s I, Robot. Then note that in our reality, we’ve not yet invented the Three Laws of Robotics.
Before we accidentally make an AI capable of posing existential risk to human being safety, perhaps we should find out how to build effective safety measures first.
You make his position sound way more measured and responsible than it is.
His 'effective safety measures' are something like A) solve ethics B) hardcode the result into every AI, I.e. garbage philosophy meets garbage sci-fi.
He's talking like it's 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it's not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he's lining the floors of hamster cages.
That's 100% my weird late-night word choices. You can reuse it for whatever.
I agree with your sentiment, but the wording is careful. Scaffolding is inherently temporary. It only is erected in service of some further goal. I think what I wanted to get across is that Yud's philosophical world was never going to be a permanent addition to any field of science or maths, for lack of any scientific or formal content. It was always a farfetched alternative fueled by science-fiction stories and contingent on a technological path that never came to be.
Maybe an alternative metaphor is that Yud wanted to develop a new kind of solar panel by reinventing electrodynamics and started by putting his ladder against his siding and climbing up to his roof to call the aliens down to reveal their secrets. A decade later, the ladder sits fallen and moss-covered, but Yud is still up there, trapped by his ego, ranting to anybody who will listen and throwing rocks at the contractors installing solar panels on his neighbor's houses.
There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see "a solar-powered self-replicating factory". I've never figured out how to explain how hard a superintelligence can hit us, to someone who does not see from that angle. It's not just the one fact.
It's almost as if basing an entire worldview upon a literal reading of metaphors in grade-school science books and whatever Carl Sagan said just after "these edibles ain't shit" is, I dunno, bad?