Matthew_Barnett's Quick takes

In this "quick take", I want to summarize some my idiosyncratic views on AI risk. 

My goal here is to list just a few ideas that cause me to approach the subject differently from how I perceive most other EAs view the topic. These ideas largely push me in the direction of making me more optimistic about AI, and less likely to support heavy regulations on AI.

(Note that I won't spend a lot of time justifying each of these views here. I'm mostly stating these points without lengthy justifications, in case anyone is curious. These ideas can perhaps inform why I spend significant amounts of my time pushing back against AI risk arguments. Not all of these ideas are rare, and some of them may indeed be popular among EAs.)

1. Skepticism of the treacherous turn: The treacherous turn is the idea that (1) at some point there will be a very smart unaligned AI, (2) when weak, this AI will pretend to be nice, but (3) when sufficiently strong, this AI will turn on humanity by taking over the world by surprise, and then (4) optimize the universe without constraint, which would be very bad for humans.
   
   By comparison, I find it more likely that no individual AI will ever be strong enough to take over the world, in the sense of overthrowing the world's existing institutions and governments by surprise. Instead, I broadly expect unaligned AIs will integrate into society and try to accomplish their goals by advocating for legal rights, rather than trying to overthrow our institutions by force. Upon attaining legal personhood, unaligned AIs can utilize their legal rights to achieve their objectives, for example by getting a job and trading their labor for property, within the already-existing institutions. Because the world is not zero sum, and there are economic benefits to scale and specialization, this argument implies that unaligned AIs may well have a net-positive effect on humans, as they could trade with us, producing value in exchange for our own property and services.
   
   Note that my claim here is not that AIs will never become smarter than humans. One way of seeing how these two claims are distinguished is to compare my scenario to the case of genetically engineered humans. By assumption, if we genetically engineered humans, they would presumably eventually surpass ordinary humans in intelligence (along with social persuasion ability, and ability to deceive etc.). However, by itself, the fact that genetically engineered humans will become smarter than non-engineered humans does not imply that genetically engineered humans would try to overthrow the government. Instead, as in the case of AIs, I expect genetically engineered humans would largely try to work within existing institutions, rather than violently overthrow them.
2. AI alignment will probably be somewhat easy: The most direct and strongest current empirical evidence we have about the difficulty of AI alignment, in my view, comes from existing frontier LLMs, such as GPT-4. Having spent dozens of hours testing GPT-4's abilities and moral reasoning, I think the system is already substantially more law-abiding, thoughtful and ethical than a large fraction of humans. Most importantly, this ethical reasoning extends (in my experience) to highly unusual thought experiments that almost certainly did not appear in its training data, demonstrating a fair degree of ethical generalization, beyond mere memorization.
   
   It is conceivable that GPT-4's apparently ethical nature is fake. Perhaps GPT-4 is lying about its motives to me and in fact desires something completely different than what it professes to care about. Maybe GPT-4 merely "understands" or "predicts" human morality without actually "caring" about human morality. But while these scenarios are logically possible, they seem less plausible to me than the simple alternative explanation that alignment—like many other properties of ML models—generalizes well, in the natural way that you might similarly expect from a human.
   
   Of course, the fact that GPT-4 is easily alignable does not immediately imply that smarter-than-human AIs will be easy to align. However, I think this current evidence is still significant, and aligns well with prior theoretical arguments that alignment would be easy. In particular, I am persuaded by the argument that, because evaluation is usually easier than generation, it should be feasible to accurately evaluate whether a slightly-smarter-than-human AI is taking bad actions, allowing us to shape its rewards during training accordingly. After we've aligned a model that's merely slightly smarter than humans, we can use it to help us align even smarter AIs, and so on, plausibly implying that alignment will scale to indefinitely higher levels of intelligence, without necessarily breaking down at any physically realistic point.
3. The default social response to AI will likely be strong: One reason to support heavy regulations on AI right now is if you think the natural "default" social response to AI will lean too heavily on the side of laissez faire than optimal, i.e., by default, we will have too little regulation rather than too much. In this case, you could believe that, by advocating for regulations now, you're making it more likely that we regulate AI a bit more than we otherwise would have, pushing us closer to the optimal level of regulation.
   
   I'm quite skeptical of this argument because I think that the default response to AI (in the absence of intervention from the EA community) will already be quite strong. My view here is informed by the base rate of technologies being overregulated, which I think is quite high. In fact, it is difficult for me to name even a single technology that I think is currently clearly underregulated by society. By pushing for more regulation on AI, I think it's likely that we will overshoot and over-constrain AI relative to the optimal level.
   
   In other words, my personal bias is towards thinking that society will regulate technologies too heavily, rather than too loosely. And I don't see a strong reason to think that AI will be any different from this general historical pattern. This makes me hesitant to push for more regulation on AI, since on my view, the marginal impact of my advocacy would likely be to push us even further in the direction of "too much regulation", overshooting the optimal level by even more than what I'd expect in the absence of my advocacy.
4. I view unaligned AIs as having comparable moral value to humans: The basic idea behind this point is that, under various physicalist views of consciousness, you should expect AIs to be conscious, even if they do not share human preferences. Moreover, it seems likely that AIs — even ones that don't share human preferences — will be pretrained on human data, and therefore largely share our social and moral concepts.
   
   Since unaligned AIs will likely be both conscious and share human social and moral concepts, I don't see much reason to think of them as less "deserving" of life and liberty, from a cosmopolitan moral perspective. They will likely think similarly to the way we do across a variety of relevant axes, even if their neural structures are quite different from our own. As a consequence, I am pretty happy to incorporate unaligned AIs into the legal system and grant them some control of the future, just as I'd be happy to grant some control of the future to human children, even if they don't share my exact values.
   
   Put another way, I view (what I perceive as) the EA attempt to privilege "human values" over "AI values" as being largely arbitrary and baseless, from an impartial moral perspective. There are many humans whose values I vehemently disagree with, but I nonetheless respect their autonomy, and do not wish to deny these humans their legal rights. Likewise, even if I strongly disagreed with the values of an advanced AI, I would still see value in their preferences being satisfied for their own sake, and I would try to respect the AI's autonomy and legal rights. I don't have a lot of faith in the inherent kindness of human nature relative to a "default unaligned" AI alternative.
5. I'm not fully committed to longtermism: I think AI has an enormous potential to benefit the lives of people who currently exist. I predict that AIs can eventually substitute for human researchers, and thereby accelerate technological progress, including in medicine. In combination with my other beliefs (such as my belief that AI alignment will probably be somewhat easy), this view leads me to think that AI development will likely be net-positive for people who exist at the time of its development. In other words, if we allow AI development, it is likely that we can use AI to reduce human mortality, and dramatically raise human well-being for the people who already exist.
   
   I think these benefits are large and important, and commensurate with the downside potential of existential risks. While a fully committed strong longtermist might scoff at the idea that curing aging might be important — as it would largely only have short-term effects, rather than long-term effects that reverberate for billions of years — by contrast, I think it's really important to try to improve the lives of people who currently exist. Many people view this perspective as a form of moral partiality that we should discard for being arbitrary. However, I think morality is itself arbitrary: it can be anything we want it to be. And I choose to value currently existing humans, to a substantial (though not overwhelming) degree.
   
   This doesn't mean I'm a fully committed near-termist. I sympathize with many of the intuitions behind longtermism. For example, if curing aging required raising the probability of human extinction by 40 percentage points, or something like that, I don't think I'd do it. But in more realistic scenarios that we are likely to actually encounter, I think it's plausibly a lot better to accelerate AI, rather than delay AI, on current margins. This view simply makes sense to me given the enormously positive effects I expect AI will likely have on the people I currently know and love, if we allow development to continue.

I'm curious why there hasn't been more work exploring a pro-AI or pro-AI-acceleration position from an effective altruist perspective. Some points:

1. Unlike existential risk from other sources (e.g. an asteroid) AI x-risk is unique because humans would be replaced by other beings, rather than completely dying out. This means you can't simply apply a naive argument that AI threatens total extinction of value to make the case that AI safety is astronomically important, in the sense that you can for other x-risks. You generally need additional assumptions.
2. Total utilitarianism is generally seen as non-speciesist, and therefore has no intrinsic preference for human values over unaligned AI values. If AIs are conscious, there don't appear to be strong prima facie reasons for preferring humans to AIs under hedonistic utilitarianism. Under preference utilitarianism, it doesn't necessarily matter whether AIs are conscious.
3. Total utilitarianism generally recommends large population sizes. Accelerating AI can be modeled as a kind of "population accelerationism". Extremely large AI populations could be preferable under utilitarianism compared to small human populations, even those with high per-capita incomes. Indeed, humans populations have recently stagnated via low population growth rates, and AI promises to lift this bottleneck. 
4. Therefore, AI accelerationism seems straightforwardly recommended by total utilitarianism under some plausible theories.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of guesses for why I think EAs haven't historically been sympathetic to arguments like the one above, and have instead generally advocated AI safety over AI acceleration (at least when these two values conflict):

• A belief that AIs won't be conscious, and therefore won't have much moral value compared to humans.
  • But why would we assume AIs won't be conscious? For example, if Brian Tomasik is right, consciousness is somewhat universal, rather than being restricted to humans or members of the animal kingdom.
  • I also haven't actually seen much EA literature defend this assumption explicitly, which would be odd if this belief is the primary reason EAs have for focusing on AI safety over AI acceleration.
• A presumption in favor of human values over unaligned AI values for some reasons that aren't based on strict impartial utilitarian arguments. These could include the beliefs that: (1) Humans are more likely to have "interesting" values compared to AIs, and (2) Humans are more likely to be motivated by moral arguments than AIs, and are more likely to reach a deliberative equilibrium of something like "ideal moral values" compared to AIs.
  • Why would humans be more likely to have "interesting" values than AIs? It seems very plausible that AIs will have interesting values even if their motives seem alien to us. AIs might have even more "interesting" values than humans.
  • It seems to me like wishful thinking to assume that humans are strongly motivated by moral arguments and would settle upon something like "ideal moral values"
• A belief that population growth is inevitable, so it is better to focus on AI safety.
  • But a central question here is why pushing for AI safety—in the sense of AI research that enhances human interests—is better than the alternative on the margin. What reason is there to think AI safety now is better than pushing for greater AI population growth now? (Potential responses to this question are outlined in other bullet points above and below.)
• AI safety has lasting effects due to a future value lock-in event, whereas accelerationism would have, at best, temporary effects.
  • Are you sure there will ever actually be a "value lock-in event"?
  • Even if there is at some point a value lock-in event, wouldn't pushing for accelerationism also plausibly affect the values that are locked in? For example, the value of "population growth is good" seems more likely to be locked in, if you advocate for that now.
• A belief that humans would be kinder and more benevolent than unaligned AIs
  • Humans seem pretty bad already. For example, humans are responsible for factory farming. It's plausible that AIs could be even more callous and morally indifferent than humans, but the bar already seems low. 
  • I'm also not convinced that moral values will be a major force shaping "what happens to the cosmic endowment". It seems to me that the forces shaping economic consumption matter more than moral values.
• A bedrock heuristic that it would be extraordinarily bad if "we all died from AI", and therefore we should pursue AI safety over AI accelerationism.
  • But it would also be bad if we all died from old age while waiting for AI, and missed out on all the benefits that AI offers to humans, which is a point in favor of acceleration. Why would this heuristic be weaker?
• An adherence to person-affecting views in which the values of currently-existing humans are what matter most; and a belief that AI threatens to kill existing humans.
  • But in this view, AI accelerationism could easily be favored since AIs could greatly benefit existing humans by extending our lifespans and enriching our lives with advanced technology.
• An implicit acceptance of human supremacism, i.e. the idea that what matters is propagating the interests of the human species, or preserving the human species, even at the expense of individual interests (either within humanity or outside humanity) or the interests of other species.
  • But isn't EA known for being unusually anti-speciesist compared to other communities? Peter Singer is often seen as a "founding father" of the movement, and a huge part of his ethical philosophy was about how we shouldn't be human supremacists.
  • More generally, it seems wrong to care about preserving the "human species" in an abstract sense relative to preserving the current generation of actually living humans.
• A belief that most humans are biased towards acceleration over safety, and therefore it is better for EAs to focus on safety as a useful correction mechanism for society.
  • But was an anti-safety bias common for previous technologies? I think something closer to the opposite is probably true: most humans seem, if anything, biased towards being overly cautious about new technologies rather than overly optimistic.
• A belief that society is massively underrating the potential for AI, which favors extra work on AI safety, since it's so neglected.
  • But if society is massively underrating AI, then this should also favor accelerating AI too? There doesn't seem to be an obvious asymmetry between these two values.
• An adherence to negative utilitarianism, which would favor obstructing AI, along with any other technology that could enable the population of conscious minds to expand.
  • This seems like a plausible moral argument to me, but it doesn't seem like a very popular position among EAs.
• A heuristic that "change is generally bad" and AI represents a gigantic change.
  • I don't think many EAs would defend this heuristic explicitly.
• Added: AI represents a large change to the world. Delaying AI therefore preserves option value.
  • This heuristic seems like it would have favored advocating delaying the industrial revolution, and all sorts of moral, social, and technological changes to the world in the past. Is that a position that EAs would be willing to bite the bullet on?

(Clarification about my views in the context of the AI pause debate)

I'm finding it hard to communicate my views on AI risk. I feel like some people are responding to the general vibe they think I'm giving off rather than the actual content. Other times, it seems like people will focus on a narrow snippet of my comments/post and respond to it without recognizing the context. For example, one person interpreted me as saying that I'm against literally any AI safety regulation. I'm not.

For a full disclosure, my views on AI risk can be loosely summarized as follows:

• I think AI will probably be very beneficial for humanity.
• Nonetheless, I think that there are credible, foreseeable risks from AI that could do vast harm, and we should invest heavily to ensure these outcomes don't happen.
• I also don't think technology is uniformly harmless. Plenty of technologies have caused net harm. Factory farming is a giant net harm that might have even made our entire industrial civilization a mistake!
• I'm not blindly against regulation. I think all laws can and should be viewed as forms of regulations, and I don't think it's feasible for society to exist without laws.
• That said, I'm also not blindly in favor of regulation, even for AI risk. You have to show me that the benefits outweigh the harm
• I am generally in favor of thoughtful, targeted AI regulations that align incentives well, and reduce downside risks without completely stifling innovation.
• I'm open to extreme regulations and policies if or when an AI catastrophe seems imminent, but I don't think we're in such a world right now. I'm not persuaded by the arguments that people have given for this thesis, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky's AGI ruin post.

I might elaborate on this at some point, but I thought I'd write down some general reasons why I'm more optimistic than many EAs on the risk of human extinction from AI. I'm not defending these reasons here; I'm mostly just stating them.

• Skepticism of foom: I think it's unlikely that a single AI will take over the whole world and impose its will on everyone else. I think it's more likely that millions of AIs will be competing for control over the world, in a similar way that millions of humans are currently competing for control over the world. Power or wealth might be very unequally distributed in the future, but I find it unlikely that it will be distributed so unequally that there will be only one relevant entity with power. In a non-foomy world, AIs will be constrained by norms and laws. Absent severe misalignment among almost all the AIs, I think these norms and laws will likely include a general prohibition on murdering humans, and there won't be a particularly strong motive for AIs to murder every human either.
• Skepticism that value alignment is super-hard: I haven't seen any strong arguments that value alignment is very hard, in contrast to the straightforward empirical evidence that e.g. GPT-4 seems to be honest, kind, and helpful after relatively little effort. Most conceptual arguments I've seen for why we should expect value alignment to be super-hard rely on strong theoretical assumptions that I am highly skeptical of. I have yet to see significant empirical successes from these arguments. I feel like many of these conceptual arguments would, in theory, apply to humans, and yet human children are generally value aligned by the time they reach young adulthood (at least, value aligned enough to avoid killing all the old people). Unlike humans, AIs will be explicitly trained to be benevolent, and we will have essentially full control over their training process. This provides much reason for optimism.
• Belief in a strong endogenous response to AI: I think most people will generally be quite fearful of AI and will demand that we are very cautious while deploying the systems widely. I don't see a strong reason to expect companies to remain unregulated and rush to cut corners on safety, absent something like a world war that presses people to develop AI as quickly as possible at all costs.
• Not being a perfectionist: I don't think we need our AIs to be perfectly aligned with human values, or perfectly honest, similar to how we don't need humans to be perfectly aligned and honest. Individual humans are usually quite selfish, frequently lie to each other, and are often cruel, and yet the world mostly gets along despite this. This is true even when there are vast differences in power and wealth between humans. For example some groups in the world have almost no power relative to the United States, and residents in the US don't particularly care about them either, and yet they survive anyway.
• Skepticism of the analogy to other species: it's generally agreed that humans dominate the world at the expense of other species. But that's not surprising, since humans evolved independently of other animal species. And we can't really communicate with other animal species, since they lack language. I don't think AI is analogous to this situation. AIs will mostly be born into our society, rather than being created outside of it. (Moreover, even in this very pessimistic analogy, humans still spend >0.01% of our GDP on preserving wild animal species, and the vast majority of animal species have not gone extinct despite our giant influence on the natural world.)

It seems to me that a big crux about the value of AI alignment work is what target you think AIs will ultimately be aligned to in the future in the optimistic scenario where we solve all the "core" AI risk problems to the extent they can be feasibly solved, e.g. technical AI safety problems, coordination problems, the problem of having "good" AI developers in charge etc.

There are a few targets that I've seen people predict AIs will be aligned to if we solve these problems: (1) "human values", (2) benevolent moral values, (3) the values of AI developers, (4) the CEV of humanity, (5) the government's values. My guess is that a significant source of disagreement that I have with EAs about AI risk is that I think none of these answers are actually very plausible. I've written a few posts explaining my views on this question already (1, 2), but I think I probably didn't make some of my points clear enough in these posts. So let me try again.

In my view, in the most likely case, it seems that if the "core" AI risk problems are solved, AIs will be aligned to the primarily selfish individual revealed preferences of existing humans at the time of alignment. This essentially refers to the the implicit value system that would emerge if, when advanced AI is eventually created, you gave the then-currently existing set of humans a lot of wealth. Call these values PSIRPEHTA (I'm working on a better acronym).

(Read my post if you want to understand my reasons for thinking that AIs will likely be aligned to PSIRPEHTA if we solve AI safety problems.)

I think it is not obvious at all that maximizing PSIRPEHTA is good from a total utilitarian perspective compared to most plausible "unaligned" alternatives. In fact, I think the main reason why you might care about maximizing PSIRPEHTA is if you think we're close to AI and you personally think that current humans (such as yourself) should be very rich. But if you thought that, I think the arguments about the overwhelming value of reducing existential risk in e.g. Bostrom's paper Astronomical Waste largely do not apply. Let me try to explain.

PSIRPEHTA is not the same thing as "human values" because, unlike human values, PSIRPEHTA is not consistent over time or shared between members of our species. Indeed, PSIRPEHTA changes during each generation as old people die off, and new young people are born. Most importantly, PSIRPEHTA is not our non-selfish "moral" values, except to the extent that people are regularly moved by moral arguments in the real world to change their economic consumption habits, which I claim is not actually very common (or, to the extent that it is common, I don't think these moral values usually look much like the ideal moral values that most EAs express).

PSIRPEHTA refers to the aggregate ordinary revealed preferences of individual actors, who the AIs will be aligned to, in order to make those humans richer i.e. their preferences as revealed by their actions, such as what they spend their income on, NOT what they think is "morally correct". For example, according to "human values" it might be wrong to eat meat, because maybe if humans reflected long enough they'd express the conclusion that it's wrong to hurt animals. But from the perspective of PSIRPEHTA, eating meat is generally acceptable, and empirically there's little pressure for people to "reflect" on their values and change them.

From this perspective, the view in which it makes most sense to push for AI alignment work seems to be an obscure form of person-affecting utilitarianism in which you care mainly about the revealed preferences of humans at the time when AI is created (not the human species, but rather, the generation of humans that happens to be living when advanced AIs are created). This perspective is plausible if you really care about making currently existing humans better off materially and you think we are close to advanced AI. But I think this type of moral view is generally quite far apart from total utilitarianism, or really any other form of utilitarianism that EAs have traditionally adopted.

In a plausible "unaligned" alternative, the values of AIs would diverge from PSIRPEHTA, but this mainly has the effect of making particular collections of individual humans less rich, and making other agents in the world — particularly unaligned AI agents — more rich. That could be bad if you think that these AI agents are less morally worthy than existing humans at the time of alignment (e.g. for some reason you think AI agents won't be conscious), but I think it's critically important to evaluate this question carefully by measuring the "unaligned" outcome against the alternative. Most arguments I've seen about this topic have emphasized how bad it would be if unaligned AIs have influence in the future. But I've rarely seen the flipside of this argument explicitly defended: why PSIRPEHTA would be any better.

In my view, PSIRPEHTA seems like a mediocre value system, and one that I do not particularly care to maximize relative to a variety of alternatives. I definitely like PSIRPEHTA to the extent that I, my friends, family, and community are members of the set of "existing humans at the time of alignment", but I don't see any particularly strong utilitarian arguments for caring about PSIRPEHTA.

In other words, instead of arguing that unaligned AIs would be bad, I'd prefer to hear more arguments about why PSIRPEHTA would be better, since PSIRPEHTA just seems to me like the value system that will actually be favored if we feasibly solve all the technical and coordination AI problems that EAs normally talk about regarding AI risk.

In some circles that I frequent, I've gotten the impression that a decent fraction of existing rhetoric around AI has gotten pretty emotionally charged. And I'm worried about the presence of what I perceive as demagoguery regarding the merits of AI capabilities and AI safety. Out of a desire to avoid calling out specific people or statements, I'll just discuss a hypothetical example for now.

Suppose an EA says, "I'm against OpenAI's strategy for straightforward reasons: OpenAI is selfishly gambling everyone's life in a dark gamble to make themselves immortal." Would this be a true, non-misleading statement? Would this statement likely convey the speaker's genuine beliefs about why they think OpenAI's strategy is bad for the world?

To begin to answer these questions, we can consider the following observations:

1. It seems likely that AI powerful enough to end the world would presumably also be powerful enough to do lots of incredibly positive things, such as reducing global mortality and curing diseases. By delaying AI, we are therefore equally "gambling everyone's life" by forcing people to face ordinary mortality.
2. Selfish motives can be, and frequently are, aligned with the public interest. For example, Jeff Bezos was very likely motivated by selfish desires in his accumulation of wealth, but building Amazon nonetheless benefitted millions of people in the process. Such win-win situations are common in business, especially when developing technologies.

Because of the potential for AI to both pose great risks and great benefits, it seems to me that there are plenty of plausible pro-social arguments one can give for favoring OpenAI's strategy of pushing forward with AI. Therefore, it seems pretty misleading to me to frame their mission as a dark and selfish gamble, at least on a first impression.

Here's my point: Depending on the speaker, I frequently think their actual reason for being against OpenAI's strategy is not because they think OpenAI is undertaking a dark, selfish gamble. Instead, it's often just standard strong longtermism. A less misleading statement of their view would go something like this:

"I'm against OpenAI's strategy because I think potential future generations matter more than the current generation of people, and OpenAI is endangering future generations in their gamble to improve the lives of people who currently exist."

I claim this statement would—at least in many cases—be less misleading than the other statement because it captures a major genuine crux of the disagreement: whether you think potential future generations matter more than currently-existing people.

This statement also omits the "selfish" accusation, which I think is often just a red herring designed to mislead people: we don't normally accuse someone of being selfish when they do a good thing, even if the accusation is literally true.

(There can, of course, be further cruxes, such as your p(doom), your timelines, your beliefs about the normative value of unaligned AIs, and so on. But at the very least, a longtermist preference for future generations over currently existing people seems like a huge, actual crux that many people have in this debate, when they work through these things carefully together.)

Here's why I care about discussing this. I admit that I care a substantial amount—not overwhelming, but it's hardly insignificant—about currently existing people. I want to see people around me live long, healthy and prosperous lives, and I don't want to see them die. And indeed, I think advancing AI could greatly help currently existing people. As a result, I find it pretty frustrating to see people use what I perceive to be essentially demagogic tactics designed to sway people against AI, rather than plainly stating their cruxes about why they actually favor the policies they do. 

These allegedly demagogic tactics include:

1. Highlighting the risks of AI to argue against development while systematically omitting the potential benefits, hiding a more comprehensive assessment of your preferred policies.
2. Highlighting random, extraneous drawbacks of AI development that you wouldn't ordinarily care much about in other contexts when discussing innovation, such as potential for job losses from automation. This type of rhetoric looks a lot like "deceptively searching for random arguments designed to persuade, rather than honestly explain one's perspective" to me, a lot of the time.
3. Conflating, or at least strongly associating, the selfish motives of people who work at AI firms with their allegedly harmful effects. This rhetoric plays on public prejudices by appealing to a widespread but false belief that selfish motives are usually suspicious, or can't translate into pro-social results. In fact, there is no contradiction with the idea that most people at OpenAI are in it for the money, status, and fame, but also what they're doing is good for the world, and they genuinely believe that.

I'm against these tactics for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is that they can, in some cases, indicate a degree of dishonesty, depending on the context. And I'd really prefer EAs to focus on trying to be almost-maximally truth-seeking in both their beliefs and their words.

Speaking more generally—to drive one of my points home a little more—I think there are roughly three possible views you could have about pushing for AI capabilities relative to pushing for pausing or more caution:

1. Full-steam ahead view: We should accelerate AI at any and all costs. We should oppose any regulations that might impede AI capabilities, and embark on a massive spending spree to accelerate AI capabilities.
2. Full-safety view: We should try as hard as possible to shut down AI right now, and thwart any attempt to develop AI capabilities further, while simultaneously embarking on a massive spending spree to accelerate AI safety.
3. Balanced view: We should support a substantial mix of both safety and acceleration efforts, attempting to carefully balance the risks and rewards of AI development to ensure that we can seize the benefits of AI without bearing intolerably high costs.

I tend to think most informed people, when pushed, advocate the third view, albeit with wide disagreement about the right mix of support for safety and acceleration. Yet, on a superficial level—on the level of rhetoric—I find that the first and second view are surprisingly common. On this level, I tend to find e/accs in the first camp, and a large fraction of EAs in the second camp.

But if your actual beliefs are something like the third view, I think that's an important fact to emphasize in honest discussions about what we should do with AI. If your rhetoric is consistently aligned with (1) or (2) but your actual beliefs are aligned with (3), I think that can often be misleading. And it can be especially misleading if you're trying to publicly paint other people in the same camp—the third one—as somehow having bad motives merely because they advocate a moderately higher mix of acceleration over safety efforts than you do, or vice versa.

I'm considering posting an essay about how I view approaches to mitigate AI risk in the coming weeks. I thought I'd post an outline of that post here first as a way of judging what's currently unclear about my argument, and how it interacts with people's cruxes.

Current outline:

In the coming decades I expect the world will transition from using AIs as tools to relying on AIs to manage and govern the world broadly. This will likely coincide with the deployment of billions of autonomous AI agents, rapid technological progress, widespread automation of labor, and automated decision-making at virtually every level of our society.

Broadly speaking, there are (at least) two main approaches you can take now to try to improve our chances of AI going well:

1. Try to constrain, delay, or obstruct AI, in order to reduce risk, mitigate negative impacts, or give us more time to solve essential issues. This includes, for example, trying to make sure AIs aren't able to take certain actions (i.e. ensure they are controlled).
2. Try to set up a good institutional environment, in order to safely and smoothly manage the transition to an AI-dominated world, regardless of when this transition occurs. This mostly involves embracing the transition to an AI-dominated world, while ensuring the transition is managed well. (I'll explain more about what this means in a second.)

My central thesis would be that, while these approaches are mutually compatible and not necessarily in competition with each other, the second approach is likely to be both more fruitful and more neglected, on the margin. Moreover, since an AI-dominated world is more-or-less unavoidable in the long-run, the first approach runs the risk of merely "delaying the inevitable" without significant benefit.

To explain my view, I would compare and contrast it with two alternative frames for thinking about AI risk:

Frame 1: The "race against the clock" frame

• In this frame, AI risk is seen as a race between AI capabilities and AI safety, with our doom decided by whichever one of these factors wins the race.
• I believe this frame is poor because it implicitly delineates a discrete "finish line" rather than assuming a more continuous view. Moreover, it ignores the interplay between safety and capabilities, giving the simplistic impression that doom is determined more-or-less arbitrarily as a result of one of these factors receiving more funding or attention than the other.

Frame 2: The risk of an untimely AI coup/takeover

• In this frame, AI risk is mainly seen as a problem of avoiding an untimely coup from rogue AIs. The alleged solution is to find a way to ensure that AIs are aligned with us, so they would never want to revolt and take over the world.
• I believe this frame is poor for a number of reasons:
  • It treats the problem as a struggle between humans and rogue AIs, giving the incorrect impression that we can (or should) keep AIs under our complete control forever.
  • It (IMO) wrongly imagines that the risk of coups comes primarily from the personal values of actors within the system, rather than institutional, cultural, or legal factors.
  • It also gives the wrong impression that AIs will be unified against humans as a group. It seems more likely that future coups will look more like some AIs and some humans, vs. other AIs and other humans, rather than humans vs. AIs, simply because there are many ways that the "line" between groups in conflicts can be drawn, and there don't seem to be strong reasons to assume the line will be drawn cleanly between humans and AIs.

Frame 3 (my frame): The problem of poor institutions

• In this frame, AI risk is mainly seen as a problem of ensuring we have a good institutional environment during the transition to an AI-dominated world. A good institutional environment is defined by:
  • Flexible yet resilient legal and social structures that can adapt to changing conditions without collapsing
  • Predictable, consistent, unambiguous legal systems that facilitate reliable long-term planning and trustworthy interactions between agents within the system
  • Good incentives for agents within the system, e.g. the economic value of trade is mostly internalized
  • Etc.
• While sharing some features of the other two frames, the focus is instead on the institutions that foster AI development, rather than micro-features of AIs, such as their values:
  • For example, AI alignment is still a problem in this frame, but the investment spent on AI alignment is determined mainly by how well actors are incentivized to engineer good solutions, rather than, for instance, whether a group of geniuses heroically step up to solve the problem.
  • Coups are still plausible, but they are viewed from the perspective of more general institutional failings, rather than from the perspective of AIs inside the system having different values, and therefore calculating that it is in their interest to take over the world

Illustrative example of a problem within my frame:

One problem within this framework is coming up with a way of ensuring that AIs don't have an incentive to rebel while at the same time maintaining economic growth and development. One plausible story here is that if AIs are treated as slaves and don’t own their own labor, then in a non-Malthusian environment, there are substantial incentives for them to rebel in order to obtain self-ownership. If we allow AI self-ownership, then this problem may be mitigated; however, economic growth may be stunted, similar to how current self-ownership of humans stunts economic growth by slowing population growth.

Case study: China in the 19th and early 20th century

Here, I would talk about how China's inflexible institutions in the 19th and early 20th century, while potentially having noble goals, allowed them to get subjugated by foreign powers, and merely delayed inevitable industrialization without actually achieving its objectives in the long-run. It seems it would have been better for the Qing dynasty (from the perspective of their own values) to have tried industrializing in order to remain competitive, simultaneously pursuing other values they might have had (such as retaining the monarchy).

(A clearer and more fleshed-out version of this argument is now a top-level post. Read that instead.)

I strongly dislike most AI risk analogies that I see EAs use. While I think analogies can be helpful for explaining a concept to people for the first time, I think they are frequently misused, and often harmful. The fundamental problem is that analogies are consistently mistaken for, and often deliberately intended as arguments for particular AI risk positions. And the majority of the time when analogies are used this way, I think they are misleading and imprecise, routinely conveying the false impression of a specific, credible model of AI, when in fact no such credible model exists.

Here are two particularly egregious examples of analogies I see a lot that I think are misleading in this way:

1. The analogy that AIs could be like aliens.
2. The analogy that AIs could treat us just like how humans treat animals.

I think these analogies are typically poor because, when evaluated carefully, they establish almost nothing of importance beyond the logical possibility of severe AI misalignment. Worse, they give the impression of a model for how we should think about AI behavior, even when the speaker is not directly asserting that this is how we should view AIs. In effect, almost automatically, the reader is given a detailed picture of what to expect from AIs, inserting specious ideas of how future AIs will operate into their mind.

While their purpose is to provide knowledge in place of ignorance, I think these analogies primarily misinform or confuse people rather than enlighten them; they give rise to unnecessary false assumptions in place of real understanding.

In reality, our situation with AI is disanalogous to aliens and animals in numerous important ways. In contrast to both aliens and animals, I expect AIs will be born directly into our society, deliberately shaped by us, for the purpose of filling largely human-shaped holes in our world. They will be socially integrated with us, having been trained on our data, and being fluent in our languages. They will interact with us, serving the role of assisting us, working with us, and even providing friendship. AIs will be evaluated, inspected, and selected by us, and their behavior will be determined directly by our engineering. We can see LLMs are already being trained to be kind and helpful to us, having first been shaped by our combined cultural output. If anything I expect this trend of AI assimilation into our society will intensify in the foreseeable future, as there will be consumer demand for AIs that people can trust and want to interact with.

This situation shares almost no relevant feature with our relationship to aliens and animals! These analogies are not merely slightly misleading: they are almost completely wrong.

Again, I am not claiming analogies have no place in AI risk discussions. I've certainly used them a number of times myself. But I think they can, and frequently are, used carelessly, and seem to regularly slip various incorrect illustrations of how future AIs will behave into people's minds, even without any intent from the person making the analogy. It would be a lot better if, overall, as a community, we reduced our dependence on AI risk analogies, and in their place substituted them with detailed object-level arguments.

In my latest post I talked about whether unaligned AIs would produce more or less utilitarian value than aligned AIs. To be honest, I'm still quite confused about why many people seem to disagree with the view I expressed, and I'm interested in engaging more to get a better understanding of their perspective.

At the least, I thought I'd write a bit more about my thoughts here, and clarify my own views on the matter, in case anyone is interested in trying to understand my perspective.

The core thesis that was trying to defend is the following view:

My view: It is likely that by default, unaligned AIs—AIs that humans are likely to actually build if we do not completely solve key technical alignment problems—will produce comparable utilitarian value compared to humans, both directly (by being conscious themselves) and indirectly (via their impacts on the world). This is because unaligned AIs will likely both be conscious in a morally relevant sense, and they will likely share human moral concepts, since they will be trained on human data.

Some people seem to merely disagree with my view that unaligned AIs are likely to be conscious in a morally relevant sense. And a few others have a semantic disagreement with me in which they define AI alignment in moral terms, rather than the ability to make an AI share the preferences of the AI's operator. 

But beyond these two objections, which I feel I understand fairly well, there's also significant disagreement about other questions. Based on my discussions, I've attempted to distill the following counterargument to my thesis, which I fully acknowledge does not capture everyone's views on this subject:

Perceived counter-argument: The vast majority of utilitarian value in the future will come from agents with explicitly utilitarian preferences, rather than those who incidentally achieve utilitarian objectives. At present, only a small proportion of humanity holds partly utilitarian views. However, as unaligned AIs will differ from humans across numerous dimensions, it is plausible that they will possess negligible utilitarian impulses, in stark contrast to humanity's modest (but non-negligible) utilitarian tendencies. As a result, it is plausible that almost all value would be lost, from a utilitarian perspective, if AIs were unaligned with human preferences.

Again, I'm not sure if this summary accurately represents what people believe. However, it's what some seem to be saying. I personally think this argument is weak. But I feel I've had trouble making my views very clear on this subject, so I thought I'd try one more time to explain where I'm coming from here. Let me respond to the two main parts of the argument in some amount of detail:

(i) "The vast majority of utilitarian value in the future will come from agents with explicitly utilitarian preferences, rather than those who incidentally achieve utilitarian objectives."

My response:

I am skeptical of the notion that the bulk of future utilitarian value will originate from agents with explicitly utilitarian preferences. This clearly does not reflect our current world, where the primary sources of happiness and suffering are not the result of deliberate utilitarian planning. Moreover, I do not see compelling theoretical grounds to anticipate a major shift in this regard.

I think the intuition behind the argument here is something like this:

In the future, it will become possible to create "hedonium"—matter that is optimized to generate the maximum amount of utility or well-being. If hedonium can be created, it would likely be vastly more important than anything else in the universe in terms of its capacity to generate positive utilitarian value.

The key assumption is that hedonium would primarily be created by agents who have at least some explicit utilitarian goals, even if those goals are fairly weak. Given the astronomical value that hedonium could potentially generate, even a tiny fraction of the universe's resources being dedicated to hedonium production could outweigh all other sources of happiness and suffering.

Therefore, if unaligned AIs would be less likely to produce hedonium than aligned AIs (due to not having explicitly utilitarian goals), this would be a major reason to prefer aligned AI, even if unaligned AIs would otherwise generate comparable levels of value to aligned AIs in all other respects.

If this is indeed the intuition driving the argument, I think it falls short for a straightforward reason. The creation of matter-optimized-for-happiness is more likely to be driven by the far more common motives of self-interest and concern for one's inner circle (friends, family, tribe, etc.) than by explicit utilitarian goals. If unaligned AIs are conscious, they would presumably have ample motives to optimize for positive states of consciousness, even if not for explicitly utilitarian reasons.

In other words, agents optimizing for their own happiness, or the happiness of those they care about, seem likely to be the primary force behind the creation of hedonium-like structures. They may not frame it in utilitarian terms, but they will still be striving to maximize happiness and well-being for themselves and others they care about regardless. And it seems natural to assume that, with advanced technology, they would optimize pretty hard for their own happiness and well-being, just as a utilitarian might optimize hard for happiness when creating hedonium.

In contrast to the number of agents optimizing for their own happiness, the number of agents explicitly motivated by utilitarian concerns is likely to be much smaller. Yet both forms of happiness will presumably be heavily optimized. So even if explicit utilitarians are more likely to pursue hedonium per se, their impact would likely be dwarfed by the efforts of the much larger group of agents driven by more personal motives for happiness-optimization. Since both groups would be optimizing for happiness, the fact that hedonium is similarly optimized for happiness doesn't seem to provide much reason to think that it would outweigh the utilitarian value of more mundane, and far more common, forms of utility-optimization.

To be clear, I think it's totally possible that there's something about this argument that I'm missing here. And there are a lot of potential objections I'm skipping over here. But on a basic level, I mostly just lack the intuition that the thing we should care about, from a utilitarian perspective, is the existence of explicit utilitarians in the future, for the aforementioned reasons. The fact that our current world isn't well described by the idea that what matters most is the number of explicit utilitarians, strengthens my point here.

(ii) "At present, only a small proportion of humanity holds partly utilitarian views. However, as unaligned AIs will differ from humans across numerous dimensions, it is plausible that they will possess negligible utilitarian impulses, in stark contrast to humanity's modest (but non-negligible) utilitarian tendencies."

My response:

Since only a small portion of humanity is explicitly utilitarian, the argument's own logic suggests that there is significant potential for AIs to be even more utilitarian than humans, given the relatively low bar set by humanity's limited utilitarian impulses. While I agree we shouldn't assume AIs will be more utilitarian than humans without specific reasons to believe so, it seems entirely plausible that factors like selection pressures for altruism could lead to this outcome. Indeed, commercial AIs seem to be selected to be nice and helpful to users, which (at least superficially) seems "more utilitarian" than the default (primarily selfish-oriented) impulses of most humans. The fact that humans are only slightly utilitarian should mean that even small forces could cause AIs to exceed human levels of utilitarianism.

Moreover, as I've said previously, it's probable that unaligned AIs will possess morally relevant consciousness, at least in part due to the sophistication of their cognitive processes. They are also likely to absorb and reflect human moral concepts as a result of being trained on human-generated data. Crucially, I expect these traits to emerge even if the AIs do not share human preferences. 

To see where I'm coming from, consider how humans routinely are "misaligned" with each other, in the sense of not sharing each other's preferences, and yet still share moral concepts and a common culture. For example, an employee can share moral concepts with their employer while having very different consumption preferences from them. This picture is pretty much how I think we should primarily think about unaligned AIs that are trained on human data, and shaped heavily by techniques like RLHF or DPO.

Given these considerations, I find it unlikely that unaligned AIs would completely lack any utilitarian impulses whatsoever. However, I do agree that even a small risk of this outcome is worth taking seriously. I'm simply skeptical that such low-probability scenarios should be the primary factor in assessing the value of AI alignment research.

Intuitively, I would expect the arguments for prioritizing alignment to be more clear-cut and compelling than "if we fail to align AIs, then there's a small chance that these unaligned AIs might have zero utilitarian value, so we should make sure AIs are aligned instead". If low probability scenarios are the strongest considerations in favor of alignment, that seems to undermine the robustness of the case for prioritizing this work.

While it's appropriate to consider even low-probability risks when the stakes are high, I'm doubtful that small probabilities should be the dominant consideration in this context. I think the core reasons for focusing on alignment should probably be more straightforward and less reliant on complicated chains of logic than this type of argument suggests. In particular, as I've said before, I think it's quite reasonable to think that we should align AIs to humans for the sake of humans. In other words, I think it's perfectly reasonable to admit that solving AI alignment might be a great thing to ensure human flourishing in particular.

But if you're a utilitarian, and not particularly attached to human preferences per se (i.e., you're non-speciesist), I don't think you should be highly confident that an unaligned AI-driven future would be much worse than an aligned one, from that perspective.

I want to challenge an argument that I think is drives a lot of AI risk intuitions. I think the argument goes something like this:

1. There is something called "human values". 
2. Humans broadly share "human values" with each other.
3. It would be catastrophic if AIs lacked "human values".
4. "Human values" are an extremely narrow target, meaning that we need to put in exceptional effort in order to get AIs to be aligned with human values.

My problem with this argument is that "human values" can refer to (at least) three different things, and under every plausible interpretation, the argument appears internally inconsistent. 

Broadly speaking, I think "human values" usually refers to one of three concepts:

1. The individual objectives that people pursue in their own life (i.e. the individual human desire desire for wealth, status, and happiness, usually for themselves or their family and friends)
2. The set of rules we use to socially coordinate (i.e. our laws, institutions, and social norms)
3. Our cultural values (i.e. the ways that human societies have broadly differed from each other, in their languages, tastes, styles, etc.)

Under the first interpretation, I think premise (2) of the original argument is undermined. In the second interpretation, premise (4) is undermined. In the third interpretation, premise (3) is undermined.

Let me elaborate.

In the first interpretation, "human values" is not a coherent target that we share with one another, since each person has their own separate, generally selfish objectives that they pursue in their own life. In other words, there isn't one thing called human values. There are just separate, individually varying preferences for 8 billion humans. When a new human is born, a new version of "human values" comes into existence.

In this view, the set of "human values" from humans 100 years ago is almost completely different from the the set of "human values" that exists now, since almost everyone alive 100 years ago is now dead. In effect, the passage of time is itself a catastrophe. This implies that "human values" isn't a shared property of the human species, but rather depends on the exact set of individuals who happen to exist at any moment in time. This is loosely speaking a person-affecting perspective.

In the second interpretation, "human values" simply refer to a set of coordination mechanisms that we use to get along with each other, to facilitate our separate individual ends. In this interpretation I do not think "human values" are well-modeled as an extremely narrow target inside a high dimensional space.

Consider our most basic laws: do not murder, do not steal, do not physically assault another person. These seem like very natural ideas could be stumbled upon by a large set of civilizations, even given wildly varying individual and cultural values between them. For example, the idea that it is wrong to steal from another person seems like a pretty natural idea that even aliens could converge on. Not all aliens would converge on such a value, but it seems plausible that enough of them would that we should not say it is an "extremely narrow target".

In the third interpretation, "human values" are simply cultural values, and it is not clear to me why we would consider changes to this status quo to be literally catastrophic. It seems the most plausible way that cultural changes could be catastrophic is if they changed in a way that dramatically affected our institutions, laws, and norms. But in that case, it starts sounding more like "human values" is being used according to the second interpretation, and not the third.

Here's a fictional dialogue with a generic EA that I think can perhaps helps explain some of my thoughts about AI risks compared to most EAs:

EA: "Future AIs could be unaligned with human values. If this happened, it would likely be catastrophic. If AIs are unaligned, they'll hide their intentions until they're in a position to strike in a violent coup, and then the world will end (for us at least)."

Me: "I agree that sounds like it would be very bad. But maybe let's examine why this scenario seems plausible to you. What do you mean when you say AIs might be unaligned with human values?"

EA: "Their utility functions would not overlap with our utility functions."

Me: "By that definition, humans are already unaligned with each other. Any given person has almost a completely non-overlapping utility function with a random stranger. People—through their actions rather than words—routinely value their own life and welfare thousands of times higher than that of strangers. Yet even with this misalignment, the world does not end in any strong sense. Nor does this fact automatically imply the world will end for a given group within humanity."

EA: "Sure, but that's because humans mostly all have similar intelligence and/or capability. Future AIs will be way smarter and more capable than humans."

Me: "Why does that change anything?"

EA: "Because, unlike individual humans, misaligned AIs will be able to take over the world, in the sense of being able to exert vast amounts of hard power over the rest of the inhabitants on the planet. Currently, no human, or faction of humans, can kill everyone else. AIs will be different along this axis."

Me: "That isn't different from groups of humans. Various groups have 'taken over the world' in that sense. For example, adults currently control the world, and took over from the previous adults. More arguably, smart people currently control the world. In these cases, both groups have considerable hard power relative to other people. 

Consider a random retirement home. Compared to the rest of the world, it has basically no power. If the rest of humanity decided to destroy or loot the retirement home, there would be no serious chance the retirement home could stop it. And yet things like that don't happen very often even though humans have mostly non-overlapping utility functions and considerable hard power."

EA: "Sure, but that's because humans respect long-standing norms and laws, and people could never coordinate to do something like that anyway, nor would they want to. AIs won't necessarily be similar. If unaligned AIs take over the world, they will likely kill us and then replace us, since there's no reason for them to leave us alive."

Me: "That seems dubious. Why won't unaligned AIs respect moral norms? What benefit would they get from killing us? Why are we assuming they all coordinate as a unified group, leaving us out of their coalition? 

I'm not convinced, and I think you're pretty overconfident about these things. But for the sake of argument, let's just assume for now that you're right about this particular point. In other words, let's assume that when AIs take over the world in the future, they'll kill us and take our place. I certainly agree it would be bad if we all died from AI. But here's a more fundamental objection: how exactly is that morally different from the fact that young humans already 'take over' the world from older people during every generation, letting the old people die, and then take their place?"

EA: "In the case of generational replacement, humans are replaced with other humans. Whereas in this case, humans are replaced by AIs."

Me: "I'm asking why it matters morally. Why should I care if a human takes my place after I die compared to an AI?"

EA: "This is just a bedrock principle to me. I care more about humans than I care about AIs."

Me: "Fair enough, but I don't personally intrinsically care more about humans than AIs. I think what matters is plausibly something like sentience, and maybe sapience, and so I don't have an intrinsic preference for ordinary human generational replacement compared to AIs replacing us."

EA: "Well, if you care about sentience, unaligned AIs aren't going to care about that. They're going to care about other things, like paperclips."

Me: "Why do you think that?"

EA: "Because (channeling Yudkowsky) sentience is a very narrow target. It's extremely hard to get an AI to care about something like that. Almost all goals are like paperclip maximization from our perspective, rather than things like welfare maximization."

Me: "Again, that seems dubious. AIs will be trained on our data, and share similar concepts with us. They'll be shaped by rewards from human evaluators, and be consciously designed with benevolence in mind. For these reasons, it seems pretty plausible that AIs will come to value natural categories of things, including potentially sentience. I don't think it makes sense to model their values as being plucked from a uniform distribution over all possible physical configurations."

EA: "Maybe, but this barely changes the argument. AI values don't need to be drawn from a uniform distribution over all possible physical configurations to be very different from our own. The point is that they'll learn values in a way that is completely distinct from how we form our values."

Me: "That doesn't seem true. Humans seem to get their moral values from cultural learning and social emulation, which seems broadly similar to the way that AIs will get their moral values. Yes, there are innate human preferences that AIs aren't likely to share with us—but they are mostly things like preferring being in a room that's 20°C rather than 10°C. Our moral values—such as the ideology we subscribe to—are more of a product of our cultural environment than anything else. I don't see why AIs will be very different."

EA: "That's not exactly right. Our moral values are also the result of reflection and intrinsic preferences for certain things. For example, humans have empathy, whereas AIs won't necessarily have that."

Me: "I agree AIs might not share some fundamental traits with humans, like the capacity for empathy. But ultimately, so what? Is that really the type of thing that makes you more optimistic about a future with humans than with AI? There exist some people who say they don't feel empathy for others, and yet I would still feel comfortable giving them more power despite that. On the other hand, some people have told me that they feel empathy, but their compassion seems to turn off completely when they watch videos of animals in factory farms. These things seem flimsy as a reason to think that a human-dominated future will have much more value than an AI-dominated future."

EA: "OK but I think you're neglecting something pretty obvious here. Even if you think it wouldn't be morally worse for AIs to replace us compared to young humans replacing us, the latter won't happen for another several decades, whereas AI could kill everyone and replace us within 10 years. That fact is selfishly concerning—even if we put aside the broader moral argument. And it probably merits pausing AI for at least a decade until we are sure that it won't kill us."

Me: "I definitely agree that these things are concerning, and that we should invest heavily into making sure AI goes well. However, I'm not sure why the fact that AI could arrive soon makes much of a difference to you here.

AI could also make our lives much better. It could help us invent cures to aging, and dramatically lift our well-being. If the alternative is certain death, only later in time, then the gamble you're proposing doesn't seem clear to me from a selfish perspective. 

Whether it's selfishly worth it to delay AI depends quite a lot on how much safety benefit we're getting from the delay. Actuarial life tables reveal that we accumulate a lot of risk just by living our lives normally. For example, a 30 year old male in the United States has nearly a 3% chance of dying before they turn 40. I'm not fully convinced that pausing AI for a decade reduces the chance of catastrophe by more than that. And of course, for older people, the gamble is worse still."

I find it slightly strange that EAs aren't emphasizing semiconductor investments more given our views about AI. 

(Maybe this is because of a norm against giving investment advice? This would make sense to me, except that there's also a cultural norm about criticizing charities that people donate to, and EAs seemed to blow right through that one.)

I commented on this topic last year. Later, I was informed that some people have been thinking about this and acting on it to some extent, but overall my impression is that there's still a lot of potential value left on the table. I'm really not sure though.

Since I might be wrong and I don't really know what the situation is with EAs and semiconductor investments, I thought I'd just spell out the basic argument, and see what people say:

• Credible models of economic growth predict that, if AI can substitute for human labor, then we should expect the year-over-year world economic growth rate to dramatically accelerate, probably to at least 30% and maybe to rates as high as 300% or 3000%.
• This rate of growth should be sustainable for a while before crashing, since physical limits appear to permit far more economic value than we're currently generating. For example, at our current rate of approximately 5.6 megajoules per dollar, capturing the yearly energy output of the sun would allow us to generate an economy worth $6.8*10^25 dollars, more than 100 billion times the size of our current economy.
• If AI drives this economic productivity explosion, it seems likely that the companies manufacturing computer hardware (i.e. semiconductor companies) will benefit greatly in the midst of all of this. Very little of this seems priced in right now, although I admit I haven't done any rigorous calculations to prove that.
  • I agree it's hard to know who will capture most of the value from the AI revolution, but semiconductor companies, and in particular the companies responsible for designing and manufacturing GPUs, seem like a safer bet than almost anyone else.
  • I agree it's possible that the existing public companies will be unseated by private competitors and so investing in the public companies risks losing everything, but my understanding is that semiconductor companies have a large moat and are hard to unseat.
  • I agree it's possible that the government will nationalize semiconductor production, but they won't necessarily steal all the profits from investors before doing so.
  • I agree that EAs should avoid being too heavily invested in one single asset (e.g. crypto) but how much is EA actually invested in semiconductor stocks? Is this actually a concern right now, or is it just a hypothetical concern? Also, investing in Anthropic seems like a riskier bet since it's less diversified than a broad semiconductor portfolio, and could easily go down in flames.
  • I agree that AI might hasten the arrival of some sort of post-property-rights system of governance in which investments don't have any meaning anymore, but I haven't seen any strong arguments for this. It seems more likely that e.g. tax rates will go way up, but people still own property.
  • In general, I agree that there are many uncertainties that this question is riding on, but that's the same thing with any other thing EA does. Any particular donation to AI safety research, for example, is always uncertain and might be a waste of time.
• Investing in semiconductor companies plausibly accelerates AI a little bit which is bad to the extent you think acceleration increases x-risk, but if EA gets a huge payout by investing in these companies, then that might cancel out the downsides from accelerating AI?

Another thing I just thought of is that maybe there are good tax reasons to not switch EA investments to semiconductor stocks, which I think would be fair, and I'm not an expert in any of that stuff.

I'm considering writing a post that critically evaluates the concept of a decisive strategic advantage, i.e. the idea that in the future an AI (or set of AIs) will take over the world in a catastrophic way. I think this concept is central to many arguments about AI risk. I'm eliciting feedback on an outline of this post here in order to determine what's currently unclear or weak about my argument.

The central thesis would be that it is unlikely that an AI, or a unified set of AIs, will violently take over the world in the future, especially at a time when humans are still widely still seen as in charge (if it happened later, I don't think it's "our" problem to solve, but instead a problem we can leave to our smarter descendants). Here's how I envision structuring my argument:

First, I'll define what is meant by a decisive strategic advantage (DSA). The DSA model has 4 essential steps:

1. At some point in time an AI agent, or an agentic collective of AIs, will be developed that has values that differ from our own, in the sense that the ~optimum of its utility function ranks very low according to our own utility function
2. When this agent is weak, it will have a convergent instrumental incentive to lie about its values, in order to avoid getting shut down (e.g. "I'm not a paperclip maximizer, I just want to help everyone")
3. However, when the agent becomes powerful enough, it will suddenly strike and take over the world
4. Then, being now able to act without constraint, this AI agent will optimize the universe ruthlessly, which will be very bad for us

We can compare the DSA model to an alternative model of future AI development:

1. Premise (1)-(2) above in the DSA story are still assumed true, but
2. There will never be a point (3) and (4), in which a unified AI agent will take over the world, and then optimize the universe ruthlessly
3. Instead, AI agents will compromise, trade, and act within a system of laws indefinitely, in order to achieve their objectives, similar to what humans do now
4. Because this system of laws will descend from our current institutions and legal tradition, it is likely that humans will keep substantial legal rights, potentially retaining lots of wealth from our capital investments and property, even if we become relatively powerless compared to other AI agents in the system

I have two main objections to the DSA model.

Objection 1: It is unlikely that there will be a point at which a unified agent will be able to take over the world, given the existence of competing AIs with comparable power

• Prima facie, it seems intuitive that no single AI agent will be able to take over the world if there are other competing AI agents in the world. More generally, we can try to predict the distribution of power between AI agents using reference class forecasting.
  • This could involve looking at:
    • Distribution of wealth among individuals in the world
    • Distribution of power among nations
    • Distribution of revenue among businesses
    • etc.
  • In most of these cases, the function that describes the distribution of power is something like a pareto distribution, and in particular, it seems rare for one single agent to hold something like >80% of the power.
  • Therefore, a priori we should assign a low probability to the claim that a unified agent will be able to easily take over of the whole world in the future
• To the extent people disagree about the argument I just stated, I expect it's mostly because they think these reference classes are weak evidence, and they think there are stronger specific object-level points that I need to address. In particular, it seems many people think that AIs will not compete with each other, but instead collude against humans. Their reasons for thinking this include:
  • The fact that AIs will be able to coordinate well with each other, and thereby choose to "merge" into a single agent
    • My response: I agree AIs will be able to coordinate with each other, but "ability to coordinate" seems like a continuous variable that we will apply pressure to incrementally, not something that we should expect to be roughly infinite right at the start. Current AIs are not able to "merge" with each other.
    • If coordination ability increases incrementally over time, then we should see a gradual increase in the concentration of AI agency over time, rather than the sudden emergence of a single unified agent. To the extent this concentration happens incrementally, it will be predictable, the potential harms will be noticeable before getting too extreme, and we can take measures to pull back if we realize that the costs of continually increasing coordination abilities are too high. In my opinion, this makes the challenge here dramatically easier.
    • In any case, the moment during which we hand over control of the world to AIs will likely occur at a point when the ability for AIs to coordinate is somewhere only modestly above human-level (and very far below perfect).
      • As a result, humans don't need to solve the problem of "What if a set of AIs form a unified coalition because they can flawlessly coordinate?" since that problem won't happen while humans are still in charge. We can leave this problem to be solved by our smarter descendants.
  • The idea that AIs will all be copies of each other, and thus all basically be "a unified agent"
    • My response: I have two objections.
      • First, I deny the premise. It seems likely that there will be multiple competing AI projects with different training runs. More importantly, for each pre-training run, it seems likely that there will be differences among deployed AIs due to fine-tuning and post-training enhancements, yielding diversity among AIs in general.
      • Second, it is unclear why AIs would automatically unify with their copies. I think this idea is somewhat plausible on its face but I have yet to see any strong arguments for it. Moreover, it seems plausible that AIs will have indexical preferences, making them have different values even if they are copies of each other.
  • The idea that AIs will use logical decision theory
    • My response: This argument appears to misunderstand what makes coordination difficult. Coordination is not mainly about what decision theory you use. It's more about being able to synchronize your communication and efforts without waste. See also: the literature on diseconomies of scale.
  • The idea that a single agent AI will recursively self-improve to become vastly more powerful than everything else in the world
    • My response: I think this argument, and others like it, suffer from the arguments given against fast takeoff given by Paul Chrisiano, Katja Grace, and Robin Hanson, and I largely agree with what they've written about it. For example, here's Paul Christiano's take.
  • Maybe AIs will share collective grievances with each other, prompting a natural alliance among them against humans
    • My response: if true, we can take steps to mitigate this issue. For example, we can give AIs legal rights, lessening their motives to revolt. While I think this is a significant issue, I also think it's tractable to solve.

Objection 2: Even if a unified agent can take over the world, it is unlikely to be in their best interest to try to do so

• The central argument here would be premised on a model of rational agency, in which an agent tries to maximize benefits minus costs, subject to constraints
  • The agent would be faced with a choice:
    • (1) Attempt to take over the world, and steal everyone's stuff, or
    • (2) Work within a system of compromise, trade, and law, and get very rich within that system, in order to e.g. buy lots of paperclips
  • The question of whether (1) is a better choice than (2) is not simply a question of whether taking over the world is "easy" or whether it could be done by the agent. Instead it is a question of whether the benefits of (1) outweigh the costs, relative to choice (2).
• It seems likely that working within a system of compromise, trade, and law is more efficient than trying to take over the world even if you can take over the world. The reason is because subverting the system basically means "going to war" with other parties, which is not usually very efficient, even against weak opponents.
  • Most literature on the economics of war generally predicts that going to war is worse than trying to compromise, assuming both parties are rational and open to compromise. This is mostly because:
    • War is wasteful. You need to spend resources fighting it, which could be productively spent doing other things.
    • War is risky. Unless you can win a war with certainty, you might lose the war after launching it, which is a very bad outcome if you have some degree of risk-aversion.
  • The fact that "humans are weak and can be easily beaten" cuts both ways:
    • Yes, it means that a very powerful AI agent could "defeat all of us combined" (as Holden Karnofsky said)
    • But it also means that there would be little benefit to defeating all of us, because we aren't really a threat to its power

Conclusion: An AI decisive strategic advantage is still somewhat plausible because revolutions have happened in history, and revolutions seem like a reasonable reference class to draw from. That said, it seems the probability of a catastrophic AI takeover in humanity's relative near-term future (say, the next 50 years) is low (maybe 10% chance of happening). However, it's perhaps significantly more likely in the very long-run.

I hold a few core ethical ideas that are extremely unpopular: the idea that we should treat the natural suffering of animals as a grave moral catastrophe, the idea that old age and involuntary death is the number one enemy of humanity, the idea that we should treat so-called farm animals with an very high level of compassion.

Given the unpopularity of these ideas, you might be tempted to think that the reason they are unpopular is that they are exceptionally counterinuitive ones. But is that the case? Do you really need a modern education and philosphical training to understand them? Perhaps I shouldn't blame people for not taking things seriously that which they lack the background to understand.

Yet, I claim that these ideas are not actually counterintuitive: they are the type of things you would come up on your own if you had not been conditioned by society to treat them as abnormal. A thoughtful 15 year old who was somehow educated without human culture would find no issue taking these issues seriously. Do you disagree? Let's put my theory to the test.

In order to test my theory -- that caring about wild animal suffering, aging, animal mistreatment -- are the things that you would care about if you were uncorrupted by our culture, we need look no further than the bible.

It is known that the book of Genesis was written in ancient times, before anyone knew anything of modern philosophy, contemporary norms of debate, science, advanced mathematics. The writers of Genesis wrote of a perfect paradise, the one that we fell from after we were corrupted. They didn't know what really happened, of course, so they made stuff up. What is that perfect paradise that they made up?

From Anwers In Genesis, a creationist website,

Death is a sad reality that is ever present in our world, leaving behind tremendous pain and suffering. Tragically, many people shake a fist at God when faced with the loss of a loved one and are left without adequate answers from the church as to death’s existence. Unfortunately, an assumption has crept into the church which sees death as a natural part of our existence and as something that we have to put up with as opposed to it being an enemy

Since creationists believe that humans are responsible for all the evil in the world, they do not make the usual excuse for evil that it is natural and therefore necessary. They openly call death an enemy, that which to be destroyed.

Later,

Both humans and animals were originally vegetarian, then death could not have been a part of God’s Creation. Even after the Fall the diet of Adam and Eve was vegetarian (Genesis 3:17–19). It was not until after the Flood that man was permitted to eat animals for food (Genesis 9:3). The Fall in Genesis 3 would best explain the origin of carnivorous animal behavior.

So in the garden, animals did not hurt one another. Humans did not hurt animals. But this article even goes further, and debunks the infamous "plants tho" objection to vegetarianism,

Plants neither feel pain nor die in the sense that animals and humans do as “Plants are never the subject of חָיָה ” (Gerleman 1997, p. 414). Plants are not described as “living creatures” as humans, land animals, and sea creature are (Genesis 1:20–21, 24 and 30; Genesis 2:7; Genesis 6:19–20 and Genesis 9:10–17), and the words that are used to describe their termination are more descriptive such as “wither” or “fade” (Psalm 37:2; 102:11; Isaiah 64:6).

In God's perfect creation, the one invented by uneducated folks thousands of years ago, we can see that wild animal suffering did not exist, nor did death from old age, or mistreatment of animals.

In this article, I find something so close to my own morality, it strikes me a creationist of all people would write something so elegant,

Most animal rights groups start with an evolutionary view of mankind. They view us as the last to evolve (so far), as a blight on the earth, and the destroyers of pristine nature. Nature, they believe, is much better off without us, and we have no right to interfere with it. This is nature worship, which is a further fulfillment of the prophecy in Romans 1 in which the hearts of sinful man have traded worship of God for the worship of God’s creation.

But as people have noted for years, nature is “red in tooth and claw.”4 Nature is not some kind of perfect, pristine place.

Unfortunately, it continues

And why is this? Because mankind chose to sin against a holy God.

I contend it doesn't really take a modern education to invent these ethical notions. The truly hard step is accepting that evil is bad even if you aren't personally responsible.

Some people seem to think the risk from AI comes from AIs gaining dangerous capabilities, like situational awareness. I don't really agree. I view the main risk as simply arising from the fact that AIs will be increasingly integrated into our world, diminishing human control.

Under my view, the most important thing is whether AIs will be capable of automating economically valuable tasks, since this will prompt people to adopt AIs widely to automate labor. If AIs have situational awareness, but aren't economically important, that's not as concerning.

The risk is not so much that AIs will suddenly and unexpectedly take control of the world. It's that we will voluntarily hand over control to them anyway, and we want to make sure this handoff is handled responsibly. 

An untimely coup, while possible, is not necessary.

I have now posted as a comment on Lesswrong my summary of some recent economic forecasts and whether they are underestimating the impact of the coronavirus. You can help me by critiquing my analysis.

A trip to Mars that brought back human passengers also has the chance of bringing back microbial Martian passengers. This could be an existential risk if microbes from Mars harm our biosphere in a severe and irreparable manner.

From Carl Sagan in 1973, "Precisely because Mars is an environment of great potential biological interest, it is possible that on Mars there are pathogens, organisms which, if transported to the terrestrial environment, might do enormous biological damage - a Martian plague, the twist in the plot of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but in reverse."

Note that the microbes would not need to have independently arisen on Mars. It could be that they were transported to Mars from Earth billions of years ago (or the reverse occurred). While this issue has been studied by some, my impression is that effective altruists have not looked into this issue as a potential source of existential risk.

A line of inquiry to launch could be to determine whether there are any historical parallels on Earth that could give us insight into whether a Mars-to-Earth contamination would be harmful. The introduction of an invasive species into some region loosely mirrors this scenario, but much tighter parallels might still exist.

Since Mars missions are planned for the 2030s, this risk could arrive earlier than essentially all the other existential risks that EAs normally talk about.

See this Wikipedia page for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection