Donald Hobson

Karma: 4

Donald Hobson 27 Jan 2024 16:23 UTC
1 point
on: Don’t be scared by the AI fearmongering.
>Throughout history, fearmongering has been used to justify a lot of extreme measures.
And throughout history, people have dismissed real risks and been caught with their pants down. What, in 2018 or Feb 2020 would appear to be pretty extreme measures at pandemic prevention would make total sense from our point of view.
Countries can and do spend a huge pile of money to defend themselves from various things. Including huge militaries to defend themselves from invasion etc.
All sorts of technologies come with various safety measures.
>For a more concrete example, one could draw the possibility that video games might cause the players to emulate behaviors, even though you have to be insane to believe the video games are real, to then start advocating for bans of violent video games. However, one could go a step further and say that building games could also make people believe that it’s easy to build things, leading to people building unsafe houses, and what about farming games, or movies, or books?
If you are unable to distinguish the arguments for AI risk from this kind of rubbish, that suggests either you are unable to evaluate argument plausibility, or you are reading a bunch of strawman arguments for AI risk.
>The community wants you to believe in a very pessimistic version of the world where all the alignment ideas don’t work, and AI may suddenly be dangerous at any time even when their behaviors look good and they’re constantly reward for their good behaviors?
I do not know of any specific existing alignment protocol that I am convinced will work.
And again, if the reward button is pressed every time the AI does nice things, there is no selection pressure one way or the other between an AI that wants nice things, and one that wants to press the reward button. The way these “rewards” in ML work is similar to selection pressure in evolution. And humans were selected on to enjoy sex so they produced more babies, and then invented contraception. And this problem has been observed in toy AI problems too.
This isn’t to say that there is no solution. Just that we haven’t yet found a solution.
>The AI alignment difficulty lies somewhere on a spectrum, yet they insist to base the policy on the idea that AI alignment lies somewhere in a narrow band of spectrum that somehow the pessimistic ideas are true, yet we can somehow align the AI anyway, instead of just accepting that humanity’s second best alternative to survival is to build something that will survive and thrive, even if we won’t?
We know alignment isn’t super easy, because we haven’t succeeded yet. We don’t really know how hard it is.
Maybe it’s hopelessly hard. But if your giving up on humanity before you spend 10% of GDP on the problem, your doing something very wrong.
Think of a world where aliens invaded, and the government kind of took a few pot shots at them with a machine gun, and then gave up. After all, the aliens will survive and thrive even if we don’t. And mass mobilization, shifting to a wartime economy… those are extreme measures.

Donald Hobson 27 Jan 2024 3:43 UTC
1 point
on: The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely Changes
Well
>Invader countries have to defend their conquests and hackers need to have strong information security.
One place where offense went way ahead of defense is with nukes.
However nukes are sufficiently hard to make that only a few big powers have them. Hence balance of power MAD.
If destruction is easy enough, someone will do it.
In the war example, as weapon lethality went up, the fighters moved further apart. So long as both sides have similar weapons and tactics, there exists some range at which you aren’t so close as to be instakilled, nor are you so far as to have no hope of attacking. This balance doesn’t apply to civilian casualties.

Donald Hobson 17 Jan 2024 23:26 UTC
1 point
on: Report on the Desirability of Science Given Risks from New Biotech
The thing is, we have many options that aren’t just accelerating or decelerating the whole thing. Like we can choose gain of function research and cutting edge AI capabilities, and accelerate everything except that.
Science is lots of different pieces, differential technological development.
“25% probability that the domain experts are right x 50% chance that it’s not too late for science to affect the onset of the
time of perils x 50% chance that science cannot accelerate us to safety = 6.25%”
This smells of the “multistage fallacy”
You think of something. List a long list of “nesscessary steps”. Estimate middling probabilities for each step. And multiply them together for a small end stage probability.
The problem is, often some of the steps, or all of them, turn out to not be that necessary. And often, if a step had actually happened, it would do so in a way that gave you strong new information about the likelihood of other steps.
Ie if a new device needs 100 new components to be invented, and you naively assume the probability is ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ for each component. But then a massive load of R&D money gets sent towards making the device, and all 100 components are made.
In this particular case, you are assuming a 25% chance the domain experts are right about the level of X-risk. In the remaining 75%, apparently X risk is negligable. There is no possibility for “actually it’s way way worse than the domain experts predicted”.
“x 50% chance that it’s not too late for science to affect the onset of the
time of perils x 50% chance that science cannot accelerate us to safety ”
If the form of the peril is a step. Say a single moment when the first ASI is turned on, then “accelerate to safety” is meaningless. You can’t make the process less risky by rushing through the risky period faster. You can’t make Russian roulette safer by playing it real fast, thus only being at risk for a short time.

Donald Hobson 3 Dec 2023 22:12 UTC
2 points
on: Neither EA nor e/acc is what we need to build the future
The thing about e/acc is it’s a mix of the reasonable and the insane doom cult.
The reasonable parts talk about AI curing diseases ect, and ask to speed it up.
Given some chance of AI curing diseases, and some chance of AI caused extinction, it’s a tradeoff.
Now where the optimal point of the tradeoff lands on depend on whether we just care about existing humans, or all potential future humans. And also on how big we think the risk of AI extinction is.
If we care about all future humans, and think ai is really dangerous, we get a “proceed with extreme caution” position. A position that accepts the building of ASI eventually, but is quite keen to delay it 1000 years if that buys any more safety.
On the other end, some people think the risks are small, and mostly care about themselves/current humans. They are more e/acc.
But there are also various “AI will be our worthy successors”, “AI will replace humans, and that’s great” type e/acc who are ok with the end of humanity.

Donald Hobson 3 Dec 2023 22:04 UTC
2 points
on: Neither EA nor e/acc is what we need to build the future
I don’t see any specific criticism of effective altruism other than “I don’t like the vibes”.
And the criticism from “acrimonious corporate politics”.
“Helen Toner was apparently willing to let OpenAI be destroyed because of a general feeling that the organization was moving too fast or commercializing too much.”
Between the two of them, a philosophy that aims to prevent catastrophic risk in the future seems to be creating its own catastrophes in the present.
Shutting down a company and some acrimonious board room discussion is hardly “catastrophic”. And it can be the right move, if you think the danger exceeds the value the company is creating.
Ie if a company makes nuclear power plants that are melt downs just waiting to happen, or kids toys full of lead or something, shutting that company down is a good move.

Donald Hobson 3 Dec 2023 21:58 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Maxwell Tabarrok’s comment on: Why Governments Can’t be Trusted to Protect the Long-run Future
It could be an externality, if the land was randomly reassigned a new owner every year or something. But if the land is sold, that is taken into account. It isn’t an externality. Capitalism has priced this effect in.

Donald Hobson 12 Nov 2023 18:40 UTC
2 points
on: Why Governments Can’t be Trusted to Protect the Long-run Future
For something that is long term, but only effects the property of 1 person, like the field example, the market prices it in and it’s not an externality.
No one is significantly incentivized to stop climate change, because no one person bears a significant fraction of the damage caused.
Politicians are far from perfect, but at least they have any incentive to tackle these big problems at all.

Donald Hobson 12 Nov 2023 18:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: m_j_r’s comment on: Radical Energy Abundance
I have yet to see a good case against AI doom.

Donald Hobson 11 Jun 2023 16:28 UTC
2 points
on: The Next Einstein Could Be From Anywhere: Why Developing Country Growth Matters for Progress
I don’t think most of these “next einstein” arguments prove what you think they do.
If you want to increase the chances of string theory breakthroughs, you want to find the sort of people that have a high chance of understanding string theory, and push them even further. If any genetic component is relatively modest, then it becomes mostly pick someone, and throw lots of resources at educating them. If genetics or randomness control a lot, but are easily observed, then it’s looking out for young maths prodigies and helping them.
Ensuring widely spread education is more about the people making lots of small ideas rather than the lone geniuses. It’s getting people from being peasant farmers to codemonkey programmers.

Donald Hobson 26 Mar 2023 13:57 UTC
1 point
on: Small signs you live in a complacent society
Have you considered printing off a few sheets of paper, getting some glue, and just adding a few signs yourself? ;-)

Donald Hobson 26 Mar 2023 13:50 UTC
1 point
on: Why slow progress is more dangerous than fast progress
Some tech, like seatbelts, are almost pure good. Some techs, like nukes are almost pure bad. Some, like cars, we might want to wait until we develop seatbelts and traffic lights for before we use widely. It depends on the technology.

Donald Hobson 14 Mar 2023 0:13 UTC
1 point
on: Philosophy in Space
Elon musk is very good at making himself the center of as many conversations about technology as possible.
He should not be taken as a source of information of any reliability.
Living on mars with tech not too far beyond current tech is like living in antarctica today. It’s possible, but it isn’t clear why you would want to. A few researchers on a base, not much else.
Think ISS but with red dust out the windows.
At some point, which might be soon or not so soon, tech is advanced enough that it becomes easy to get to mars. But at that point, traditional biological humans on mars might be stupid, compared to say self replicating robots containing computers running uploaded human minds in the asteroid belt.
A mars base is cool scifi. But it might turn into the largest white elephant in history. It doesn’t solve any obvious practical purpose in increasing human wellbeing or industrial capability.
Sure, at some point you are disassembling all the planets to build a dyson sphere. But before that, a mars landing doesn’t actually need to mean any real progress.

Donald Hobson 13 Mar 2023 23:55 UTC
1 point
on: Will Technology Keep Progressing? (A Happier World video)
I don’t think the “aside from the internet, nothing much”. Firstly comuter and internet tech have been fairly revolutionary across substantial chunks of industry and our daily lives. This is the “a smartphone is only 1 device so doesn’t count as much progress” thinking. Without looking at the great pile of abacuses and slide rules and globes and calculators and alarm clocks and puzzle toys and landline phones and cameras and cassette tapes and … that it replaced and improved on.
Secondly, there are loads of random techs that were invented recently, solarPV, LED’s. Mrna Vaccines. Electric (self driving?) cars.
And finally, a substantial part of progress is the loads of tiny changes that make things cheaper and better. If you don’t include things like 3d-printers and drones that haven’t really gotten good yet, then of course you will see less inventions recently. The first fridges were expensive and not that good either.

Donald Hobson 13 Mar 2023 23:43 UTC
1 point
on: Against Altruism
If longtermists existed back when blacks were widely regarded as morally inferior to whites, would the moral calculus of the longtermists have included the prosperity of future blacks or not? It seems like it couldn’t possibly have included that. More generally, longtermism can’t take into account progress in moral knowledge, nor what future generations will choose to value. Longtermists impose their values onto future generations.
It is true that we can’t predict future moral knowledge. However.
1. An intervention by someone from that time period that helps modern whites and doesn’t harm modern blacks would still be seen as better than doing nothing from the point of view of most people. (excluding the woke fringe) Most random interventions selected to help future white people are unlikely to cause significant net harm to blacks.
2. If their intervention is ensuring that we are wealthy and knowledgeable, and hence more able to do whatever it is we value, then that intervention would take into account progress and moral knowledge.
3. In reality, you have to choose to do something. When making decisions that effect future generations, either you impose your current values, or you try to give them as much flexible power to allow moral knowledge, or you basically pretend they don’t exist.
This is an intresting new combination of standard mistakes.
Another issue is that if altruistic morality is taken to its logical conclusion, then everyone would be trying to solve everyone else’s problems. How could that possibly be more effective than everyone trying to solve their own problems?
Altruistic morality in the total utilitarian sense would recognize that solving everyones problems is equally valuable, including our own. In the current world, practically no humans are going to put themselves lower than everyone else, and most of the best opportunities for aultruism are helping others. But in the hypothetical utopia land, people would solve their own problems, there being no more pressing problems to solve.
If we are here to help others, what on Earth are the others here for?
Well imagine the ideal end goal, if we develop some magic tech. Everyone living in some sort of utopia. At this point, most of the aultruists say that there is no one in the world who really needs helping, and just enjoy the utopia. But until then, they help.
What we actually need to be is selfish, not altruistic. We need to make as rapid progress as possible so that the people of the future themselves will be at a starting point where they can make even more rapid progress.
A aulturist argument for selfishness. You are arguing that selfishness is good because it benefits future people.
If you were actually selfish, you would be arguing that selfishness is good because it makes you happy, and screw those future people, who cares about them.
I also don’t know where you got the idea that selfish=max progress.
Suppose I am a genius fusion researcher. (I’m not) I build fusion reactors so future people will have abundant clean energy. If I was selfish, I would play video games all day.
Altruism is subordinating one’s own preferences to those of others. It’s a zero-sum game. It’s not win-win.
In the ideal utilitarian hypothetical utopia, who exactly is loosing. If hypothetically everyone had the exact same goal, the well being of humanity as a whole, valuing their own well being at exactly the same level as everyone elses, that would be a 0 difference game, the exact opposite of a 0 sum game.