Humble EY can move goalposts in long format. - awful.systems
Nitter link [https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/status/1706872347876352115] With
interspaced sneerious rephrasing: > In the close vicinity of
sorta-maybe-human-level general-ish AI, there may not be any sharp border
between levels of increasing generality, or any objectively correct place to
call it AGI. Any process is continuous if you zoom in close enough. The profound
mysteries of reality carving, means I get to move the goalposts as much as I
want. Besides I need to re-iterate now that the foompocalypse is imminent! >
Unless, empirically, somewhere along the line there’s a cascade of related
abilities snowballing. In which case we will then say, post facto, that there’s
a jump to hyperspace which happens at that point; and we’ll probably call that
“the threshold of AGI”, after the fact. I can’t prove this, but it’s the central
tenet of my faith, we will recognize the face of god when we see it. I regret
that our hindsight 20-20 event is so conveniently inconveniently placed in the
future, the bad one no less. > Theory doesn’t predict-with-certainty that any
such jump happens for AIs short of superhuman. See how much authority I have, it
is not “My Theory” it is “The Theory”, I have stared into the abyss and it
peered back and marked me as its prophet. > If you zoom out on an evolutionary
scale, that sort of capability jump empirically happened with humans–suddenly
popping out writing and shortly after spaceships, in a tiny fragment of
evolutionary time, without much further scaling of their brains. The forward
arrow of Progress™ is inevitable! S-curves don’t exist! The y-axis is
practically infinite!
We should extrapolate only from the past (eugenically scaled certainly) century!
Almost 10 000 years of written history, and millions of years of unwritten
history for the human family counts for nothing! > I don’t know a theoretically
inevitable reason to predict certainly that some sharp jump like that happens
with LLM scaling at a point before the world ends. There obviously could be a
cascade like that for all I currently know; and there could also be a
theoretical insight which would make that prediction obviously necessary. It’s
just that I don’t have any such knowledge myself. I know the AI god is a
NeCeSSarY outcome, I’m not sure where to plant the goalposts for LLM’s and still
be taken seriously. See how humble I am for admitting fallibility on this
specific topic. > Absent that sort of human-style sudden capability jump, we may
instead see an increasingly complicated debate about “how general is the latest
AI exactly” and then “is this AI as general as a human yet”, which–if all hell
doesn’t break loose at some earlier point–softly shifts over to “is this AI
smarter and more general than the average human”. The world didn’t end when John
von Neumann came along–albeit only one of him, running at a human speed. Let me
vaguely echo some of my beliefs: - History is driven by great men (of which I
must be, but cannot so openly say), see our dearest elevated and canonized von
Neumann. - JvN was so much above the average plebeian man (IQ and eugenics
good?) and the AI god will be greater. - The greatest single entity/man will be
the epitome of Intelligence™, breaking the wheel of history. > There isn’t any
objective fact about whether or not GPT-4 is a dumber-than-human “Artificial
General Intelligence”; just a question of where you draw an arbitrary line about
using the word “AGI”. Albeit that itself is a drastically different state of
affairs than in 2018, when there was no reasonable doubt that no publicly known
program on the planet was worthy of being called an Artificial General
Intelligence. No no no, General (or Super) Intelligence is not an completely
un-scoped metric. Again it is merely a fuzzy boundary where I will be able to
arbitrarily move the goalposts while being able to claim my opponents are! >
We’re now in the era where whether or not you call the current best stuff “AGI”
is a question of definitions and taste. The world may or may not end abruptly
before we reach a phase where only the evidence-oblivious are refusing to call
publicly-demonstrated models “AGI”. Purity-testing ahoy, you will be instructed
to say shibboleth three times and present your Asherah poles for inspection. Do
these mean unbelievers not see these N-rays as I do ? What do you mean we have
(or almost have, I don’t want to be too easily dismissed) is not evidence of
sparks of intelligence? > All of this is to say that you should probably ignore
attempts to say (or deniably hint) “We achieved AGI!” about the next round of
capability gains. Wasn’t Sam the Altman so recently cheeky? He’ll ruin my grift!
> I model that this is partially trying to grab hype, and mostly trying to pull
a false fire alarm in hopes of replacing hostile legislation with confusion.
After all, if current tech is already “AGI”, future tech couldn’t be any worse
or more dangerous than that, right? Why, there doesn’t even exist any coherent
concern you could talk about, once the word “AGI” only refers to things that
you’re already doing! Again I reserve the right to remain arbitrarily alarmist
to maintain my doom cult. > Pulling the AGI alarm could be appropriate if a
research group saw a sudden cascade of sharply increased capabilities feeding
into each other, whose result was unmistakeably human-general to anyone with
eyes. Observing intelligence is famously something eyes are SufFicIent for! No
this is not my implied racist, judge someone by the color of their skin, values
seeping through. > If that hasn’t happened, though, deniably crying “AGI!”
should be most obviously interpreted as enemy action to promote confusion; under
the cover of selfishly grabbing for hype; as carried out based on carefully
blind political instincts that wordlessly notice the benefit to themselves of
their ‘jokes’ or ‘choice of terminology’ without there being allowed to be a
conscious plan about that. See Unbelievers! I can also detect the currents of
misleading hype, I am no buffoon, only these hypesters are not undermining your
concerns, they are undermining mine: namely damaging our ability to appear
serious and recruit new cult members.
