It's a secular/religious divide. (As it says in the post.)
Though it's possible the people who think a theoretical future AI will turn the planet into paperclips have merely forgotten that perpetual motion machines aren't possible.
There is nothing religious with thinking about whether failure modes of advanced artificial intelligence can permanently destroy large parts of the reality that humans care about. Just like there was nothing religious in thinking about whether the first atomic bombs could start a chain reaction that would destroy all life on Earth.
Part of such precautionary planning involves asking whether such an accident could happen easily or not. There certainly isn't consensus at the moment, but the philosophy very clearly favors a cautious approach.
Most people are used to thinking about established science that follows expected rules, or incremental advances that have no serious practical consequences. But this isn't that. There is good reason to think that we're approaching a step-change in capabilities to shape the world, and even a strong suspicion of this warrants taking serious defensive measures. Crucially for this particular instance of the discussion, OP is favoring that.
There will necessarily be a broad spectrum of opinions regarding how to handle this, both in the central judgement and how palatably the opinion itself is presented. Using a dismissive moniker like 'religious' for a whole segment of it doesn't give justice to the arguments.
Present a counterargument if you feel strongly about it, and see whether that will stand on its own merit.
The post, which calls Eliezer a "prophet" who says people should drop everything in their lives to work on AI safety, agrees with me.
> Present a counterargument if you feel strongly about it, and see whether that will stand on its own merit.
This is a bad way to talk to rationalists because it's what they think solves everything and is the reason they're convinced an AI is going to enslave them. As long as you're actually right, saying "no that's dumb and not worth worrying about" is superior to logical arguments about things you can't have logical arguments about (because there are unenumerable "unknown unknowns" in the future). This is called "metarationality".
e.g. Someone could decide to kill you because they don't like one of your posts (1). Is there any finite amount of work you could do to stop this? No (2). Should you worry about this? No (3).
You can't logically prove the 2->3 step, nor can you calculate the probability of it being a problem, but it still doesn't seem to be a problem.
Self-reproducing machines are capable of covering the surface of the planet, yes. There's one right now (covid). But there's lots of energy and oxygen up here and they rarely displace other such machines (species) or even displace much of any earth and water. And because they're self-contained and self-reproducing, all of their instructions can be lost over time to entropy including the ones we're afraid of.
None of em replace the entire planet though. That's a lot of rock to digest without any more energy to help you do it.
And a paperclip factory isn't self-reproducing (that would be a paperclip factory factory). It's just a regular machine that can break down. The people afraid of that one are imagining a perfect non-breaking-down non-energy-requiring machine because they've accidentally joined a religion.
I'm not talking about covid; covid is not covering the planet. I'm talking about life in general.
All that oxygen comes from all the plants.
Yes, life has so far only covered the top of the planet. You are right that a paper clip maximizer would need quite a bit of time to go deeper than life has gone (if it would get there at all).
> And a paperclip factory isn't self-reproducing [...]
Why wouldn't it? If your hypothetical superhuman AGI determined that becoming self-reproducing would be the right thing to do, presumably it would do that.
No perfection required for that. Biological machines aren't perfect either. Just good enough.
You are right that thermodynamics puts a limit on how fast anything can transform the planet into paperclips or grey goo.
Though the limit is probably mostly about waste heat, not necessarily about available energy:
There's enough hydrogen around that an AGI that figured out nuclear fusion would have all the energy it needs. But on a planet wide basis, there's no way to dissipate waste heat faster than via radiation into space.
(Assuming currently known physics, but allowing for advances in technology and engineering.)
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Of course, when we worry about paperclip maximisers, it's bad enough when they turn the whole biosphere into paperclips. Noticing that they'll have a hard time turning the rest of the earth into paperclips would be scant consolation for humanity.
(But the thermodynamic limits on waste heat still apply even when just turning the biosphere into paperclips.)
Agreed, and being a bit of a religiophobe, the thought of living through some sort of butlerian jihad scares me enough, regardless of whether the machines can actually kill us all.
I think you are conflating different concepts. It is clearly imaginable that a very intelligent agent could end humanity if its objective would require so. How exactly is "perpetual motion machines can't exist" related to this? How is it going to prevent an agent from engineering 1000 pandemic viruses at the same time?
> It is clearly imaginable that a very intelligent agent could end humanity if its objective would require so.
This is quite possible. Indeed, I don't believe this is exclusive to superintelligence or requires it at all. Compare to the closest thing we have to "inventing AGI" - having babies. People do that all the time and there isn't a mathematical guarantee that baby won't end humanity, but we don't do much to stop it, and that's not considered a problem. Mainly, why would it want to?
I don't think superintelligence even gives them much advantage if they wanted to. Being able to imagine a virus real good doesn't actually have much to do with the ability to create one, since plans tend to fail for surprising reasons in the real world once you start trying to follow them. Unless you define superintelligence as "it's right about everything all the time", but that seems like a magical power, not something we can invent.
> How exactly is "perpetual motion machines can't exist" related to this?
It wouldn't be able to do the particular kind of ending humanity where you turn them all into paperclips, though it could do other things. There's plenty of ways to do it that reduce entropy rather than increase it - nuclear winter is one.
The anthropomorphism is misleading. No one expects that an AGI would "want to" in the commonplace sense of being motivated by animosity, fear, or desire. The problem is that the best path to satisying its reward function could have adverse-to-extinction level consequences for humanity, because alignment is hard, or maybe impossible.
But now you have appealed to anthropomorphism (“intelligence”) to pose a problem yet forbidden anthropomorphism in an attempted counter argument. That doesn’t seem quite fair.
I don't intend to forbid anything - I just think the language of motivation and desire makes it harder to see the risks, because it introduces irrelevant questions into the the conversation like "how can machines want something?"
Conversely, at least in this discussion, the term "intelligence" seems pretty neutral.
> I just think the language of motivation and desire makes it harder to see the risks, because it introduces irrelevant questions into the the conversation like "how can machines want something?"
Yet discourse on existential AI risks is predicated on something like a "goal" (e.g. to maximise paperclips). Notions like "goal" also make it harder to see clearly what we are actually discussing.
> the term "intelligence" seems pretty neutral
Hmm, I'm not convinced. It seems like an extremely loaded term to me.
AIs absolutely do have goals, determined by their reward functions.
Yes, "intelligence" is a deeply loaded term. It just doesn't matter in the context of the discussion here, so far as I've seen.its ambiguities haven't been relevant.
> AIs absolutely do have goals, determined by their reward functions.
You're confusing "AIs" (existing ML models) with "AGIs" (theoretical things that can do anything and are apparently going to take over the world). Not only is there not proof AGIs can exist, there isn't proof they can be made with fixed reward functions. That would seem to make them less than "general".
You seemingly are portraying people who worry about long term risks of ai as members of a religious cult. But you also acknowledge that AI could end humanity? The question of why AI would want to kill us has been addressed by other people before, simplified: your atoms are useful for many objectives. Humans use resources and might plot against you.
> You seemingly are portraying people who worry about long term risks of ai as members of a religious cult.
Strictly speaking, we can limit that to people who rearrange their lives around reacting to the possibility, even in sillier (yet not disprovable) forms like Roko's Basilisk.
People who believe having a lot of "intelligence" means you can actually do anything you intend to do, no matter what that thing is, also get close to it because they both involve creating a perfect being in their minds. But that's possible for anyone - I guess it comes from assuming that since an AGI would be a computer + a human, it gets all the traits of humans (intelligence and motivation) plus computer programs (predictable execution, lack of emotions or boredom). It doesn't seem like that follows though - boredom might be needed for online learning, which is needed to be an independent agent, and might limit them to human-level executive function.
The chance of dumb civilization-ending mistakes like nuclear war seems higher than smart civilization-ending mistakes like gray goo, and can't be defended against, so as a research direction I suggest finding a way to restore humans from backup. (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2000)
> Self-reproducing machines are capable of covering the surface of the planet, yes. There's one right now (covid). But there's lots of energy and oxygen up here and they rarely displace other such machines (species) or even displace much of any earth and water. And because they're self-contained and self-reproducing, [...]
Your analogy is weak and also false: viruses can't self-reproduce, but need to bind to a host's protein synthesis pathways.
That makes my point stronger if you're claiming self-reproducing machines don't exist. Of course I thought of using a bacteria or an algae bloom there, and even though I didn't, pretending I did is a better use of your time than commenting surely? The future robot torture AI isn't going to like that.
This is your friendly physics reminder that perpetual motion machines have nothing to do with this. It's hard to turn the whole planet into paperclips because paperclips are mostly made of iron, while the planet contains many other elements. Of course, with a high enough level of technology, it might be possible to fuse together the non-iron elements, so that you would end up with just a bunch of iron nuclei. This would even be energetically favourable, since iron is so stable. Then you just have to solve the issue that the paperclips in the center of the planet would be under huge pressure and would be crushed.
It's less than perpetual, but a planet is a lot of raw material to work through for a machine without it breaking down, if the machine's also eaten all the people who can repair it.
Each frame gets the same amount of the file, about a kilobyte. So each frame is basically a sector. You need to read in a few extra frames to undo the compression, but otherwise it's just like a normal filesystem. And reading in a batch of sectors at once is normal for real drives too.
Even if you did need the frames to be self-describing, you could just toss a counter/offset in the top left corner for less than 1% overhead.
