Holden Karnofsky: belief

Transcript context

…Right. When I look at a report like Biological Anchors, I often wonder whether Asimov is just shooting the shit about screens and what you're able to do with them. Maybe he had less sources of error than this eight-step methodology where you might not even be aware that there's a ninth or tenth missing step that might make the whole thing invalid, and where many of the inputs have multiple orders of magnitude, wide confidence intervals. What do you think of that general skepticism? I mean Biological Anchors is a very important input into my thinking, but it's not the only input. I think my views on AI timelines are a mix of A, looking at AI systems today, looking at what they did 50 years ago, looking at what they did 10 years ago, and just kind of being like, “Well, gosh, it sure looks plausible that these will be able to do all the things humans can do to advance science and technology pretty soon.” That's one input into my thinking. Another input into my thinking is what we call the semi-informative priors analysis, which is a complex report because it looks from a lot of different angles. I think you can summarize the highlights of the report as just saying that most of the effort that has ever in the history of humanity has gone into making AI because the field of AI is not very old and the economy and the amount of effort invested have gone up dramatically. I think that's a data point in favor of not being too skeptical that we could be on the cusp of transformative AI. In some sense, the world has not been trying very hard for very long. So that's an input. Another input is expert surveys when people ask AI researchers when they think AI will be able to do everything humans can. They tend to come out saying it's a few decades. That can be biased and unreliable in all kinds of ways, and all these things have their problems, but that's a data point. Then there's biological anchors.…

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