Roman Yampolskiy: prediction

Transcript context

…There’d been fear-mongering about cars for a long time. The transition from horses to cars, there’s a really nice channel that I recommend people check out, Pessimist Archive that documents all the fear-mongering about technology that’s happened throughout history. There’s definitely been a lot of fear-mongering about cars. There’s a transition period there about cars, about how deadly they are. We can try. It took a very long time for cars to proliferate to the degree they have now. And then you could ask serious questions in terms of the miles traveled, the benefit to the economy, the benefit to the quality of life that cars do, versus the number of deaths; 30, 40,000 in the United States. Are we willing to pay that price? I think most people when they’re rationally thinking, policymakers will say, “Yes.” We want to decrease it from 40,000 to zero and do everything we can to decrease it. There’s all kinds of policies, incentives you can create to decrease the risks with the deployment of technology. But then you have to weigh the benefits and the risks of the technology and the same thing would be done with AI. You need data, you need to know. But if I’m right and it’s unpredictable, unexplainable, uncontrollable, you cannot make this decision. We’re gaining $10 trillion of wealth, but we’re we don’t know how many people. You basically have to perform an experiment on 8 billion humans without their consent. And even if they want to give you consent, they can’t because they cannot give informed consent. They don’t understand those things. Right. That happens when you go from the predictable to the unpredictable very quickly. But it’s not obvious to me that AI systems would gain capabilities so quickly that you won’t be able to collect enough data to study the benefits and risks.…

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