Eliezer Yudkowsky: belief

Transcript context

…All right, let’s talk about the societal response to AI. To the extent you think it worked well, why do you think US-Soviet cooperation on nuclear weapons worked well? Because it was in the interest of neither party to have a full nuclear exchange. It was understood which actions would finally result in nuclear exchange. It was understood that this was bad. The bad effects were very legible, very understandable. Nagasaki and Hiroshima probably were not literally necessary in the sense that a test bomb could have been dropped instead of the demonstration but the ruined cities and the corpses were legible. The domains of international diplomacy and military conflict potentially escalating up the ladder to a full nuclear exchange were understood sufficiently well that people understood that if you did something way back in time over here, it would set things in motion that would cause a full nuclear exchange. So these two parties, neither of whom thought that a full nuclear exchange was in their interest, both understood how to not have that happen and then successfully did not do that. At the core I think what you’re describing there is a sufficiently functional society and civilization that could understand that — if they did thing X, it would lead to very bad thing Y, and so they didn’t do thing X. The situation seems similar with AI in that it is in neither party’s interest to have misaligned AI go wrong around the world.…

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