Nathan Labenz: prediction

Transcript context

…Let's say you go to a conference and you start talking to someone and you start talking about economics or politics and that person says, well, you know, under a dictatorship of a proletariat, you know, XYZ, the words dictatorship of a proletariat are used only by people who are communists. People who are not communists are not going to even think in these kinds of terms. So in my opinion, pDoom is most likely to be used by people who are intrinsically doomers about AI. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, okay? And I just, you know, it's very hard for me to come up with even a reason I would have a percentage in my head constantly, like, is it 8%? Is this 13% today? Should I update to 14% based on this new development? It just seems silly to me. I can certainly tell you that there is a clear, a bunch of clear risks stemming from AI, some of which are in fact paperclip risks, right? It's possible. It is, I have absolutely no idea how to reduce that to a number. I know that some people try. I do not have very I don't hold a very high opinion of people who are like get to 13.35%. So I think the point is that we need to manage those risks in the best way we can and navigate them the best we can and hope that it turns out well. I think Zvi puts it well when he says you only get one significant digit on your P doom number. So I'm definitely with you in terms of the like faux precision being a strange impulse for some people. At the same time, I also think of Laurent, I'm sure you've seen his work with doom debates. And Laurent has kind of pushed me at times to be like, okay, sure, it doesn't have to be a number or whatever, but like, we need more people to be more candid about how confident they are or are not, that in some general sense, if your neighbor were to ask you or if your kid's grandmother were to ask you or whatever, is it going to be okay? are the kids going to be okay? Good question. I tend to think that people have preconceived attitudes about these kinds of things that then cause them to back propagate, rationalize them. I'm A generally fairly optimistic person. So if you ask me this kind of question, what I'm going to say is probably it's going to be okay. Probably we're going to figure it out. You know, in a risk adjusted way. Not to say, again, like to be clear, I'm not saying that there are no risks in AI. There are many risks. But I do not think that we have strong evidence that it is impossible to navigate these risks or that it is extremely unlikely that we will navigate these risks. So that's where I am.…

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