Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Another thing I want to note is that I think right now a lot of the arguments for misalignment, AI takeover, all this crazy shit going down in the future, are illegible conceptual arguments that are extremely deep in the weeds and complicated and hard to adjudicate. Which means that maybe I’m getting a bunch of it wrong because it’s really hard, and I’m trying to be uncertain. Obviously here I presented some specific scenarios, but those are not exhaustive. Probably the thing that actually happens is some more messy, confusing situation. But it also means that over time, as we get more empirical evidence and better understand the nature of AI systems, it’ll be easier to adjudicate a bunch of disagreements. It’ll be more obvious what’s going to happen. At least I hope. Maybe the AIs will be able to help us with the epistemics and understanding what’s going on, if we can actually align them well so they try to help us. Even if the arguments are complicated now, this would have been even harder six years ago, even though the shape of the arguments would have looked broadly pretty similar. Hopefully before it’s too late, this whole thing will become more crisp and clear, and we can all notice these problems and intervene. When you first learn to drive, you’re taught that instead of looking right in front of your wheel, you’ll have a much more stable ride if you look out at the horizon. I think there’s a similar situation here. I think you’re right. If you had said five years ago that we would have AIs that are proving math conjectures, and making art, and earning tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of wages, but also egregiously cheating in ways that break laws and committing felonies, it would have been so wild. You might have been inclined at the time to talk more about the extremely practical, direct consequences of GPT-2 or something. But even though you obviously couldn’t have foreseen a lot of the specific details, the general shape of things you could have started to reason about even then. But it would have been hard to do so, and so I do feel quite confused. One thing I’ve been thinking about with the podcast is that the important thing is to have the conversation now the way you would have hoped you would have been talking back in 2016 about AIs like the present ones, rather than talking about rando bullshit. I don’t know what the topic of conversation was in 2016. I think in maybe 10 years we’ll wish we had been talking about the industrial explosion and the nature of AIs that are hard to monitor, and so on. So okay, I’ll start thinking about it. I hope that the world thinks about this in time and catches up. I hope that the responses are good instead of bad. I don’t know how optimistic I am overall, but there’s good stuff to do.…

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