Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Mess things up. Well, that’s better. I mean, I guess the question, is it possible to engineer that in? I guess your answer would be yes, but we don’t know how to do that and we need to invest a lot of effort into figuring out how to do that, but it’s unlikely. Underpinning a lot of your writing is this sense that we’re screwed, but it just feels like it’s an engineering problem. I don’t understand why we’re screwed. Time and time again, humanity has gotten itself into trouble and figured out a way to get out of the trouble. We are in a situation where people making more capable systems just need more resources. They don’t need to invent anything, in my opinion. Some will disagree, but so far at least I don’t see diminishing returns. If you have 10X compute, you will get better performance. The same doesn’t apply to safety. If you give MIRI or any other organization 10 times the money, they don’t output 10 times the safety. And the gap between capabilities and safety becomes bigger and bigger all the time. So, it’s hard to be completely optimistic about our results here. I can name 10 excellent breakthrough papers in machine learning. I would struggle to name equally important breakthroughs in safety. A lot of times a safety paper will propose a toy solution and point out 10 new problems discovered as a result. It’s like this fractal. You’re zooming in and you see more problems and it’s infinite in all directions.…

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