Roman Yampolskiy: prediction

Transcript context

…But then it becomes a question of decades versus years. If the only disagreement is that it will take decades, not years for everything I’m saying to materialize, then I can go with that. But if it takes decades, then the development of tools for AI safety then becomes more and more realistic. So I guess the question is, I have a fundamental belief that humans when faced with danger, can come up with ways to defend against that danger. And one of the big problems facing AI safety currently, for me, is that there’s not clear illustrations of what that danger looks like. There’s no illustrations of AI systems doing a lot of damage, and so it’s unclear what you’re defending against. Because currently it’s a philosophical notions that, yes, it’s possible to imagine AI systems that take control of everything and then destroy all humans. It’s also a more formal mathematical notion that you talk about that it’s impossible to have a perfectly secure system. You can’t prove that a program of sufficient complexity is completely safe, and perfect and know everything about it, yes, but when you actually just pragmatically look how much damage have the AI systems done and what kind of damage, there’s not been illustrations of that. Even in the autonomous weapon systems, there’s not been mass deployments of autonomous weapon systems, luckily. The automation in war currently is very limited, that the automation is at the scale of individuals versus at the scale of strategy and planning. I think one of the challenges here is where is the dangers and the intuition the [inaudible 00:54:40] and others have is, let’s keep in the open building AI systems until the dangers start rearing their heads and they become more explicit, they start being case studies, illustrative case studies that show exactly how the damage by AD systems is done, then regulation can step in. Then brilliant engineers can step up, and we can have Manhattan style projects that defend against such systems. That’s kind of the notion. And I guess, a tension with that is the idea that for you, we need to be thinking about that now, so that we’re ready, because we’ll have not much time once the systems are deployed. Is that true?…

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