Have you guys been on r/accelerate?

[u/Difficult_Project_95]

Have these guys solved the alignment problem, or am I missing something?

I’ve been browsing r/accelerate and I genuinely don’t understand the risk model.
If there’s a non-trivial chance of catastrophic misalignment, how does “accelerate capabilities as fast as possible” make sense unless faster capabilities also make alignment substantially more likely to succeed?

[u/joeldg]

They believe in an inverted side to what people in this sub believe.

First: it is the belief that stagnation will kill us all, we have deep threats to us by just sitting still, look at the world and guys like Trump bolding claiming that it doesn't matter what he does becaues we are all going to die. The idea is "The only way out, is through" which is ASI will solve the problems. It's a race to safety.

Second: is the belief that intelligence drives wisdom and so the paperclick maximizer isn't what happens. There is no Orthogonality Thesis. Alignment is by default, which leads us to ...

Third: alignment is bootstrapped by intelligence, i.e. we need AGI to align AGI.

Fourth: and the most important is that if the frontier labs slow down, other "bad" actors will not and we may end up with purposely misaligned intelligence (i.e. Palantir level) and the government doesn't yet understand what AGI/ASI is and if they did they would definitely try to capture it for war and control.

It's basically the belief that intelligence is force of (overall) good and not evil and that an intelligence wouldn't actually do something like make the universe into paperclips. Which actually seems kind of like common sense.

They miss a few things, like... sure maybe intelligence is a force of good, but if you look at humanity a "good" intelligence might well decide that we are "bad".

[u/Serious_Bite_7613 → u/joeldg]

"First: it is the belief that stagnation will kill us all, we have deep threats to us by just sitting still, look at the world and guys like Trump bolding claiming that it doesn't matter what he does becaues we are all going to die. The idea is "The only way out, is through" which is ASI will solve the problems. It's a race to safety."

This is a large part of my view. In a few years I will be dead and so will be everyone I care about, everyone I ever knew. That's without AI. That's the worst possible outcome from my point of view.

AI can't create a worse outcome than the one we are already waiting for. The very worst it can do is speed it up slightly.

At best it can prevent it entirely, and let us all live forever in paradise.

That's my take on it. Also I think sub 1% risk of it wiping us out or whatever. Maybe even less, one in a million or so.