They were never worth listening to.

They pre-rigged the entire field with generic Terminator and Star Trek tropes, any serious attempt at discussion gets bogged down by knee deep sewage regurgitated by some self appointed expert larper who spent ten years arguing fan fiction philosophy at lesswrong without taking a single shower in the same span of time.

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solveit 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's frustrating how far you can go out of your way to avoid being associated with such superficially similar tropes and still fail miserably. Yudkowsky in particular hated that he couldn't get a discussion without being typecast as the guy worried about Terminator. He hated it to the point he wrote a whole article on why he thought Terminator tropes were bad (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...).

As a side note:

> any serious attempt at discussion gets bogged down by [...] without taking a single shower in the same span of time.

This is unnecessary and (somewhat ironically) undermines your own point. I would like to see less of this on HN.

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jsnider3 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Then it should be easy for you to make an aligned AI, right? Can I see it?

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wizzwizz4 4 days ago | parent [-]

Aligned AI is easy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

The hard part is extrapolated alignment, and I don't think there's a good solution to this. Large groups of humans are good at this, eventually (even if they tend to ignore their findings about morality for hundreds, or thousands, of years, even past the point where over half the local population knows, understands, and believes those findings), but individual humans are pretty bad at moral philosophy. (Simone Weil was one of the better ones, but even she thought it was more important to Do Important Stuff (i.e., get in the way of more competent resistance fighters) than to act in a supporting role.)

Of course, the Less Wrongians have extremely flawed ideas about extrapolated alignment (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks that "coherent extrapolated volition" is a coherent concept that one might be able to implement, given incredible magical powers), and OpenAI's twisted parody of their ideas is even worse. But it's thanks to the Less Wrongians' writings that I know their ideas are flawed (and that OpenAI's marketing copy is cynical lies / cult propaganda). "Coherent extrapolated volition" is the kind of idea I would've come up with myself, eventually, and (unlike Eliezer Yudkowsky, who identified some flaws almost immediately) I would probably have become too enamoured with it to have any sensible thoughts afterwards. Perhaps the difficulty (impossibility) of actually trying to build the thing would've snapped me out of it, but I really don't know.

Anyway: extrapolated alignment is out (for now, and perhaps forever). But it's easy enough to make a "do what I mean" machine that augments human intelligence, if you can say all the things it's supposed to do. And that accounts for the majority of what we need AI systems to do: for most of what people use ChatGPT for nowadays, we already had expert systems that do a vastly better job (they just weren't collected together into one toolsuite).

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achierius 4 days ago | parent [-]

Ok, sorry, rephrase: a useful aligned AI.

	▲	wizzwizz4 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Expert systems are plenty useful. For example, content moderation: an expert system can interpret and handle the common cases, leaving only the tricky cases for humans to deal with. (It takes a bit of thought to come up with the rules, but after the dozenth handling of the same issue, you've probably got a decent understanding of what it is that is the same – perhaps good enough to teach to the computer.) Expert systems let you "do things that don't scale", at scale, without any loss of accuracy, and that is simply magical. They don't have initiative, and can't make their own decisions, but is it ever useful for a computer to make decisions? They cannot be held accountable, so I think we shouldn't be letting them, even before considering questions of competence.