| > I wonder if you've had an in-person conversation with someone who would identify as being a part of the AGI safety community. Yes. Many. > I've talked with several people and their arguments are a lot more sophisticated than an intuition that ML models would have human motivations. I don't have to think much about refuting this. Sure, okay, sophistication. Or not. Whatever. The sophistication is still mostly philosophical. To wit: > I wonder if you also believe that post is just a wasteful collection of philosophy anthropomorphizing misunderstood ML models. Yes, it's mostly philosophy and not of much use for understanding how engineered systems behave. I design ML systems and think about their safety. Even in the limit, where ML sysetems do some non-trivial set of human-like tasks (which we aren't even remotely close to yet, btw), how is this essay supposed to be useful to me when I design safety analyses? I liken it to Software Architects who address software security by talking about Christopher Alexander instead of, y'know, building languages that obviate buffer overflows or establishing frameworks/code practices that make injection attacks less common. |
I'm a layman in AI/ML and I've seen this stated a lot by people actually programming ML stuff (as opposed to "working in the space" as a blogger/manager/marketer etc.)
How can I concretely convey this concept to friends & family panicing about AI from crap they read in NYT/Economist/WSJ etc.? 'Some guy on HN who sounded like he knew what he was talking about says that article you read is sensationalist' doesn't pass their 'expertise' test.