[michaelmrose]

I'm not the poster but there is no reason to believe that we possess the tools to contemplate AI safety worse it may be a fools errand to contemplate how to control something much smarter than you are.

Ergo at this point in time money spent to pay people to contemplate it is almost certainly entirely wasted.

[TedDoesntTalk]

It’s much like spending millions on studying how to save humanity from the sun when it expands in 5b years.

[c1ccccc1]

Interestingly, the sun would kill us much sooner than that: in less than 1 billion years the sun's increased output will heat up the Earth's surface to the point of becoming unlivable.

Related to the topics of AI apocalypse and putting things off because they seem far away: I personally find it amusing to contemplate a strong AGI being developed in 2035 and wiping out humanity. Why? Because it would eliminate the Y2038 problem, retroactively vindicating all the engineers who only allocated 32 bits to timestamps. It would mean the justification of "oh, it's so far off, the world will have changed unimaginably by then", would for once turn out to be correct!

[notahacker]

I quite like the idea of strong AI being developed in 2038 just in time for its plans to be thwarted by time disorientation...

[FeepingCreature]

Maybe we should try to acquire the tools before we build systems much smarter than we are

[michaelmrose]

Current AI seems to be just a box of math churning out correlations that we can put to effective use but not understand wherein the ability to actually act is entirely reliant on us deliberately wiring the machine into the world in a way it can even have negative effects or any effect at all wherein said negative effects are entirely and trivially predictable and avoidable. This is true whether its a robot that accidentally breaks a kids finger or a system that bakes in the inherent racism of prior decisions into future sentencing or mortgage approvals. In most cases the logical thing is just don't use AI for that.

Its not at all clear that future actual AI will be GPT7 now with 10,000x as much processing power. In fact not much seems to be clear at all. It would seem that the insight to control future tools will come from the experience in building said tools with little chance that it will just accidentally suddenly become skynet. If we doom ourselves thus it will be a long laborious process with years of striving, setbacks, and thousands of people involved.

We should focus on the basic science and let it become clear what avenues exist over the probable decades it will take to even reach the vicinity of our goal. Money spent specifically on paying PhDs to imagine how to secure a technology we don't have and don't remotely understand is probably wasted.

[FeepingCreature]

None of this seems to argue against focusing on safety tools now, given the enormous downside risk. And maybe you're wrong about the probable decades.

The possible outcomes here are "probably we waste a lot of money" and "the world ends."