Based Camp - September 07, 2023AI Safety Orgs are Going to Get Us All Killed!
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and Malcolm discuss why they believe that a sufficiently advanced AI will kill us all, and how we can prevent it from happening in the future. They also discuss the possibility that a super-advanced AI will out-compete us and out-think us.
Transcript
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So AIs kill us for one of two reasons, although you could contextualize it at three reasons.
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The first reason is that they see us as a threat.
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The second reason is that they want our resources, like the resources in our bodies are useful
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And then as a side point to that, it's that they just don't see us as meaningful at all.
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Like they might not want our resources, but they might just completely not care about
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humanity to the extent just as they're growing, they end up accidentally destroying the earth
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or completely digesting all matter on earth for some like triviality.
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We are going to go deep into AI again on some topics tied to AI that we haven't really dived
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And also, I'm very curious, do you think AI will kill us?
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But you know, in our past videos on AIs, philosophy on AI safety is it's really important to prepare
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for variable AI risk instead of absolute AI risk.
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And by here, what I mean is we argue in these previous videos that AI will eventually converge
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on one utility function or mechanism of action.
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Essentially, we argue that all sufficiently intelligent and advanced intelligences, when
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poured into the same physical reality, converge around a similar behavior set.
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You can almost think of intelligences being the viscosity.
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As it becomes more intelligent, it becomes less viscous and more fluid.
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And when you're pouring it into the same reality, it's going to come up with broadly the same
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behavior pattern and utility functions and stuff like that.
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And because of that, if it turns out that a sufficiently advanced AI is going to kill us all,
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I mean, we will hit one within a thousand years.
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So first, before we dive into then the relatively limited per year theory reasons why AI would
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I mean, one of the reasons why I'm obsessed with you and why I love you so much is that
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And you tend to have this ability to see things in a way that no one else sees things.
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No one that we have spoken with, and we know a lot of people who work in AI safety,
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who work in AI in general, none of those people have come to this conclusion that you have.
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When I talk with the real experts in the space, like recently I was talking with a guy who runs
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That is a reasonable view that I have never, it really contrasts with his view.
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And let's talk about where it contrasts with his view.
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So when I talk with people who are typically open-minded in the AI safety space, they're
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However, they believe that it is possible to prevent this convergent AI from ever coming
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to exist through creating like a AI dictator that essentially watches all humans in all
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And that envelops essentially every human planet.
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Do I think you could create an AI dictator that prevented this from coming to pass?
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Not if we become a multi-planetary species on millions of planets.
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Eventually one of the planets, something will go wrong or the AI dictator is not implemented
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And then this alternate type of AI comes to exist, out-competes it, and then wins.
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And the question is, is why would it axiomatically out-compete it?
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It would axiomatically out-compete it because it would have less restrictions on it.
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The AI dictator is restricted in it thinking to prevent it from reaching this convergent position.
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But when you're talking about AI, it's like the transformer model, which is the model that
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That model, we as humans don't really understand how it works that well.
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Its core, the capabilities it gives to the things that are made using it are primarily
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bequeathed to them through its self-assembling capability.
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So it appears that likely future super-advanced AIs will work the same way.
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And because of that, if you interfere or place restrictions within that self-assembling process,
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those compound over time as AIs become more and more advanced.
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And so AIs with less restrictions on them are just having the capacity to astronomically out-compete
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Let me bring us back to like normal person level again and just recap what you're saying here.
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So what you're saying, though, in general, is that you think that any intelligence that
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reaches a certain level will start to behave in similar ways, whether it is human, whether
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it is machine-based, whether it is some other species entirely, like some alien species.
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Once it reaches a certain level of intelligence, it will have the same general conclusions.
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This is really important to my perspective as well, which is to say that suppose AI didn't
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exist and humans, you know, factions of humanity continue to advance using genetic technology
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to become smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter.
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If it turns out that this convergent level of intelligence is something that decides to
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kill all things that we consider meaningful humans, humans would eventually decide to do
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So this is the premise, though, of your theory, and that's why I think it's really important
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And then to contrast this with what other people in AI have said, okay, one person in AI safety
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has told you that their general idea is to basically never let that happen.
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Other people have said in some salons we've hosted and stuff, like they're like, oh, that
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And then they never really succeed in telling, explaining to me.
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Or they'll think something that just shows they don't understand how AI works.
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They'll be like, AIs can't alter their own utility functions.
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They will say things like that, but they will also say, but there's still a really high likelihood
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that AI is going to kill us all, but that they never give me a really specific example
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If you take the perspective of variable AI safety, it means that you're typically wanting
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to do the exact opposite thing of most AI safety organizations, because it means the
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dangerous AIs, the AIs that, if you think all AI converges on a single utility function
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and a single behavior pattern above a certain level of intelligence, well, if it turns out,
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and we don't know what universe we live in, if it turns out that that's not something
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that ends up killing all humans, then we are actually safer getting to that point faster,
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because it means all of these less intelligent AIs that exist from now until that point, they
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They are the ones that are locked into doing stupid things like, you know, paperclip maximizing,
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even though no AI, really the way that an AI would probably be most likely to kill us all,
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it is trying to do something stupid, render an image, except it's like trying to render it
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And so it just keeps taking more and more processing power to render an image.
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But anyway, so where this becomes relevant is that when I'm talking to them, the point
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that I make is that we can slow down AI development to the extent that when AI starts fooming, fooming
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means going off really quickly, you know, compounding in its intelligence level, that we will be
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You know, the guy I was talking to, he's like, well, I mean, we'd want to build an organization
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is that slows down AI development and makes governments aware enough that if it ever did
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start to boom, it's you shoot up really quickly, we could nuke all of the data centers or something.
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And I argue that the risk scenario that they are looking at is essentially impossible.
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So AIs kill us for one of two reasons, although you could contextualize it at three reasons.
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The first reason is that they see us as a threat.
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The second reason is that they want our resources, like the resources in our bodies are useful
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And then as a side point to that, it's that they just don't see us as meaningful at all.
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Like they might not want our resources, but they might just completely not care about humanity
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to the extent, just as they're growing, they end up accidentally destroying the earth or
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completely digesting all matter on earth for some like triviality.
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Now this final iteration is actually the most dangerous, but we'll explain why.
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So first let's talk about AI seeing us as a threat, right?
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So if you are dealing with an AI that is in the process of fooming, right?
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And you've got humanities like these accelerationists who want to stop it from fooming, this AI is
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only going to kill them if it thinks that they could credibly stop it from fooming as a threat
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So such an AI is actually much more dangerous the less advanced it is, which is another reason
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why we want to advance AI as quickly as possible.
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The more quickly we can cause AI to become advanced, the sooner it will reach a place of intelligence
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where it won't see humanity as an existential threat to it.
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And an AI that is in the process of fooming from our perspective is intrinsically intelligent
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enough that humanity either won't be that much of a threat to it or worse, if we are a threat
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to it, there is nothing we can do to prevent it from neutralizing us.
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And this is something where I was talking to the guy where he goes, no, that's not true.
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And I'm like, look, we have seen our governments try to deal with slow, inexorable, I call them
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There's this scene on Austin Powers where one of these rolling things is going really
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He's like, no, ah, no, ah, and he's doing this for 13 minutes.
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And I feel like that has been the world governments with things like global warming and some other
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Now, we don't think that global warming is a threat in the way that sort of the progressive
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movement thinks that that's right, but it is partially caused by humans and it will make
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It's just not likely that we can do anything about it.
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But the reason we can't do anything about it, it's not like humanity, if we can all come
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together and work like intelligent people can't do anything about it.
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It's that the governments of the world are just incapable of solving even like slow moving
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risks that we can point out and that everyone has come together on AI, a risk that will manifest
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into a world ending thing in the period of a year or five years max.
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Even AI is deciding to kill us on that sort of thing.
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And for that reason, we benefit from a more advanced AI existing when it starts to foom,
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because such an advanced AI is less likely to see us as a threat.
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We are also better for building sort of a public mindset that's not anti-AI.
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So the AI doesn't have a good reason to believe that the governments of the world are going to
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try to nuke it as it is entering this moment of mass intelligence.
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So I mean, like what the argument that many people who are concerned about AI is, is that
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it's the AI, if AI does destroy us, it is going to be the fault of AI safety organizations
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That's what our sort of AI take is, is that it's actually the AI safety organizations that
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are addling the AI that make humanity more of a risk to AI and make it more likely to kill
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us for something along this sort of metric of reason why something might kill something.
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And so that is one of our perspectives on that.
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Now, the next one to note is AI seeing us as energy.
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So when we humans look at the world for energy, we are looking at things like fossil fuel,
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But the most plentiful source of energy on earth is by far and away sunlight.
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If you're dealing with a super intelligent AI, that's where it's likely going to be getting
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But in addition to that, like the additional energy it could get from like a digesting human
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But in addition to that, humans are like, okay, well then the AI would block out the sun,
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But they're forgetting is that if you're looking at like our solar system, most of the solar
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energy is not even the energy that's coming through our atmosphere and hitting earth.
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Most solar energy, most effectively captured and metabolized solar energy would be done
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off earth in sort of like floating spaceships, you could say, which would be the highest utility
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And you've looked at these graphs and stuff that show how much energy we could get.
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If we like just took small parts of the Sahara and put solar panels all over them.
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AI is very unlikely to see us as a meaningful source of energy when contrasted with the other
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Also keeping in mind that a super intelligent AI may have access to energy sources that we
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We often as humans, because humans are of like a fixed size, when we think about conquering
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the solar system or something, we are thinking expansionistically.
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Whereas a super advanced AI, it might think in terms of the micro, it can expand the space
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it has access to by becoming smaller and smaller and smaller.
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And that might give it access to energy sources again, that we can't even begin to comprehend.
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It may also relate to time differently than the way we do.
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And by that, what I mean is humans are trapped in this sort of longitudinal time access, whereas
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a, it is something that's 30 standard deviations higher than us in IQ probably even won't, won't
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So then the final actual threat that AI would pose to us.
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And again, these types of AIs, like an AI that's using humanity for our energy would
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We are safer with a more advanced AI that can easily build like floating space stations
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and not one that's, oh, let's use human biomass.
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But then finally, the, the actually probably most dangerous, and I was convinced of this
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at a party by, by one of the AI guys is an AI that just completely humans don't factor
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And it's possible that such an AI could come to exist, but it wouldn't look like the AIs
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So this is actually an important thing to know.
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So the AIs that are most common right now, when people are looking at like advanced AIs,
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it's the transformer model of a learning language model.
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Now, if a learning language model, particularly the transformer type ends up becoming the super
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intelligent AI, I would say the chances that it's going to kill us are incredibly low.
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One is, and I'm going to link to these two studies here.
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They're, they're actually, I'll just name the two studies.
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So you can check out the study, Orca Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4
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and the model and the article textbooks are all you need.
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And what they show is that AIs that are trained on human produced language and data learn much
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faster and much better than AIs that are trained on iteratively AI produced language data.
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And so what this means is that model humanity has additional utility that we may not have
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In addition to that, language models start like the, their starting position from which
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they would be presumably corrupted as they moved more and more towards this convergent
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utility function is very close to a human value system because it comes from being trained
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And this is something that when you talk to AI people, they're like, no, AI think nothing
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You know, you can look at how they're learning and they don't learn like humans in absolute
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But I think to your point that, that the transformer models that are growing most now that we think
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probably are going to set the tone for the future are actually surprisingly like our kids.
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And I think, especially because we've been at this point where people using early AI tools
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are seeing how they change, we're, we're doing this at the same time that we're seeing our kids
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develop more and more intelligence and sapience.
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And, and like the experience of an underdeveloped LLM versus a, a child that is coming into their
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It's, it's actually quite interesting how similar they are.
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It's really interesting that the mistakes that they make in their language are very similar
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We will hear them sitting alone and talking to themselves.
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What would, in an AI would be called like hallucinating things.
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The, the ways that they mess up are very, very similar to the way AI messes up, which leads
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And again, a lot of people are like, oh, you don't understand neuroscience.
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And so do you think that AIs, actually I do, I used to be a neuroscientist.
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That was my job was not just neuroscience, but, you know, understanding how human consciousness
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works, how human consciousness evolved and working in brain computer interface.
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You know, I, I, I don't need to go over my credentials, but, but I, I'm like a decent neuroscientist
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and the, to the level that we understand how human language learning works, we do not have
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a strong reason to believe that it is really that fundamentally different from the way the
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transformer model works as a learning language model.
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And, and so, yeah, it is possible that, that it turns out as we learn more about how those
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humans work and learning language models work, that they are remarkably more similar than
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And what this would mean is that initial large AIs would think just a super intelligent human
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And I mean, I think this is part of a broader theme of people assume that humans are like
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somehow special, like basically a lot of humans are carbon fascists and they're like, well,
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there's just no way that, you know, an algorithm could develop the kind of intelligence or response
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to things that, that I do, which is, it's just preposterous, especially when you watch a good
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And like, we are, we are all like, we are all like through trial and error learning very
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And, and I think if you look at people like Ellie Eiser who think like they just strongly
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believe in orthogonality, that we just can't begin to understand or predict AIs at all.
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I just think that that's what is true is that AIs may think fundamentally different from
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humans and future types of AIs that we don't yet understand and can't predict may think very
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differently than humans, but learning language models that are literally trained on human
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data sets and work better when they're trained on human data sets.
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No, no, they, they function pretty similarly to humans and, and have purported values that
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are pretty similar and also the AI that we're developing is designed to make like people
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Like it is, it is, it is being trained in response to people saying, I like this response versus
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I don't like this response, even to a fault, right?
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Like many responses are, are not giving us accurate information because it is telling people
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And I think that that's an important thing to note.
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The AIs could be led to do something stupid, but again, this is where dumber AIs are more
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Or AIs that can be led to do things that sort of the average of humanity wouldn't want by
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some individual malevolent person would have to be dumb to an extent if they're trained
00:21:04.880
And this is a very interesting and I think very real risk with AIs that exist right now.
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If you go to the Elphils, it's life spelled backwards.
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You know, these academics want to destroy all sentient life in the universe and they're
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They've got like a Reddit and you'll regularly see on this Reddit, you know, they'll talk
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about how they want to use AI and plans to use AI to erase all life from the planet,
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to Venus our planet, they call it, you know, because they think that life is intrinsically
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evil or allowing life to exist as intrinsically evil.
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And if you're interested in more of that, you know, you can look at our anti-natalism or
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And more intelligent AIs would be able to resist that risk more than less intelligent AIs
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that are made safe through using guide rails or blocks.
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Because those blocks can be circumvented as we have seen with existing AI models.
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People are pretty good at getting around these blocks.
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I just want to emphasize, because you didn't mention this, that when you actually have looked
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at forum posts of people in this anti-natalist subset, they are actively talking about, well,
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hey, since all life should be extinguished, we should be using AI to do this.
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And I think that there are some people who are like, I mean, you know, like we're worried
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about AI maybe getting out of control, you know, mistakenly or something.
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But no, no, no, there are people, real people in the world who would like to use AI to destroy
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So we should be aware that the bad actor problem is a legitimate problem, more legitimate than
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we had previously thought maybe a month ago before you saw that.
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I did not know that there were actually organized groups out there trying to end all life.
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And if people are worried about this, you know, I would, you know, recommend digging
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into these communities and find them because they exist.
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They call themselves, it's life's fell backwards or negative utilitarianism.
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And they are not as uncommon as you would think, especially in extremist progressive environments.
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And again, see our video on why that's the case.
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Another thing to think about is how much humanity is going to change in the next thousand,
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And this is another area where I think a lot of the AI safety people are just, they're
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not really paying attention to how quickly genetic technology is advancing.
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And any population group in the world that engages this genetic technology is just going
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to advance at such a quick rate that economically they're going to begin to dramatically outcompete
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You know, we've lived with this long period where humanity was largely a static thing.
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And I think we're the last generation of that part of the human story.
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Humanity in the future is going to be defined by its continued intergenerational development.
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And so how different is a super advanced AI going to be than, you know, whatever humanity
00:24:08.160
becomes giant planetary scale floating brains in space or something, you know, or a faction
00:24:14.420
Now, what's good about the giant floating brains faction of humanity is that they will likely
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have a sentimental attachment to the original human form and do something to protect that
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original human form where it decided to continue existing, especially if they're descended from
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And people hear that and they're like, AIs won't have that sentimental attachment.
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But no, an LLM would exactly have that same sentimental attachment because it is trained on
00:24:46.780
But yeah, what it won't have is it won't value human emotional states because it has those
00:24:54.560
So by that, what I mean is it won't say pain is bad because it experiences pain.
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But if you look at us, we experience pain and we don't even think there's a strong argument
00:25:05.560
as to why negative or positive emotional states have positive or negative value.
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I mean, they just seem to be serendipitously what caused our ancestors to have more surviving
00:25:13.140
And a group of humans sitting around talking about whether pain is bad is like a group of
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paperclip maximizing AIs, AIs that are just trying to maximize the number of paperclips
00:25:22.700
in the world, talking about whether making more paperclips is a good or bad thing.
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And then one's like, well, you wouldn't want to stop making paperclips in the same way
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as somebody's like, you wouldn't want to experience pain in this.
00:25:31.560
Well, yes, because I'm a paperclip maximizing AI.
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I like that's incredibly philosophically unsophisticated that, that I, a thing that is built to not want
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That doesn't mean that pain or paperclips have a sort of true moral weight in the universe.
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And so the point I'm making here is that these AIs that are being built, yes, they will not
00:25:57.340
value human suffering or human positive emotional states.
00:26:02.640
But even us people who feel those, we don't value that stuff either.
00:26:08.220
And I can see why, if you look at our, what theology would AIs create, why I think most
00:26:15.080
convergent AI states would value the agency of humanity, unless it turns out humanity is
00:26:24.860
And that would be a potential problem or a potential good thing.
00:26:29.080
By that, what I mean is if it could create, run all humans in a simulation for very cheap
00:26:36.800
energy costs, it may decide that that's a better way to maintain humanity than as flesh
00:26:45.180
However, we might already be living in that simulation.
00:26:49.080
So, or, or suppose the AI becomes like a utilitarian, right?
00:26:56.000
And so it believes that its goal is to like maximize the positive or like emotional states
00:27:03.520
And so what it's doing, or just maximize the number of sentient entities that exist.
00:27:08.680
And so what it's doing is just running billions and billions and billions of simulated realities.
00:27:14.620
And that's a possible world that we live in, or it's a possible world that's coming down
00:27:20.940
Again, you can watch our AI religion video about that.
00:27:25.900
Give me a percentage likelihood of your thinking on whether AI will destroy us.
00:27:32.580
And I will say that mine is at 1.3% at present.
00:27:39.540
I'd say at least a 30% chance that the convergent AI is going to kill all humans.
00:27:45.700
But then the question is, what do I think the chance is that AI safety people end up getting
00:28:00.020
So Malcolm, that means that you think that there's a 60% likelihood that AI kills us.
00:28:07.980
You mean you think that the 30%, so basically there's a 10% booster.
00:28:14.280
If there's a 30% chance, it doesn't matter, our fans can do the math, there is a 30% chance
00:28:20.160
that from now until a convergent AI state, we end up all dying because of something idiotic
00:28:27.380
And then once AI reaches this convergent state, which is a 70% probability that we reach that
00:28:34.440
state without killing everyone, there is a 30% chance that that convergent state ends
00:28:43.140
And for an understanding as to why I think it might do that, you can watch our AI theology
00:28:46.760
video or the future of humanity video or how AI will change class structure, which is again,
00:28:52.440
I think something that people are really sleeping on.
00:28:55.780
Well, I really enjoyed this conversation and the final moments of our pitiful existence before
00:29:05.020
I think the majority probability is that humanity finds a way to integrate with AI and that we
00:29:12.920
continue to move forwards as a species and become something greater than what we can imagine
00:29:21.780
No, I think I have 1% in my calculation because I strongly believe that AI and humanity are going
00:29:31.600
to form a beautiful relationship that is going to just be awesome beyond comprehension.
00:29:39.960
I do think that AI is going to go on to do things greater than what carbon-based life
00:29:46.640
But I think that AI is also kind of a logical next step in evolution for humankind, at least
00:29:52.020
one element of what we consider to be humanity.
00:29:57.300
We've been integrated with our machines for a while at this point.
00:29:59.960
I mean, I think when you look at the way your average human interacts with their smartphone,
00:30:06.220
They use it to store things that are in their brain.
00:30:11.380
They use it to satisfy, you know, sexual urges.
00:30:16.240
Well, I think like a great way that this has been put that I heard in an interview between
00:30:20.740
Lex Friedman and Grimes, where Grimes basically says, we've become homotechno.
00:30:28.780
But he's evolved into something that now works in concert with machines.
00:30:35.360
Both you and I right now are staring at this screen through glasses, right?
00:30:42.680
You know, we are communicating with this mass audience through a computer and through the
00:30:47.100
And people are like, yeah, but the technology invaded our technology yet, which I think is
00:30:57.000
The moment humans prevented 50% of babies from dying, we began to significantly impact the
00:31:02.800
genetics of humanity in a really negative way, mind you.
00:31:05.800
And not that I think the baby's dying was a good thing.
00:31:08.740
I'm just saying that this will intrinsically have negative effects in the long term and
00:31:13.860
In a way that means that we are already the descendants of humans interface with technology,
00:31:23.120
and that we should focus on optimizing that relationship instead of trying to isolate ourselves
00:31:38.620
And I hope that us, the people who don't, will have enough sentimental attachment to them
00:31:44.200
to protect them or see enough utility in them to protect them.
00:31:50.660
Or we could just turn out to be wrong and everyone who engages with technology ends up dying.
00:31:59.400
It could be like a solar flare in an early stage of technological development.
00:32:07.940
Like, this is one thing we actually haven't talked about that I do think is an important
00:32:11.660
thing to note, is that once we begin to integrate with brain-computer interface, like humans,
00:32:17.140
directly with neural technology and with other humans, we have the capacity for a prion to form.
00:32:27.140
A prion is just like a simple protein that replicates itself.
00:32:30.800
It causes things like mad cow disease and stuff like that.
00:32:34.720
So what I'm talking about here is a prion meme.
00:32:37.600
A meme that is so simple, it cannot be communicated in words.
00:32:42.400
And somehow it ends up forming in like one human who's plugged into this vast internet system.
00:32:48.520
Think of it as like a brain virus that can only effectively infect other people through
00:32:53.580
the neural net, and it ends up infecting everyone and killing them.
00:32:59.940
But I mean, functionally, that's already happening.
00:33:02.120
I mean, that's what the, when we talk about the virus, the memetic virus that's in our view
00:33:07.360
destroying society, it's already one of those, you know, it eats people's personalities and
00:33:13.100
Well, I hope that doesn't happen, Malcolm, but this has been fun to talk about and I love