New experimental results: opinions about AI risk are immune to evidence and argument| Better without AI
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Better without AI is now available in paperback and Kindle| Better without AI
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How to avert an AI apocalypse... and create a future we would like| Better without AI
The most important questions are not about technology but about us. What sorts of future would we like? What role could AI play in getting us there, and also in that world? What is your own role in helping that happen?| Better without AI
If we must have AI, we should replace “neural” methods with simpler, cheaper, and safer alternatives.| Better without AI
AI may radically accelerate technology development. That might be extremely good or extremely bad. There are currently no good explanations for how either would happen, so it’s hard to predict which, or when, or whether. The understanding necessary to guide the future to a good outcome may depend more on uncovering causes of technological progress than on reasoning about AI.| Better without AI
Maybe AI will kill you before you finish reading this section. The extreme scenarios typically considered by the AI safety movement are possible in principle, but unfortunately no one has any idea how to prevent them. This book discusses moderate catastrophes instead, offering pragmatic approaches to avoiding or diminishing them.| Better without AI
The AI safety field often takes the central question as “when will it happen?!” That is futile: we don’t have a coherent description of what “it” is, much less how “it” would come about. Fortunately, a prediction wouldn’t be useful anyway. An AI apocalypse is possible, so we should try to avert it.| Better without AI
Superintelligence should scare us only insofar as it grants superpowers. Protecting against specific harms of specific plausible powers may be our best strategy for preventing catastrophes.| Better without AI
It’s a mistake to think that human-like agency is the only dangerous kind. That risks overlooking AIs causing agent-like harms in inhuman ways.| Better without AI
Many people call the future threat “artificial general intelligence,” but all three words there are misleading when trying to understand risks.| Better without AI
How David Chapman came to write Better Without AI| Better without AI
I was asked by the funders of Better without AI to give opinions about several specific recent reports on AI safety. These are considered major texts in the field.| Better without AI
You are not the monomaniacal monster rationalism imagines you as.| Better without AI
Most people do not viscerally believe that any further progress is possible. That disbelief, that unwarranted pessimism, is a major impediment to progress itself.| betterwithout.ai
<pre>my question & answer:| betterwithout.ai
Current AI results from experimental variation of mechanisms, unguided by theoretical principles. That has produced systems that can do amazing things. On the other hand, they are extremely error-prone and therefore unsafe. Backpropaganda, a collection of misleading ways of talking about “neural networks,” justifies continuing in this misguided direction.| Better without AI
Current AI systems are already harmful, and may cause near-term catastrophes through their ability to shatter societies, cultures, and individual psychologies. That might potentially cause human extinction, but it is more likely to scale up to the level of the twentieth century dictatorships, genocides, and world wars. We would be wise to anticipate possible harms in as much detail as possible.| Better without AI
Most of this page absolutely agree with, but I wanted to quibble about one point:| betterwithout.ai
To give you constructive feedback: The list here still feels a bit loose, though. Is AGI a distinct property or a group of other properties? What differentiates super intelligent from mind-like? Are motivations and morals another scary property or more of a lens to look at artificial intelligence and understand its agency and hence scariness? And where are the social aspects of the AI, the way it changes social interaction, enables surveillance and oppression etc. - is that all in the power c...| betterwithout.ai
More to the point, it doesn’t posit that the AI villain has any kind of self-awareness or intentions. It has a limited ability to take control of other automated systems, and to adapt when its attempts to pursue its pre-programmed goals are thwarted. But it needs no mindness to be dangerous, just an carefully designed automated system, following goals and a rough plan given to it by its creator.| betterwithout.ai
GPT is already at the point where the easiest way to reason about it is to use our other-minds cognition.| betterwithout.ai
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Improving artificial intelligence research with scientific testing, design practice, and meta-rational choice of methods and criteria| Better without AI
So-called “neural networks” are extremely expensive, poorly understood, unfixably unreliable, deceptive, data hungry, and inherently limited in capabilities.| Better without AI