AI Expert Yudkowsky Warns Destiny About The AI Threat | LIVE DEBATE

This Time It's Different this is actually a threat it's smarter than you all the other Technologies in the past people are trying to like choose what to do with them on a basis of choice that doesn't include everyone on Earth including them being dead not not right now but in the in the predictable place it's going understands reality better than you do makes better choices goes outside the box better has more of a spark of creativity of invention of like creative unexpected uses of the world around it better at manipulating you you to it are an object whose rules it knows better than you understand yourself my guess is that babies are not conscious why one thing that I think people hear the normal people not you guys because every person I've talked to here does like AI or ml research it's like every wait I'm actually so curious hold on how many of you guys work in something like AI or ml like related okay yeah a decent amount that's kind of weird Okay um I wonder sometimes no okay um so here's a question a lot of people have heard this thing is going to be the next thing in five years I think I've heard about self-driving cars like almost since I was in college um that that we were right around the corner from it and it seems like today we're no closer than we were in the past or that the next version of Chachi BT or some I know art generators were really big for a point in time and now at least probably going out talking about it as much if there was somebody hypothetically that said okay you're saying this thing about AI but people have said this about all technology and it's always five years away and elon's been talking about neuralink and it's not happening and blah blah blah blah blah what would be like the one or two most convincing arguments you had for them that well this time it's different this is actually a threat timing is much harder to predict than endpoints I agree yeah I I was not in the self-driving carpet grade I was like you know I obviously was going to get solved eventually but it wasn't clear to me it was going to be solved and legalized before the end of the world though things on legal front arms are looking interesting things on the technology front are allegedly looking interesting I haven't checked in detail it's much easier to pre like in 2001 I did not predict that this stuff was going to become an issue in 20 years I predict it was going to become an issue eventually in like 2004 I sketched out a scenario for how the world ends it involved a super intelligence cracking a special case of the protein folding problem I could not have told you that like the general case of the biological protein folding problem was going to be cracked in 2020 by Alpha fold 2. like I could not have timed it I can I was might not even have been confident that you could like predict biological protein folding in full generality as opposed to like choose a special case and engineer it it definitely wouldn't have been able to predict that it could be done by you know deep nuts though Alpha fold 2 is legitimately more complicated than just a giant stack of deep nuts like an llm do you think on on that on the velocity thing on the trajectory thing here um the first topic that we talked about was getting people to bet on outcomes as a way to kind of hold people accountable or make better predictions do you think that to some people they would say that it feels unsatisfying that you can make such strong predictions about the endpoints of AI if those endpoints could be outside of everybody here's natural life cycle that if this is happening in 200 years I don't really care about it I don't even want to think about it whereas if this is going to happen in like 15 or 20 years it suddenly becomes like the most pressing thing for anybody to think about I would but far bet on 15 or 20 over 200 and possibly on 10 over 20. um but that is much more me eyeballing things that is me looking at like how fast things have gone and at the fact that gpt4 got further than I expected the entire Tech stack to to um stall out at like I was expecting like tpt3 to mostly stall out and then gpd4 did not and maybe gpt4 stalls out but but I don't know anymore what do you think are what are technologies that uh people that are hesitant to believe in in I don't want to call it dumerism because that sounds dismissive but for people that don't think it's as big of a problem what are the technologies that they should be eyeballing well you could be like look at how insane that is like that's it is moving quickly it is going to be a future problem like I mean again timing is hard like synthetic biology if somehow AI were not being a thing um I would tell people to worry about like um synthetic pathogens such as covid-19 but worse like uh I'm you know it's like a pretty gloomy fact that we like had the big synthetic pathogen disaster and like the reaction to this was that like half of the United States doesn't want to take vaccines anymore it's it's a it's a pretty I consider it a blow against the theory that you're like small disasters will successfully immunize civilization against large ones um but yeah synthetic pathogens can clearly get much worse than covid-19 um I think a bunch of people are worried about AI specifically enabling that uh even if AI were not going to be a thing I would still be like that's a thing to worry about um if I if I were not going to be a thing um I'd probably start to worry about uh who's not having kids if you know we're going to be around that long but we're not so moot point okay uh was this a satisfying AI where else do you want to explore on this one um I feel like for how do you get well I'm curious okay I I want people to be interested in things that I care about so I feel like for politics now we sit on the other end of that as political people to whereas you're unwilling to put a Time blind on anything political people's timeline is always like tomorrow this is the most important election this is the most important problem this is the most important piece of legislation if you don't pass this everything is over um do you feel um do you ever feel like a compulsion to push something ahead where it's like hey I know that there's like a fingerprint but like you know like you said like 10 to 15 years this is something we really need to start evaluating more is there anything like that are you just like content kind of doing like the more theoretical side and you know either believe me or don't and I mean if somebody were to dig up my manifold prediction Market records you would find that in the market on whether we're all dead in 2030 which resolves n a in 2027 to um avoid the usual problem of is your model worth anything if the world ends no um but you know if it resolves and in 2027 you can get like temporarily temporary boost by anticipating how other people will trade so there's hopefully some incentive to like try to guess the right direction there it's ultimately Unbound from reality of course this is not a true virtuous prediction Market but it's hard to get those anyway you would find that I um initially placed like a limit order that was sell at 80 percent and buy 40 for everyone debt by 2030. so unless I I lied you know unless unless I like poisoned the well by making non-epistemic trades and not announcing the facts you know like you can you can tell that I don't think it's like all that likely to be very very far out okay are we satisfied but with this topic that's up to you I obviously have a not literally infinite but unbounded supply of things to say in the sense that if I said all of them I would have thought of more by the time I was done sure uh well what's next on the prediction Market list all right let me pull it back up again um or actually no wait actually real quick because I'd be interested in hearing you say it um what is um I I can think of in a general sense of answer but I'm curious what would you say is the more specific threat that makes the more unique threat about AI as opposed to other Technologies in the past yeah it's smarter than you that's it like all the other Technologies in the past people are trying to like choose what to do with them on a basis of choice that doesn't include everyone on Earth including them being dead as choosing to do with itself it's doing so using a more powerful ability to steer it understands reality better than you do not not right now but in the in the predictable place it's going understands reality better than you do makes better choices goes outside the box better has more of a spark of creativity of invention of like creative unexpected uses of the world around it better at manipulating you you to it are an object whose rules it knows better than you understand yourself um yeah all of that that is that is not something that's true of electricity okay all right what's the next one well unfortunately let's all got I think scrambled but there's so moral claims are truth apt was on this list do you want to do that I don't I don't want to do that you want to do are newborns conscious how are we defining conscious qualia um how do we know guess I I feel like um I feel like if I were to say A baby is a a pea zombie then half the people I've talked to on my stream would probably fit the same criteria so I feel like I feel like babies must be conscious but I'm curious why is your argument to say they're not yeah wait wait hold on are you saying that half the people on your live stream struck you as having less cognitive complexity than a newborn baby I'm concerned I'm wondering if you're a newborn babies group newborn babies are at least willing to learn I'll say that yeah all right I I I I see the snark I'm guessing it's just snark and they don't actually literally mean I'm getting closer every day to believing it but for now it's snark okay okay yeah so cause like no I I believe that people are fully cognitive conscious creatures that are not philosophical zombies if they're smart enough to be operating a microphone and talking on a computer yeah okay so back to the babies yeah well babies can't operate a microphone and talk on a computer so well they can speak into a microphone you know not not deliberately well okay this is true but I feel like most of the time I've spent talking to Ayla has been configuring her microphone so I don't know if microphones are the best argument for for a cognitive capabilities no okay tell me why do you think babies are conscious I want to hear it let's hear it oh um I I my guess is that babies are not conscious yeah what why um because I think there's a bunch of like reflective circuitry of like identifying the ape that is this ape um that sort of like looks at your own internal cognitive process and looks at a piece of it and says like this is the thing in the uh this is like a rarefied thing in the ontology where if you imagine it it then like causes a little piece of that cognitive process to be there like if you imagine a red thing some little red appears in your visual cortex or an area Downstream of it um this makes it seem very unlike an object in the outside world you can't quite see how any number of atoms could ever add up to the thing that happens when you send your brain a a instruction like visualize red it seems like no matter how much you imagine atoms bopping around in your mental workspace in your imagination a little sense of redness never appears the way that it appears if you instruct yourself to imagine redness so I I understand what you're saying in terms of if I think I understand that it's hard to imagine qualia but why would we imagine that babies don't have it what I'm saying is that like if I look at the processes for having qualia that it's hard to imagine atoms adding up to my guess is that the babies aren't running it yet yeah so because I've done more abortion debates than I care to recall but um it feels like when when you're looking at the ability of something to deploy a conscious experience what we're looking at is because we can't really see one anywhere or I'm not aware of any way to observe a conscious experience it seems like we're looking at kind of like the underlying mechanisms and we're trying to make a guess of is there enough like circuitry communicating with each other and functioning at this point such that there's some conscious experience that's happening on top of it and I feel like I don't know what is the what is the significant alteration of brain mechanism that's changing as a baby goes from you know birth to two or three or four that would make you think that like now it's got the proper parts for conscious experience but before it didn't I'm not a sufficiently a student of Developmental neuroscience and developmental psychology to take a guess is like where in two to three or even if it's done by two to three um though to be clear like I'd be less surprised if a toddler was having conscious experiences but I was was trying to do is like describe a guess of why qualia feel and Fable I was trying to describe a guess of a mechanism whereby quality of feel ineffable and then like it's complicated and as long as Consciousness appears to you like a blank mysterious substance for all you know that blank mysterious substance could be inside babies but it's not going to turn out to be a blank mysterious substance you don't have to believe my guess is about it's about to believe that like like everything else in history that seems simple and opaque like life itself if you it's just this like mysterious animating force of Flesh then for all you know bales of straw can spontaneously generate flies or mice but as soon as you understand like what life is there's an almost enormously complicated Machinery behind it and Consciousness isn't going to have that much complicated Machinery behind it you know it's going to be built on top of of standard brain stuff but like babies are quite simple so if you anything you know about the more you know about what Consciousness is as soon as you know that there's a particular mechanism you're going to be like oh babies are too simple to have that going running yet give them a wake at least could I could one challenge you because I'm not going to um well no can I challenge you on that and say that it does feel like Consciousness is a special type of thing that there might be we might be able to draw a circle around all of the knowledge a human could ever possess and understanding like the fundamental nature of Consciousness just because that is our frame that we view things through that understanding that might just exist outside of that particular Circle and it's something we can never truly fully comprehend like eyes are the one thing that you can never look at well but you can look at eyes in a mirror right yeah and you know if you'd grown up in a civilization that had already unraveled like what makes Consciousness feel so mysterious would have like grown up thinking of it as no more mysterious than life itself and the Mysterious vitalik Force yeah I agree that there are definitely things that exist that we didn't know before that we do know now but it feels like um I could I mean I say this I guess it's not true but I like even in the past we could Envision ways to test for a lot of things uh like where you know does blood keep you alive are germs real uh you know is string theory a good explanation of quantum mechanical like we can imagine all of these things and we can try to you know pose questions for like how could we test for this particular thing but I it feels like conscious experience is a truly unique thing where I couldn't even imagine a way to test it like let's say that I showed you as if I imagine you would think or maybe you won I don't want to put this in your mouth but I would imagine that if you could create a sufficiently complex computer you should be able to get everything working such that a conscious experience somehow appears there I would imagine if you could emulate yeah but then the question would be let's say that we feel like we've done that how would we know if there was one there or not I can't even like fathom a test for that well that's because you don't know what Consciousness is let me put it this way you exist think there exists an objective yes or no answer to the question are you conscious conscious is the only area where I will bow to dualism and I don't know if I'm a hardcore or physicalist materialist but I'm not sure I think it's a really difficult question yeah I'm not sure I don't know I've done a lot of drugs and sometimes I wonder if conscious or not or if other people are conscious or not I'm not sure yeah well and I bring that up jokingly but I think drugs are actually a really interesting way to explore um a lot of what we I think we take a lot for granted when it comes to our conscious experience and how much is going on under the hood to put together um the crude approximations of reality that your conscious experience actually is but um I guess yeah when you ask questions about are germs real is the Sun hot uh you know what where do babies come from or whatever it feels like even if it's hard to imagine where they come from I can think of or I can hypothesize a series of tests to get us closer to the answer for that but I mean I can't think of anything for Consciousness yeah is that because babies are more real than Consciousness or is that or like fire is more real than Consciousness or is that because you're confused about Consciousness but not about fire I think babies are more real inconsistent as weird as that is to say because I feel like I I can't think of anything else in the universe that is like an emergent property of underlying things that is actually a greater thing than the sum of its parts that like I can't imagine a thing that if you put a bunch of things together another thing appears yeah if nothing else is like that how about if you guess that Consciousness isn't like that either well I could but then I ask well what is the way that we can try to get any closer to understanding what it is like do you think we're any closer to understanding what Consciousness is now as we were 100 years ago uh in my case yeah like you know it was it used to used to be more confused about this than I feel right now well what is it share your thoughts with us so you so the question you want so suppose I say that the question why does Consciousness feel ineffable is guaranteed to have an answer in in a way that the question what is the ineffable nature of Consciousness is not would you agree with that um repeat it again to me like there's some so like you try to look Inward and you see something very confusing and then your lips move and you say I'm confused okay and you had some like internal thought processes if we could you know like take tomorrow's fmri machine and read your auditory cortex we would like find that there was like more thoughts he had along the way to saying I'm confused and would you agree that these things are all like objective features of the universe I'm not sure if I would I don't know that if you're if you're talking about the underlying process that can be measured in a machine then I think that the answer to that is obviously yes it's a thing that's observable testable we've got ways to measure for it but if we if we talk about the qualia or like the semantic understanding of or the actual experience of like is there a thing that knows what it's like to be a thing that's experiencing a thing I don't know about that being a future of the universe in the same way that like the brain itself is but there has to be something that causes you to say all those words you said just now I agree there's a lot of LSD no I'm just kidding no I I agree there is a thing but that going back to my thing before the there's the underlying structure and then to even go back to the baby thing that's where I would assume that babies are conscious the only way is humans it seems to be that we can imagine a conscious experience being there is if the underlying parts are there first that like it could be the case that neurons communicate with each other they have an experience or they don't have an experience but they cause this emerging experience to happen who's to say that there's not a conscious experience overlying this crowd or a state or country and how would we even begin to observe it well you you something like that is a project and you like unravel the strings of your confusion piece by piece and I'm not necessarily saying that like there is merely some merely physical explanation for why you talk about Consciousness and therefore no such thing as consciousness I am saying that if we're going to Define that if like that like Consciousness as this thing we look at and become confused is our handle on where to even locate inside reality the thing we're trying to talk about and be confused about so if you say that like Consciousness is unrelated to your feelings of confusion as they appear inside your brain and the words that you speak about Consciousness like then I really do think you've like ended up in some like weird side corner of philosophical Corners one talks oneself into like I mean Consciousness would have something to do with why we're talking about Consciousness or what are we even talking about sure I definitely agree they're related but like a question that's very difficult um I think it's called hydrocephalus where you can have diseases or issues that go into the brain but there's a lot of water and there's a lot of brain missing there are some people that can be reported I want to say the most dramatic case was a guy that I feel like the scan showed he had like like 20 of his brain there but outwardly he appeared to be thinking feeling having a conscious experience like anybody else like is that a philosophical zombie like can we even know that or you said no I would strongly guess that wasn't philosophical zombie how could you know that when so much of the underlying Machinery that would we would imagine would like he's got less of a brain than a baby does right yeah [Music] babies have brains they they're there yeah like they're small they're smaller but they're definitely there you have to check with the volume compared to adults volume this guy's buying his brain it's very small very low volume brain so so for one thing I kind of like want to actually check out this case study before I draw deep sure of course um for another like you know like me if you ask this person like are you conscious and they're like what are you talking about then I would but if then you know like that's one thing it has this person like are you conscious and they like sort of like play back something from that they read in the Journal of Consciousness studies as a kid or something you know that you know llms can do that too um unfortunately I I think parenthetically I think we should like exclude all the talk about Consciousness from the data sets we train the AIS on said If ever spontaneously start talking about that without having heard any humans talking about that we'd be able to notice um but yeah close parenthetical um so so like when you stare at something confusing there's often like this thing that's confusing and that thing that's confusing and how could this possibly be true how could this possibly true and you want to like follow the one thread you have and set all the confusions aside and and the threat I was suggesting that you follow is a threat to like what is shaping in detail my experience of looking at Consciousness and being confused about it not what is not what is consciousness such that it confuses me but like what are the momentary shaping forces whereby my confusion ends up in this exact shape I don't think we actually have time to go into here I think like I just sort of like discourse upon the way of resolving confusing things which is not to like hop about between all the different pieces that confuse you one after another and like look in any direction despair because it doesn't explain everything it wants it's like find a thread you can pull and pull it well that was the baby question that was a baby question I'm not convinced that they're not conscious but that was a interesting conversation so I was satisfied okay yeah main thing you want to say you know sort of like is there a part of you is there a part of you that knows in real life that of course there's going to turn out to be like an explanation in terms of atoms Not Mere atoms but just that there was something all these atoms were doing that felt from the inside like this very confusing Consciousness stuff but in the end there wasn't miraculous physics there wasn't extra causal stuff there wasn't anything inherently mysterious there was just a thing you were ignorant about and confused about that would be my guess my my guess would be well then obviously babies are not Consciousness yeah my guess would be is that there is I think it's I think it's fallacious to assume that humans evolved to perceive everything that exists that I don't know I haven't heard a compelling argument for that so it might be the fact that um there are other things that exist extra material we might say that we don't have the ability to perceive maybe Consciousness exists in that realm where we can't see it but another type of being could or has different types of sensory things or but I'm not entirely sure there I mean I would say of that that there could be a universe attached to ours such that we're inside its causal closure but it's not inside our causal closure like there could be a whole universe of particles that interact with particles in our universe and each other but none of the particles that we think of as being our universe interact with the extra particles but of these things it's we cannot speak we cannot see them we don't even have a good way to refer to them if you imagine like some prankster aliens um up in a universe with more computing power than this one they could simulate our universe and our universe plus like we're Universe one interacting with it and our universe plus like we're in Universe two like like being interacted with by our universe but not interacting with it in turn like it get like causal arrows go from our universe to there but no causal arrows going back so you know like um actually I'm not going to go in that rabbit hole cause time but uh he's a guy um so they uh obvious hypothesis about isakai's is that like it's the universe that causally descends from yours but doesn't send causal directions causal projections going back the other way anyways um so but then how do you you can then you can't even talk about the things there you don't have any way of saying like like you can be like uh there's a there's a ghost in my bedroom that doesn't causally interact with me in any way and I'm like how do you know how are you even talking about it in in all you like there's this enormous variety of possible universes with different that descend causally from our universe and send no projections back you have no idea of poking down any one of them unless you talk about like that thing you saw that thing you heard that thing that causally interacted with you in some way and that's then that's how the words even come to Mean a Thing that causally interacted with you it's something that doesn't costly interact with you at all you literally cannot talk about because you have no way for your words to pin down you mean that thing as opposed to something else yeah I think I largely agree you can't really talk about things you have no perception of I'm just saying that it's not inconceivable to me that these other types of things um could be a thing that we just don't have the ability to perceive that interact in a way that's hard for us maybe like um theoretically the explanation for you know gravitational forces in the universe like the dark matter we're looking for the dark matter is causing gravity we can talk about the dark matter because we can talk about yeah but I don't think right now we even know if Dark Matter exists right are we are we're looking for like there's not enough matter to account for the gravitational forces in our expanding Universe right now I think that's a big mystery for astrophysics right we can talk about that thing that causes galaxies to rotate faster than we think they should sure like but what if the thing that's emitting that that gravitational effect is something that's existing outside of our ability to ever perceive it like is that is that unfathomable is that totally not I'd say it's incoherent because we are able to perceive its effects upon our universe in the form of the galaxies rotating faster we can we may not be able to like measure it by means other than using galaxies as measuring devices but the galaxies are right there being measuring devices and that's how we're able to talk about them do you hear share something I'm curious do you think that it's possible that like a fourth dimensional creature could leave a footprint in a three-dimensional world and that we would never be able to perceive the creature but we could perceive an effect on our world as a result of his I guess meddling in I don't know what it means to say that I can I can never perceive that speaker there I can only perceive the photons impinging upon my retina well isn't that exactly what we say with dark matter though we can't perceive the matter but we perceive the gravitational effect of something that we can't find yeah like everything except for my qualia is something whose existence I infer from the patterns it makes in my qualia well but I think the the problem with the inference here though is that we're inferring something we literally have absolutely no way to account for most of the things we infer from our qualia have direct things that I'm pretty sure we find in like blue and red correspond to waves on the electromagnetic spectrum or things that we hear refer to sound pressure waves in the air but when it comes to galaxies moving in a certain direction we can't find the the matter there it just seems unaccounted for like we can't even found it right now is that I I I'm not seeing a basic theoretical distinction there's just like the patterns that stuff that stuff outside of us makes in our sensory information and we have stories about what's doing it and these are the hypotheses and the ones that make very good predictions we say are thereby confirmed over their prior probabilities and I just don't see a fundamental distinction between Dark Matter making galaxies rotate faster and the light from those stars and coming into telescopes and like sunlight bounces off of the speaker and gets goes into my retina and gets transduced into neural impulses and then is like information consonant with the rest of my brain and I'm like oh there's a there's a speaker over there but to me this this feels like exactly the same sort of thing maybe some things are like provide more employment to physicists because they're harder to pin down but they're not qualitatively harder to pin down they're just like you just have to employ additional physicists okay well I think babies are conscious so yes but that's because Consciousness seems like a very simple and mysterious thing that for all you know could be present in babies if you actually knew the real story there it would be predictably the case that no matter what you learned it could be something that would be that might be absent from babies that are much simpler than toddlers so you'll update in a predictable Direction on this issue as you come to learn more about Consciousness and you can figure that even in advance of knowing what the explanation is all right well what's the next market for us what time we're out of time are we out of time all right well well hey say goodbye or something geez right um and in conclusion I'm not actually saying that you should eat babies many people have misinterpreted my stance on probably babies don't newborn babies don't have qualia as as saying that it would be okay to directly load them into catapults and fling them and I'm not saying that there's reasons to not do that those babies could eventually come to bed in prediction markets thanks for having me it's been fun chatting I appreciate it yep have a good one guys

Channel: Destiny

Views: 183,208

Keywords: steven bonnell, destiny, destiny streamer, destiny debates, destiny twitch, destiny vods, politics, news, livestreamfail, lsf

Id: Na0XYDKxvGY

Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023