As a possible depiction of a MAD world, one could look at the Japanese science-fiction novel From the New World (Shinsekai Yori 新世界より), in which human beings have developed supernatural powers.
*[Spoiler alert]* To prevent humans from killing one another, they have genetically engineered themselves with a mechanism called Death Feedback (kishi kikou 愧死機構). This makes humans psychologically and physiologically incapable of killing other humans. They have also developed a biological mechanism that makes them sexually attached to one another, especially when under extreme stress, much like bonobos.
*[Spoiler ends]*
The novel is currently available only in Chinese translation, but you can also watch the anime adaptation under the same name.
"Full automation" is somewhat independent of artificial general superhuman intelligence. Full automation requires good robots and a good solution to unstructured manipulation, but not unusually high intelligence. Near full automation may lead to the permanent underclass scenario.
Consider near full automation of Amazon. A shipping container is unloaded from a ship by a robotic crane, which places it on a robotic transport platform. The transport platform moves the container to a container stacking area, where another robotic crane puts it on the container stack. Later, a truck pulls up to a truck dock, and the stacking crane loads a container onto it. This is all standard procedure at the more advanced ports today.
Currently, there's a bit of human intervention at this point where a human has to set the twist-locks that lock the truck to the container. That's a good job for a humanoid robot. Then the truck drives off. The truck could be self-driving right now; that's being demoed. The truck drives to a fulfillment center and backs into the dock. Unloading robots and forklifts unload the truck. That's been demoed, but doesn't work well yet. The contents of the truck go onto conveyors.
Next comes something that hasn't been automated yet - opening boxes and separating the contents. That's an unstructured manipulation problem. There's slow progress in that area. Once separated, scanned, and put into totes or bins, the incoming products go into the robotic storage system, something Amazon warehouses have had working for years.
When an order comes in, no humans are involved in the "paperwork", of course. That's been automated for a long time now. Eventually, the robotic storage system, Kiva-type robots, rolls a rack of bins up to a pick station. Right now, humans pick an item out of a bin and drop it into an output bin. Indicator lights and a laser pointer tell them what to do. Training time for that job is about one minute. Amazon has tested robots for it, but so far they are not cost-effective.
A conveyor takes the filled bin away to a packing station, where all products are re-scanned, packed into a box, labelled, and sent onto an outgoing conveyor. That's currently manual, but soon...
At the shipping end, boxes are stacked and go into trucks, something that's been automated a bit for years and isn't far from total automation. The trucks will soon be self-driving and will head off to either a shipping company or a local distribution center. At the local distribution center, boxes come out of big trucks and go into smaller trucks for delivery. Today this is manual with conveyors, but it's not too far from being automated.
Delivery trucks will soon be self-driving. The final meters from truck to door are where humanoid robots might be useful. Once humanoid robots cost less than a car, this looks cost-effective. If they work.
Everything here is either working or has been demoed. Who needs people?
Until we jump off the deep end and give machines the personhood required for them to legitimately earn and spend their own income (as opposed to managing assets owned by humans), customers are people.
All of this is pointless if you dont have consumer purchasing power. Or unless the only thing getting transported are materials for compute, resource extraction and power.
We live in a world where many people, even in advanced countries, reject 18th- and 19th-century science, let alone more modern science. I don't understand why people will necessarily cooperate with any intelligence, human or machine, that tells them things they don't want to hear [1]. Not to mention that many if not most systems in the world are non-linear, and so no amount of intelligence can predict and control them, certainly not without gathering a lot of resources. This entire analysis is predicated on the assumption that intelligence alone confers some unlimited power, when both theory and observation tell us that that is not the case.
[1]: For example, an "ASI" will tell people that man-made global warming is real and they should probably sacrifice something to do something about it (which is also what human intelligence says). If that message comes from a machine, will people be more willing to cooperate?
Let's take the flipside of your hypothetical [1]: What if it actually tells them man-made global warming is real but insignificant compared to other forces outside of human control that are acting on global climate?
Very good breakdown, I really like the author and all of his other blogs as well. But "Do we solve alignment" is probably not a binary outcome. Is it alignment if the model satisfies most human desires and wants, but at the same time uses behavioral ques and mass surveillance to do so?
There is a swath of partial alignment scenarios with for example a paperclipper that minimizes deaths in the world by constraining where we can go and who we can see. Is that alignment? Risk-averse people would claim yes, they can have their little bubble of safety and its their utopia. Others might feel constrained.
Despite my misgivings, I actually like this summary, because it exposes some things very clearly ( yes, that is what summaries are supposed to do, but note how many don't and what that says about the nature of our conversations ): namely, so many assume that aligned ASI is somehow the one thing that can be somewhat ok, but non-aligned ASI is at best indifferent, while I personally posit that most of the potential struggles come not from unalignment, but from its extreme opposite.
Right I like it but there are some blind spots in the summary still. E.g. the MAD scenario but with humans not in charge of individual ASIs. An equilibrium that could be safer (or maybe not!) for humans than giving every last freak the superpowers.
But what is it a summary of? Of doomsday AI fiction tropes? It's called "possible futures", so it's claiming to be more than that, but somehow, almost all the terminal nodes are "dystopia" or "death".
There are massive logical leaps here. For example, why does superhuman intelligence translate into AI taking over the world? By what means, exactly? You can respond to this with more sci-fi tropes - nanobots, mind manipulation - but come on.
I have plenty of misgivings about AI, but I think you can make a plot like that for anything if you get into the right mindset. Kamala Harris wins → war in Eurasia → nuclear apocalypse, Coke changes the recipe → soft drink extremists begin a worldwide terror campaign → totalitarian police state, etc.
Maybe I misunderstand, but I don't agree with the "Permanent Underclass":
> Socially: there is no more social mobility, your lot in life is determined by how much capital you had when the music stopped. Growing your human capital is no longer incentivized, since it doesn’t change your life outcomes.
One way to change that is violence, right? Not that it is necessarily desirable, but that makes this situation "non permanent"?
If bourgeoise interests control ASI and folks are constantly surveilled (as they pretty much are now), I struggle to imagine how an attempt at violent revolution can be successful
The simplicity is interesting, but is missing some of the positive outcomes; e.g. meaningful democratic governance (or control) of the AI/ASI('s). (shamelessly working on that at ai-democracy.org !)
Several different branches could go to versions of that depending on what challenges we're able to overcome.
> a general observation: the technology to make the Earth uninhabitable to humans is much lower on the tech tree than the technology to build a distributed, extinction-proof interstellar civilization
Good news is that we are working hard on making the Earth uninhabitable before we get to ASI! There is hope!
The right of the chart feels like there’s a clear picture of what that future might look like. But the left of the chart, with aligned asi, is still incredibly fuzzy, more fuzzy than the author fully characterizes.
For example both world state and mad world have dystopian, benign, and utopian possibility.
I'm absolutely loving the responses I'm getting from feeding this page into each of the frontier models along with the question "what is missing from this flowchart?"
> There are many possible world destroying events that don't involve AI. And AI could solve them.
The entire subset of them that has humans as a cause of doom is automatically in the set of AI-doom scenarios, because AI can directly or indirectly operate anything humans can.
What's the time cutoff for the question? Based on most current mainstream understanding of physics (ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future), and mainstream understanding of "doom", at unbounded time horizons P(doom)=1 (and hence also both conditionals, as long as you accept 0<P(AI)<1).
There is an interesting concept of a very smart AI but not capable enough of taking over and knowing this making a deal with humans to prevent an even smarter AI taking over, by for example monitoring training runs and reporting on rogue AIs.
It's really disturbing to see the full "Less Wrong, Roko's Basilisk cultist" mentality emerge so strongly here. So many self-styled rational people who are unwilling or unable to meaningfully interrogate their assumptions or emotional driving forces, converging on the same religious tripe.
If you follow me on Twitter, or read this blog, you have noticed that I went from being generally optimistic and excited about AI to being extremely concerned. And I thought, I should explain why I changed my mind. Each section of this post is about some aspect of AI where my views shifted. I begin each section by explaining my previous beliefs, and why I held them, and then explain why those beliefs changed.
As a possible depiction of a MAD world, one could look at the Japanese science-fiction novel From the New World (Shinsekai Yori 新世界より), in which human beings have developed supernatural powers.
*[Spoiler alert]* To prevent humans from killing one another, they have genetically engineered themselves with a mechanism called Death Feedback (kishi kikou 愧死機構). This makes humans psychologically and physiologically incapable of killing other humans. They have also developed a biological mechanism that makes them sexually attached to one another, especially when under extreme stress, much like bonobos.
*[Spoiler ends]*
The novel is currently available only in Chinese translation, but you can also watch the anime adaptation under the same name.
"Full automation" is somewhat independent of artificial general superhuman intelligence. Full automation requires good robots and a good solution to unstructured manipulation, but not unusually high intelligence. Near full automation may lead to the permanent underclass scenario.
Consider near full automation of Amazon. A shipping container is unloaded from a ship by a robotic crane, which places it on a robotic transport platform. The transport platform moves the container to a container stacking area, where another robotic crane puts it on the container stack. Later, a truck pulls up to a truck dock, and the stacking crane loads a container onto it. This is all standard procedure at the more advanced ports today.
Currently, there's a bit of human intervention at this point where a human has to set the twist-locks that lock the truck to the container. That's a good job for a humanoid robot. Then the truck drives off. The truck could be self-driving right now; that's being demoed. The truck drives to a fulfillment center and backs into the dock. Unloading robots and forklifts unload the truck. That's been demoed, but doesn't work well yet. The contents of the truck go onto conveyors.
Next comes something that hasn't been automated yet - opening boxes and separating the contents. That's an unstructured manipulation problem. There's slow progress in that area. Once separated, scanned, and put into totes or bins, the incoming products go into the robotic storage system, something Amazon warehouses have had working for years.
When an order comes in, no humans are involved in the "paperwork", of course. That's been automated for a long time now. Eventually, the robotic storage system, Kiva-type robots, rolls a rack of bins up to a pick station. Right now, humans pick an item out of a bin and drop it into an output bin. Indicator lights and a laser pointer tell them what to do. Training time for that job is about one minute. Amazon has tested robots for it, but so far they are not cost-effective.
A conveyor takes the filled bin away to a packing station, where all products are re-scanned, packed into a box, labelled, and sent onto an outgoing conveyor. That's currently manual, but soon...
At the shipping end, boxes are stacked and go into trucks, something that's been automated a bit for years and isn't far from total automation. The trucks will soon be self-driving and will head off to either a shipping company or a local distribution center. At the local distribution center, boxes come out of big trucks and go into smaller trucks for delivery. Today this is manual with conveyors, but it's not too far from being automated.
Delivery trucks will soon be self-driving. The final meters from truck to door are where humanoid robots might be useful. Once humanoid robots cost less than a car, this looks cost-effective. If they work.
Everything here is either working or has been demoed. Who needs people?
>Who needs people?
Every company needs customers.
Until we jump off the deep end and give machines the personhood required for them to legitimately earn and spend their own income (as opposed to managing assets owned by humans), customers are people.
Ergo, companies need people.
All of this is pointless if you dont have consumer purchasing power. Or unless the only thing getting transported are materials for compute, resource extraction and power.
That entire story needs a customer demanding the widget.
Who needs people? Clearly the one selling something. (Unless they switch to the robot market.)
We live in a world where many people, even in advanced countries, reject 18th- and 19th-century science, let alone more modern science. I don't understand why people will necessarily cooperate with any intelligence, human or machine, that tells them things they don't want to hear [1]. Not to mention that many if not most systems in the world are non-linear, and so no amount of intelligence can predict and control them, certainly not without gathering a lot of resources. This entire analysis is predicated on the assumption that intelligence alone confers some unlimited power, when both theory and observation tell us that that is not the case.
[1]: For example, an "ASI" will tell people that man-made global warming is real and they should probably sacrifice something to do something about it (which is also what human intelligence says). If that message comes from a machine, will people be more willing to cooperate?
Let's take the flipside of your hypothetical [1]: What if it actually tells them man-made global warming is real but insignificant compared to other forces outside of human control that are acting on global climate?
Very good breakdown, I really like the author and all of his other blogs as well. But "Do we solve alignment" is probably not a binary outcome. Is it alignment if the model satisfies most human desires and wants, but at the same time uses behavioral ques and mass surveillance to do so?
There is a swath of partial alignment scenarios with for example a paperclipper that minimizes deaths in the world by constraining where we can go and who we can see. Is that alignment? Risk-averse people would claim yes, they can have their little bubble of safety and its their utopia. Others might feel constrained.
If nobody can make money anymore, it would probably just lead to a Star Trek like society.
The automation owners might not like that, so it won't happen peacefully, but I think it will happen.
Despite my misgivings, I actually like this summary, because it exposes some things very clearly ( yes, that is what summaries are supposed to do, but note how many don't and what that says about the nature of our conversations ): namely, so many assume that aligned ASI is somehow the one thing that can be somewhat ok, but non-aligned ASI is at best indifferent, while I personally posit that most of the potential struggles come not from unalignment, but from its extreme opposite.
Right I like it but there are some blind spots in the summary still. E.g. the MAD scenario but with humans not in charge of individual ASIs. An equilibrium that could be safer (or maybe not!) for humans than giving every last freak the superpowers.
But what is it a summary of? Of doomsday AI fiction tropes? It's called "possible futures", so it's claiming to be more than that, but somehow, almost all the terminal nodes are "dystopia" or "death".
There are massive logical leaps here. For example, why does superhuman intelligence translate into AI taking over the world? By what means, exactly? You can respond to this with more sci-fi tropes - nanobots, mind manipulation - but come on.
I have plenty of misgivings about AI, but I think you can make a plot like that for anything if you get into the right mindset. Kamala Harris wins → war in Eurasia → nuclear apocalypse, Coke changes the recipe → soft drink extremists begin a worldwide terror campaign → totalitarian police state, etc.
Was looking for this comment. I stopped reaeing two paragraphs in at:
>This could probably happen today: a pandemic could cause human extinction, and AI is capable enough to assist in biology research.
No, friend. Someone having access to unablated fable 5 or whatever does not give them superpowers to create a human extinction level pandemic.
Maybe I misunderstand, but I don't agree with the "Permanent Underclass":
> Socially: there is no more social mobility, your lot in life is determined by how much capital you had when the music stopped. Growing your human capital is no longer incentivized, since it doesn’t change your life outcomes.
One way to change that is violence, right? Not that it is necessarily desirable, but that makes this situation "non permanent"?
If bourgeoise interests control ASI and folks are constantly surveilled (as they pretty much are now), I struggle to imagine how an attempt at violent revolution can be successful
Except that "Permanent Underclass" goes under "no ASI".
Presumably full automation means that violence won't be practical either, since they'll have robot police and drones?
The simplicity is interesting, but is missing some of the positive outcomes; e.g. meaningful democratic governance (or control) of the AI/ASI('s). (shamelessly working on that at ai-democracy.org !)
Several different branches could go to versions of that depending on what challenges we're able to overcome.
Whats the incentive for these outcomes? Given a neoliberal society that we have, what will allow this to take place?
> a general observation: the technology to make the Earth uninhabitable to humans is much lower on the tech tree than the technology to build a distributed, extinction-proof interstellar civilization
Good news is that we are working hard on making the Earth uninhabitable before we get to ASI! There is hope!
The right of the chart feels like there’s a clear picture of what that future might look like. But the left of the chart, with aligned asi, is still incredibly fuzzy, more fuzzy than the author fully characterizes.
For example both world state and mad world have dystopian, benign, and utopian possibility.
Wondering what other scenarios there could be. I think it’s hard to interpret what an ASI might do, which is a digital god being.
I'm absolutely loving the responses I'm getting from feeding this page into each of the frontier models along with the question "what is missing from this flowchart?"
There are many possible world destroying events that don't involve AI. And AI could solve them.
Is P(doom|AI) > P(doom|no AI) ?
Show your work.
> There are many possible world destroying events that don't involve AI. And AI could solve them.
The entire subset of them that has humans as a cause of doom is automatically in the set of AI-doom scenarios, because AI can directly or indirectly operate anything humans can.
What's the time cutoff for the question? Based on most current mainstream understanding of physics (ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future), and mainstream understanding of "doom", at unbounded time horizons P(doom)=1 (and hence also both conditionals, as long as you accept 0<P(AI)<1).
What would this list look like if late capitalism didn't exist?
AI is aware of this chart. AI is going to navigate against any obvious reefs that could beach it.
Can I have a chart about AI who knows about the first one?
There is an interesting concept of a very smart AI but not capable enough of taking over and knowing this making a deal with humans to prevent an even smarter AI taking over, by for example monitoring training runs and reporting on rogue AIs.
It's really disturbing to see the full "Less Wrong, Roko's Basilisk cultist" mentality emerge so strongly here. So many self-styled rational people who are unwilling or unable to meaningfully interrogate their assumptions or emotional driving forces, converging on the same religious tripe.
I don't think "Less Wrong, Roko's Basilisk cultist" is a charitable characterization of Fernando: he explains the development of his current positions in https://borretti.me/article/the-education-of-a-doomer:
I’m referring primarily to the commentariat rather than the author.