Many users praised Ramez Naam's warning that AI safety proposals must avoid empowering authoritarians because of government control risks, while others dismissed the ideas as naive or unrealistic.
Based on 21 visible X reactions from 38 accounts; directional sample.
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@ramez I think it’s a very naive document. Especially its treatment of US-China relations and the incentives the operate under, and its assumption of state capacity in both countries.
@ramez Would you change your mind if you suffered severe brain damage? I'm trying to explain why so many people are taking it seriously.
@ramez Very well said.
@joshua_saxe 💯
Researchers argue personal background drives opposition to state-backed safety proposals
@ramez Agreed
@perrymetzger 🙏
I'm firmly in the third camp. The basic problem with AI 2040 is that it uses a fictional and speculative doomsday scenario to justify very real surveillance and control capabilities that governments would be certain to use in authoritarian ways, well beyond AI safety. It warns against concentration of AI power but its policy proposals serve to increase the power of the most powerful entities on planet Earth. It concretely sacrifices freedom in ways guaranteed to cause harm, in an effort to forestall a made up threat. It proposes safety tools that give governments unprecedented capabilities to monitor, suppress, and manipulate. These tools are intended only to stop the development of overly powerful AI, but once they exist, governments will use them as they please. Its authors mean well, but are so convinced of a fictional and unproven threat that they'd do real harm to the world to prevent it. It would create a world that is less free and less safe in the name of safety for a threat that may not even exist. I can't imagine making this trade off.
With respect to Paul, history supports inverting this risk profile. Authoritarian governments have killed orders of magnitude more people than mere criminals or terrorist. Our response to misuse of AI (which will happen) should never be one which augments authoritarianism. https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/2075630196913586401
You can probably map peoples reactions to various post AGI proposals based on whether they grew up in or adjacent to centralized/authoritarian forms of government and the economy. This is what it means to debate over normative values, and is good + healthy imo https://twitter.com/sebkrier/status/2075581960294940939
The reactions to prescriptions about AGI have less to do with being 'AGI pilled' or not, and more about whether you're more concerned with AIs taking over (xrisk), companies taking over (anti-capitalism), or the abuse of power by empowered governments (anti-authoritarianism).
@So8res It matters of course, but so do one's assumptions about technology, economics, and political science - all of which matter for how you understand AGI.
@alexolegimas Yep, I suspect a lot of my friends in the industry haven't had to deal with authoritarianism.
Many users praised Ramez Naam's warning that AI safety proposals must avoid empowering authoritarians because of government control risks, while others dismissed the ideas as naive or unrealistic.
Based on 21 visible X reactions from 38 accounts; directional sample.
Ask a question below.
Published answers will appear here.
@perrymetzger 🙏