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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Transcript and Brief Response to Twitter Conversation between Yann LeCunn and Eliezer Yudkowsky, published by Zvi on April 26, 2023 on LessWrong.
Yann LeCun is Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
This week, Yann engaged with Eliezer Yudkowsky on Twitter, doubling down on Yann’s position that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence poses zero threat to humanity.
I haven’t seen anyone else preserve and format the transcript of that discussion, so I am doing that here, then I offer brief commentary.
IPFConline: Top Meta Scientist Yann LeCun Quietly Plotting “Autonomous” #AI Models This is as cool as is it is frightening. (Provides link)
Yann LeCunn: Describing my vision for AI as a “quiet plot” is funny, given that I have published a 60 page paper on it with numerous talks, posts, tweets. The “frightening” part is simply wrong, since the architecture I propose is a way to guarantee that AI systems be steerable and aligned.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: A quick skim of [Yann LeCun’s 60 page paper] showed nothing about alignment. “Alignment” has no hits. On a quick read the architecture doesn’t imply anything obvious about averting instrumental deception, nor SGD finding internal preferences with optima that don’t generalize OOD, etc.
Yann LeCun: To guarantee that a system satisfies objectives, you make it optimize those objectives at run time (what I propose). That solves the problem of aligning behavior to objectives. Then you need to align objectives with human values. But that’s not as hard as you make it to be.
EY: Sufficiently intelligent systems, whatever their internal objectives, will do well at optimizing their outer behavior for those. This was never in doubt, at least for me. The entire alignment problem is about aligning internal AI objectives with external human preferences.
Yann: Setting objectives for super-intelligent entities is something humanity has been familiar with since people started associating into groups and laws were made to align their behavior to the common good. Today, it’s called corporate law.
EY: So you’re staking the life of everyone on Earth that:
– Future AIs are as human-friendly on average as the humans making up corporations.
– AIs don’t collude among themselves better than human corporations.
– AIs never go beyond superhuman to supercorporate.
Yann: I’m certainly not staking anyone’s life on anything.
Thankfully, I don’t have that power.
But your idea that getting objective alignment slightly wrong once leads to human extinction (or even significant harm) is just plain wrong.
It’s also dangerous.
Think about consequences.
EY: My objection is not that you’re staking everyone’s life on what you believe – to advocate for a global AI stop is also doing that – but that you are staking everyone’s life on propositions that seem not just uncertain but probably false, and not facing up to that staking. If you think there’s no possible extinction danger from superintelligence no matter how casually the problem is treated or how much you screw up, because of a belief “AIs are no more capable than corporations”, state that premise clearly and that it must bear the weight of Earth.
YL: Stop it, Eliezer. Your scaremongering is already hurting some people. You’ll be sorry if it starts getting people killed.
EY: If you’re pushing AI along a path that continues past human and to superhuman intelligence, it’s just silly to claim that you’re not risking anyone’s life. And sillier yet to claim there are no debate-worthy assumptions underlying the claim that you’re not risking anyone’s life.
YL: You know, you can’t just go around using ridiculous arguments to accuse people of anticipated genocide and hoping there will be no consequence that you will regret. It’s dangerous. People become clinically depressed reading your crap. Others may become violent...
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