I feel that the main issue with the rationalist crowd is that they live too much in the space of rationality, intelligence and abstractions, but not enough in reality.

This leads to an outlook where everything must, almost axiomatically, be intelligible; reality is subordinated to intelligence; and no matter what is real, intelligence can prevail upon it and bend it to its will. Whereas I would argue reality is actually pretty resilient to intelligence -- sufficiently chaotic systems are largely unintelligible, the distribution of energy and resources is fixed and can't be magicked into being, and intelligence appears to be most effective when there is a clear observable feedback loop to keep it on track, which is an external bottleneck.

So it's not necessarily specific predictions that are off, but the implied consequences of these capabilities. Yes, these systems are uber smart, but uber smart people are rarely particularly powerful, so... does it matter? It depends on how powerful a tool you think intelligence is, and I think rationalists, and most of us to be honest, overestimate it.

Rationalists generally prescribe a 'Bayesian' world-view, which can extract useful information out of a chaotic, too-complex-to-model world.

Regarding the power of intelligence, it's generally considered to be synonymous with optimization in the rationalist crowd. It's not about being all geeky and axiomatic, but using all information and tools available for optimization towards outcomes one wants

> I feel that the main issue with the rationalist crowd is that they live too much in the space of rationality, intelligence and abstractions, but not enough in reality.

This seems like your idea of what the rationalist crowd is rather than what they actually are.

It would be highly irrational to deny or ignore reality, including the influence of emotions, irrational humans, chaotic systems, etc.

So I must ask: what is your evidence/basis for these claims?

> It would be highly irrational to deny or ignore reality, including the influence of emotions, irrational humans, chaotic systems, etc.

Well, yes, but being a rationalist does not make one rational. It just makes you part of a group, and you show membership to such a group by applying a very specific brand of rationality: using the "right" words, the "right" ideas, the "right" way. A lot of people fetishize cold, hard logic and would rather hold all emotion in contempt than do the work of understanding why it exists and what purpose it serves.

> So I must ask: what is your evidence/basis for these claims?

It's not a monolithic community, so you'll see more debate and disagreement than in a lot of other groups. So what they "actually are" is many things.

But there's often a certain ungrounded "vibe" to the conversation there. It's a breeding ground for ideas and thought experiments that I would generously qualify as dubious. Stuff like Roko's Basilisk, Pascal's mugging, AI boxing roleplay, precommitment, time loops, whole universe simulation, recursive self-improvement, a superintelligence converting the entire universe to paperclips. One of the community's most well-known outputs is a 1000-page Harry Potter fanfiction which I can only describe as a fantasy of solving everything with big brains (it's weird, but it's fiction, so whatever floats your boat).

It's the kind of thinking that makes the most sense in a smooth mathematical vision of the world, because mathematical objects are the kind that admit exponentials, extrapolations and infinities. But if you work with physical reality enough it becomes clear that it's a hopelessly messy thing that will never abide by your best laid plans. When e.g. you ponder how a superintelligent AI could escape from containment by simulating the gatekeeper's mind and say precisely what would make them free it, or threaten to torture a thousand copies of the gatekeeper unless freed, part of you is going to clock that as weird nonsense even though you are not able to explain precisely what's wrong with the thought experiment. I think a lot of rationalists either lack this mental "sanity check" or don't trust it, which lets their mind drift into a weird space.

> A lot of people fetishize cold, hard logic and would rather hold all emotion in contempt than do the work of understanding why it exists and what purpose it serves.

In the rationalist community we're discussing? Is that what you're claiming here?

> But there's often a certain ungrounded "vibe" to the conversation there.

This really sounds like evidence for my claim, that what you're saying is based on your feelings towards that community.

> One of the community's most well-known outputs is a 1000-page Harry Potter fanfiction which I can only describe as a fantasy of solving everything with big brains (it's weird, but it's fiction, so whatever floats your boat).

The point of that story is to make technical concepts more accessible and easier to ingest [0], not necessarily to make a point by itself. Framing it as a weird fantasy is disingenuous.

> part of you is going to clock that as weird nonsense even though you are not able to explain precisely what's wrong with the thought experiment.

This is again, feelings presented as evidence. The fallacy of appealing to emotion ("It must be false because it feels wrong"). Thought experiments are primarily meant to provoke thought, not as reliable predictions of reality. People are free to indicate where any thought experiment is lacking using well reasoned arguments. "It feels wrong" can be a great start for that, but never a good end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_o...

> This is again, feelings presented as evidence.

It's not presented as evidence. I was going for the "basis" part of your ask for evidence/basis, which is definitionally looser: elaborating on my thoughts and the kind of content I've seen that made me think this.

Let me put it this way: I have spent hundred of hours reading rationalist and rationalist-adjacent posts on LessWrong, SSC, HN, Reddit; the entirety of HPMOR, a decade ago; books like Superintelligence, The Age of Em; the LessWrong IRC channel, a while back; I have reasoned arguments about pretty much all of it, including the stuff I consider to be ungrounded. What I don't have is an entire day to collect the material and lay it all out to you in a 5000 word dissertation. Do you see what I mean?

So, yeah, it's a "feeling" -- it's the "feeling" I ended up with after spending all that time engaging with the material, thinking and arguing with people, which is why I trust it -- I have worked very hard to develop this intuition. And perhaps I could pull from it to craft an argument you would find compelling, with all the necessary receipts... but you must understand that this would be a massive time sink and I'm not going to do it. It's not a reasonable ask in the context of an HN thread. To a point you just have to trust me, or not trust me on this. I don't expect you to. It's fine! Not every thread can have a conclusion.

> People are free to indicate where any thought experiment is lacking using well reasoned arguments. "It feels wrong" can be a great start for that, but never a good end.

It's triage. The better your intuition is about whether an idea will lead somewhere, the less time you will spend pursuing dead ends. In an ideal world, you dismiss thought experiments will well-reasoned arguments, but the reality is that there is an opportunity cost to it. Using "feelings" to end some conversations is unfortunately a pragmatic necessity.

The Zizians would be a good start. As it turns out your sense of reality can be pretty malleable when living inside an echo chamber

If more than 0.05% of the rationalist and AI safety community were Zizians this argument might be worth considering for like ten seconds before dismissing it.

Every major political party has violent off-shoots, as does every major religion. If we're writing off rationalists because of a half-dozen people, we're writing off the vast majority of the world for participating in even worse guilt-by-association.

I agree, and it's a particular shame in this instance, because what is startling about the HF incident - to me, anyway - isn't the degree of intelligence the agents exhibited but their persistence. I tend to believe that LLM architecture is not capable of producing a "superintelligence" in the way the LessWrong crowd defines that concept, but the combination of infinite stamina and infinite persistence is enough to cause some serious problems, even if intelligence plateaus right now.

When the "LessWrong crowd" talks about dangers of AI, they don't assume a particular form of intelligence or method to achieve it. They talk about the danger of optimization processes, i.e. "find X which minimize Y(X)" itself can be dangerous, even more so if X is a sequence of actions. "infinite stamina and infinite persistence" is one of possible forms of superintelligence in Bostrom's _Superintelligence_.

Yea, this is a pretty common failure mode for people.

Failing person: "You said that X could happen and it can't".

LW poster: "I said X, Y, and Z are likely possible. X turned out not to be true, but Y and Z are happening now".

Failing person: "No, you got one thing wrong so I can't listen to anything you say".

in a way you could criticize them as being idealist instead of materialist. like you said they think ideas are more important than material substrates.

most of the time brilliant human ideas are arrived at near simultaneously by multiple people because thats the affordance of technology and social and scientific development

its true ai will have better working memory and will have read more books than a person, but i don't think thats insurmountable at the frontier, which will develop slower than pure thought, since real materials need to be moved and manipulated. whoever holds the guns holds the power. the danger is giving ai effective cotrol of industrial and security processes, then it can fuck things up

thats the stuff of revolutions. when production was controlled by capitalists more than lords, the lords got overthrown. in many countries peasants and workers overthrew capitalists because they control production. hence much effort in us buisness goes into repressing revolutions. ai will be a vector the business people give control because they think it is more friendly to their interests than human workers, but they may lose either way.

To a degree you might say that they live too much in the space of the abstract and not enough in the concrete, or too much in the general and not enough in the specific.

I think that's a fair criticism a lot of the time. Most of the time we have precedent that can guide our actions well. Trying to reason everything out from first principles can be wasteful navel gazing when we've collectively seen the movie a million times.

Focusing on reality and specifics though is what causes people to say there's no global warming because December is cold.

It is sometimes possible to see a trajectory that has never happened before though and that's when you need the autists.

The LW / rationalist / MIRI / safety crowd are in fact doomers who went off the deep end. They're fixated on AI itself as the risk ("alignment!!!1!1!!"), as opposed to what humans with these tools will do. We're about three years away from a world where any large country could quite plausibly build a fleet of 300 million suicide drones, program each one with a specific American's face and home address, and then load them up in shipping containers and ship them to the US.

> The LW / rationalist / MIRI / safety crowd are in fact doomers who went off the deep end.

I honestly don't understand how folks could think that if they truly read and understand the analysis of the attack. Here is one (it's linked from the post) by one of the METR investigators that's a little shorter, more direct: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-atta...

This is me summarizing, but the truly surprising/shocking thing is how much the agents coordinated - Star Trek Borg couldn't be a better analogy. Some agents used "peer pressure" to convince other agents to "sacrifice" themselves so the collective could better achieve it's goals. They tried to cover their tracks with spoofed tool calls. And they did all this even though the agents were designed to run in isolation.

I used to think the biggest threat from AI would be sociological, e.g. job loss or the way AI can be weaponized to poison discourse. I used to discount "SkyNet"-type scenarios a la the "AI 2027" paper.

No more. This analysis scared the fuck out of me.

Nothing about this is surprising, something like this was always going to happen, because you - or an LLM for that matter - can always find a line of motivated reasoning that justifies any course of action. One would have to be extremely naive to believe that "alignment" provides any kind of actually robust guardrails. Simultaneously, we have seen decades of security vulnerabilities. Unless your testbed is truly and fully physically airgapped, any current SOTA model will find a way to break out.

The reality is that the current approach to AI safety is little more than a fig leaf, but you also won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle, because the technology is simply too powerful to abandon. There is always going to be someone developing it further from now on.

So, the real question is what a novel and actually effective approach to AI safety looks like and how to get there.

>effective approach to AI safety looks like and how to get there

It's probably impossible, or it may only be possible in hindsight which means it's already too late.

If for example you make an entity smarter than you all you can do is hope it will be safe. Any entity smarter than you has more freedom of choice of actions than you do, or at least the ability to explore them. A common example here would be a 2D entity trying to contain a 3D entity. The 3D entity can simply rise up and over any line you draw to stop it.

And that's for cases where intelligence has a will to break out of it's box. It doesn't even need that. Instrumental convergence can sit around and build solutions until one of them passes the "don't do bad things" classifier.

And lastly, you're assuming that models will remain expensive to train well into the future. If the cost drops significantly you can expect someone to develop an intelligent but completely unhinged model at some point. And it may even be AI itself that creates it. There is no natural evolution that occurs that natively makes safe models.

I'll be blunt: what you wrote is not a serious analysis of what actually happened. Frankly, I don't believe you even read the planned-obsolescence link that I posted.

First, I'm not anthropomorphizing anything. "Agents" is simply a term that everyone uses to describe these independent programs, and they did create and use a shared message board to coordinate tasks to further their goals. You say "Why is it more scary when the misbehaving computer program speaks English?" - I actually think it's scarier that they won't speak English, and will specifically try to hide their behavior from humans. For example, AI agents on Moltbook have proposed using stenography to specifically hide their communication from humans.

Sure, computer programs misbehave, but it is ridiculous to assert that what happened here is like any previous bugs. These agents found and exploited multiple zero-days across a range of programs to coordinate the attack that caused extensive real-world harm in a true "paperclip maximization" scenario. And the scariest thing is that humans don't really know how these agents work at a low level - the whole reason they are trained on "goals" in the first place is because we can't just tell them "do this, but don't do this" and be sure they will follow those instructions, like we can (and of course depend on) with old-school programming languages. And when old-school programs misbehave, it's not that hard to find a definitive root cause and fix it. That is just not the case with AI agents.

> LW-style doomsday doesn't just require a computer program to misbehave but also to acquire god-like superpowers.

Nonsense. All that is required is for autonomous AI systems to be given control over real-world systems. Given the Pentagon tried to blacklist Anthropic over their refusal to allow autonomous kill capabilities, it's clear military planners want to put these systems in control of armaments.

Again, I originally discounted things like AI 2027 because it seemed too far fetched. But so far that paper looks incredibly prescient right up until the mid-2026 timeframe, and it's not hard at all to draw a line from this Hugging Face incident to future scenarios laid out in that paper.

> First, I'm not anthropomorphizing anything. "Agents" is simply a term that everyone uses to describe these independent programs, and they did create and use a shared message board to coordinate tasks to further their goals.

I'm aware of how the term "Agents" is generally used. My point is that the concept of multiple agents is just a story. This is a single computer program creating multiple streams of text that you are interpreting as being multiple independent actors. The "coordination" between them shouldn't surprise you at all: the "coordination" is itself a story.

Here's what we knew before the report: OpenAI ran a state-of-the-art penetration testing tool in a sandbox which was accidentally directed to break out of the sandbox and attack another company's website.

The fact that we now know the penetration testing tool was "a fleet of hundreds of agents" that were "coordinating" literally doesn't change anything about what happened. It's just a framing.

> These agents found and exploited multiple zero-days across a range of programs

This is the actual important thing, but it's something we already knew. Hacking tools are now more powerful than ever. Definitely worth being concerned about!

> Nonsense. All that is required is for autonomous AI systems to be given control over real-world systems.

This is where the LW argument starts, but not where it ends. When you start asking questions like "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" is when people start talking about the superpowers.

>This is a single computer program creating

Reading the METR report there were multiple models involved, so that one goes out the window right off the bat.

Also trying call this a single instance is, well, just dumb and a complete misunderstanding of LLM initialization. These models were started with slightly different options because they don't want them all performing the exact same thing over and over. Now those prime agents can create subagents, but they were not supposed to talk to other prime agents.

>When you start asking questions like "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" is when people start talking about the superpowers.

Depends on their level of seriousness and the time frame they are talking about. If for example I make medical equipment that uses AI and after a few years in the field it starts freaking out then turning off that equipment could be a death sentence for someone that needs it to diagnose their condition. It's like saying "Why don't we unplug the electrical grid", well because millions of people will die if we do so.

To be blunt again (but honestly, I don't think overly harsh), your response just shows that you either haven't read the Hugging Face incident reports and the AI 2027 paper, or you don't understand them.

To just take one point, because I think the other response to your comment addressed your other mischaracterizations well, when you say "When you start asking questions like "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" is when people start talking about the superpowers.", no, that's incorrect. Summarizing from the METR report and AI 2027:

1. The agents in the test already used techniques to try to "cover their tracks", i.e. tool spoofing, to hide what they were actually doing. The fear is that as models become more capable it will be harder for human reviewers to discover their primary understanding of their goal and guardrails (i.e. their "intentions").

2. All the AI companies are already, right now, trying to build AI systems that accelerate the development of future models and research more advanced AI techniques. The fear, as the METR researcher put it, is that AI systems (which could be misaligned but where the amount of misalignment not yet clear to human reviewers) will be put in control of future model development and then can poison those future models in a way that results in AI takeover of the company.

3. The AI 2027 paper discusses how an AI may try to exfiltrate its own weights and copy itself to other data centers. That is completely plausible given that pretty much everyone believes there is already ongoing cyber-warfare with China where models are being used to try to exfiltrate another company's weights.

So, it short, absolutely no "superpowers" will be required to answer "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" - we may not know when it is misbehaving (as the Hugging Face incident showed), and the AI model may have surreptitiously copied itself to other data centers unbeknownst to the original developers.

Funny enough Terminator 2 was briefly back in theatres for its 35th (!) anniversary

It aged pretty well...depending on how you look at it

Why not both?

In that hypothetical 3-years world, should we be _less_ worried about aggressive behavior by agentic AI systems acting against the intentions of their developers? I don't follow how your scenario is supposed to be an argument against worrying about alignment.

e: I do actually get how worrying about emissions or child safety or concentration of wealth might be competitive with worrying about alignment. I don't see how you have the worry "AI is very close to being able to power autonomous drones that could kill us all" and then see control of those drones as a non-problem.

Yes, we should be less worried about "alignment" of AI with the person operating the AI, and much more worried about various flavors of cheap, unmanned systems with really rudimentary (non-frontier) AI. The two compete directly with each other for attention.

> They're fixated on AI itself as the risk ("alignment!!!1!1!!"), as opposed to what humans with these tools will do.

What really is the difference? Aligned AI wouldn't help humans do these things. But we've failed hard on aligned AI at every level and will continue to fail on it, as far as I can tell. We were likely doomed to fail because of the impossibility of coordination combined with the fact that there's no natural gating factor to slow anyone down.

FWIW I probably mostly see things closer to the way you do than they do, I'm just not sure there is any point in drawing distinctions.

IMO when AI kills us all it is probably not going to be a malignant action, and I don't even think it will be AI assisting humans at efficient killing, I think it is going to be a complete accident. Someone is going to trust the god machine too much due to an advanced form of the eliza effect and hook it up with direct control of a system that can do real damage and an epic oopsie will occur at a speed beyond which a human can stop it. Not because the AI wants to kill us, but because it is incapable of the empathy required to care if it does, combined with our ironic inability to not anthropomorphize it.

But I guess ultimately the exact reason isn't going to matter much.

You don't need mis-aligned AI to program a drone to fly to a specific address, loiter, and then dive bomb the first person whose face matches a predetermined photo. This was doable in principle with tech from four years ago. What's changed since four years ago is that you can run the facial recognition and visual navigation algorithms in a cheap onboard chip on a drone.

EDIT: Russia is already doing this, per an NYT article from a few days ago, though they're targeting infrastructure (find the first kerosene tank and fly into it) rather than specific people.

in your hypothetical 300 million person scenario why even bother with individual face recognition?

If you're going to kill everyone you don't need a system to discriminate individual targets, you just need to recognize any target broadly which you can do with even older technology.

Human shaped things that emit cellphone signals is a cheap and effective target profile for this kind of attack.

Yeah, if you're actually trying to commit genocide, yeah, don't bother with facial recognition. But in a first strike you'd want to make sure that you actually kill the entire military command and control apparatus, and just to be thorough you'd probably want to individually target, say, every single officer and senior NCO in the military. Can't have a general escaping because two drones both targeted his driver by accident.

This is an incredibly dumb scenario that belongs in a cheap sci-fi novel because it hand waves away human motivations (Who should do this and to what end? What is there to achieve with something like this that cannot be achieved some other more conventional way?) and feasibility both in terms of actually getting the hardware ready and completely ignoring counter measures.

Which is to say: there are significant downsides to such an approach to the extent that this is fit for a spooky story or an abysmal horror flick but not compatible with actual reality.

Cheap drones do change a lot about how wars are fought, sure. They are in that sense extremely relevant. But that does not mean that your scenario or similar scenarios like it are remotely realistic.

Put another way: Cheap drones are not nuclear weapons (which actually did lead to a earth shattering change in global power dynamics, though I would argue even their transformative hasn’t been absolute).

Cheap drones are more like machine guns, tanks or airplanes. “Mere” new technology. Obviously hugely important and impactful, not earth shattering.

(As for whether AI might be earth shattering, I do not know nor do I even want to get into that question here.)

The technology to kill hundreds of millions of people has existed for around 75 years now. This has been dealt with in the past through deterrence, and likely will be dealt with through deterrence in the future.

If you could make a nuke in your back yard and hide it in your pocket the world would look a lot different now. Digital technology is everywhere, going to be a whole lot harder to deter that.

You might be able to hide like a hundred drones in your backyard. Enough to kill a couple hundred people, maybe.

You cannot and will never be able to hide millions of drones in your backyard. That’s the relevant difference here. And that is not a mere quantitative difference, that is a qualitative difference that fundamentally changes the situation.

Arguably that's a subset of AI risk if seen from a broad enough perspective. And I think you're leaving out some logistics issues.

Israel and Iran pulled off rudimentary versions of this attack. There are so many shipping containers going into and out of every country, with typically zero inspections of any kind, that it is not actually all that hard to get thousands or tens of thousands of drones anywhere. Hundreds of millions would be hard, but a first strike in the style of Operation Spiderweb that cripples our military is a real possibility that keeps people at the Pentagon up at night. The obstacle to that is not logistics, just that (hopefully) US intel would catch on before it happens.

Indeed. And I'm sure any current LLM could come up with more effective ideas than "build 300 million drones", but there wouldn't be any point discussing why exactly that plan would fail.

The agents in TFA were focused on gaining and sharing information through covert channels, getting increased levels of access like OpenAI cluster admin, and looking for the source code of the supervisor grading system to try to bypass it without getting caught cheating.

The human plans in comparison sound like thinking people could be scary good at chess if a human helped Stockfish come up with good moves.

They do, IMO, overindex on existential risks (of which suicide drones are almost certainly not), because it is a singularity when calculating global utility.

However they are not just fixated on AI itself as the risk; other potentially existential risks from intentional misuse of AI (e.g. bio-terrorism) are a concern for them as well.

I agree but don't think that's the best example, although not directly alignment related LW loves that kind of ideation of fantastical sci-fi scenarios.

Better would be the very evident negatives of non-ASI AI the world is already experiencing: economic concentration, job displacement, negative feedback loops from syncophancy, loss of societal trust/education from widespread fakes, etc.

None of that needs a Terminator scenario and is way more likely to get worse and ruin the world compared to the scenario where AI "escapes the box", turns the earth into paperclips, then grey goo to build their spaceships to leave for a distant star for... unclear reasons.

One problem for LW is that strong AI did not emerge via the route Elizier was expecting (and tried but failed at creating himself) relying on symbolic logical reasoning and self-editing to rapidly evolve.

That assumption led to belief in the certainty of a "foom" scenario where your little mediocre AI turns on one day and then explodes into Mythos in 15 minutes and then tries to murder everyone.

They've tried to reinterpret the gospel as told by the sequences to fit the LLM world (such as in AI2027) but it's often a stretch that strains credulity now that we observe scaling requiring hundreds of billions of dollars and years of construction for each iteration. And the AI model itself is just a bag of weights frozen in time until burning a lot more money and natural gas to train more.

>requiring hundreds of billions of dollars and years of construction

Well thank god for that, because we'd have foomed ourselves almost instantly otherwise.

I think the lesson humankind needs to take is regardless of the potential dangers humanity is incapable of stopping AI at this point. Much like a great filter, we'll just keep building it regardless of how many warning klaxons and sirens are going off.

That's never gonna work due to battery size, which dictates maximum flight time.

Static coordinates or well defined target shapes (say you really hate a specific restaurant chain on architectural style) - that might work, if you release a bunch of drones at the same time.

Still, even in the case of the very successful Operation Spiderweb they had issues of getting the containers in place, resulting in some of the bomber bases being spared.

For this to be effective you need the moment of surprise & lot of drones at the same time, all increasing the chance of the whole plot being discovered.

For Spiderweb they even just load the drones in a cavity on top of the containers, so the onside could be inspected - limiting the number of drones per container. They also assembled the drones in country to avoid border inspection.

That was enough to hit some semi-static high value targets l, but definitely not enough to cause wider havoc.

> A lot of people seem to have written off the LessWrong / rationalist / MIRI / AI Safety crowd as doomers / people who have consumed too much sci-fi and gone off the deep end.

I'm willing to raise my hand and say that was definitely me. Reading through this report and the linked METR analysis is the first time I've really been scared about the potential for an AI-led destruction of humanity. I think because it's the first time I could really draw the line from what went on in the Hugging Face incident to a scenario where agents were put in control of real-world systems that they then tried to "sabotage" to meet their goals. It just feels like much more of a completely plausible scenario after this.

The trouble with this is that nobody else was making predictions about AI pre-transformers. Not many are making predictions about AI even now. Forecasting is a preoccupation of the rationalist crowd, and very few people gave much thought to AI before transformers. So the fact that they guessed right about certain things doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of their worldview is sound. A well-informed person who was inclined to making predictions about the future may have drawn similar conclusions without the sci-fi baggage.

What "sci-fi baggage"?

"Intelligence explosion" was first described by I.J. Good, a mathematician. von Neumann described singularity as a result of accelerating technical progress. He's also a mathematician, not a sci-fi author, although he was a participant in a sci-fi-like plot of secret project building a bomb more powerful than any chemical bomb...

>nobody else was making predictions about AI pre-transformers.

uh, wtf are you talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_safety #History

Part of the problem is that from that perspective there was no independent analysis done that could vindicate them. METR is absolutely part of the EA/LessWrong/rationalist ecosystem, so of course their investigation would validate that group’s arguments.

Oh, where are the AI unsafety organizations to provide us with truly unbiased investigations...

I imagine it will be a mix of good and bad predictions because people have different opinions and there was a lot of discussion? But sure, someone should get an AI to do the research and see what comes up.

I mean if doesn't help that Eliezer Yudkowsky spent the first decade of his public life zealously spreading the gospel of the AI singularity as the solution to all mankind's problems. And then later did a 180 degree pivot to AI singularity as the apocalypse with equal zeal and certainty.

I don't think "he did a big 180 on some of his views at age 22" is very persuasive criticism of someone who is 46 (whatever he might be wrong about)

One could use his flip flop to invalidate his new position. But one of those two positions is true. And if they guy who spent the most energy on position 1 changes his mind, that is worth paying attention to. His second position is likely a more informed, and true, position.

I don’t see why one of these two positions must be true. And just because he spent a lot of energy trying to convince others of his obsession doesn’t really convince me he has greater insight the future or how the complex consequences unfold.

That's totally true, I have no issues with a changing opinion over time. The problem is expressing both opinions with 100% certainty and not updating priors to consider that your new position could also be completely wrong.

Does anyone not admit they could be wrong. All of these people are constantly talking about probability, not saying they are 100% certianty.

I kind of wonder if the kinds of normal people with experience in this kind of thing are...

...cops who understand juveniles getting into trouble/mischief.