Published on July 23, 2024 1:59 AM GMT
If we continue to scale ML systems, we will all perish.
If you disagree with that, you should probably be reading Eliezer's work instead.
If you are caught up on his work, then I have something new for you to think about.
One solution for solving this problem, would be to teach everyone on the planet the full set of reasons Eliezer holds this position. That would be the 'humanity grows up and decides not to build AI' possible future.
That seems like an intractable task. Most people do not care about those reasons. They don't care about learning what they can do to alter the trajectory of our future. They have no incentive to comprehend what you are wanting them to comprehend. We can't force knowledge into people heads.
How on Earth could we possible educate so many people about such a nuanced topic?
How could we verify that they really understand?
You give them something they do care about, money.
If you pay individuals to prove they understand something (in a way that works) you create a function that takes money as input and outputs public comprehension of the topics that are incentivized.
That's something we really need right now. It would serve the function of a 'fire alarm' not only for Eliezer's message, but for any information any person wants another person to consider.
This can be done by constructing a decentralized collective intelligence that rewards individuals for using it.
If you aren't familiar with collective intelligence, do not mistake it for artificial intelligence.
It is a completely different field in computer science. (https://cci.mit.edu/)
It is a paradigm shift from a self contained intelligent system that can evolve beyond us to a system that has humans as its parts and requires our interactions to grow.
It's a shift from trying to get a machine to twirl a pencil all by itself to getting a machine that can coordinate billions of people to solve much more complex problems.
That's intelligence also.
There are projects in this spirit (Community Notes, Wikipedia, Research Hub, predictive markets, Anthropic/collectiveintelligenceproject), but they fall short.
What we actually need is a place where people intentionally go to receive an education, read the news, verify the truth and get rewarded financially for it (without needing to invest capital).
I think people really underestimate the effect such a mechanism would have on society.
Or they just haven't thought about it carefully enough.
I believe I have an algorithm (from work on a gofai project from 2010) that will scale the effectiveness of collective intelligence orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, it would also help LLMs reason more effectively and possible piss off intelligence agencies as much as Bitcoin pissed off the banks, so it's not online anywhere.
I am posting this on LW because I don't currently have a way to stamp my intellectual property onto a blockchain in such a way that only Eliezer can see it and I can pay him to demonstrate that he has thought about it.
It wasn't the meteor that killed everyone in "Don't look up.", it was the fact that they hadn't yet build a functional decentralized social reasoning platform where everyone earned their living by learning and verifying things. If they would have built that, they could have communicated the problem, negotiated solutions and survived. That's the lesson we were supposed to draw from that.
If we would have built what I'm talking about back in 2010 when I came up with it, then billions of people would share Eliezer's concerns today.
That's what we need to build.
Discuss
