Joshua Gans writes:

In the whole, is AI good or bad, debate that has been raging for some years now, especially since Bostrom’s Superintelligence book, I have been on the optimistic side of that debate. Basically, if you asked me to bet, I was more in the Marc Andresson camp when he wrote:

We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.

There were scenarios in which an AI given a simple task, like making paperclips, developed superintelligence and ended up wiping out all of us in the single-minded pursuit of that goal. But they were scenarios. They weren’t completely implausible, though I doubted things would play out that way.

While some in the economics world, notably Daron Acemoglu, were sufficiently worried that they thought we should slow things down, I placed far more faith in waiting to see if the real adverse consequences might emerge. This was because I assessed that those consequences relied on us also developing powerful and potentially very productive and useful AI, and I didn’t want to stop development based on explanation. Instead, I argued we should wait for evidence and then really act if harm is around the corner.

That argument carries a responsibility: when the evidence presents itself, we need to update our beliefs and act accordingly. Having read the METR/Redwood analysis of the Hugging Face incident, I think we are at that moment. It’s come much faster than I imagined. But it is here, and frankly, we don’t have good options for dealing with it. [Continue reading…]