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AI takeoff story: a continuation of progress by other means
Aegeus00

Is it something like the AI-box argument? "If I share my AI breakout strategy, people will think 'I just won't fall for that strategy' instead of noticing the general problem that there are strategies they didn't think of"?  I'm not a huge fan of that idea, but I won't argue it further.

I'm not expecting a complete explanation, but I'd like to see a story that doesn't skip directly to "AI can reformat reality at will" without at least one intermediate step.  Like, this is the third time I've seen an author pull this trick and I'm starting to wonde... (read more)

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2Edouard Harris
I see — perhaps I did misinterpret your earlier comment. It sounds like the transition you are more interested in is closer to (AI has ~free rein over the internet) => (AI invents nanotech). I don't think this is a step we should expect to be able to model especially well, but the best story/analogy I know of for it is probably the end part of That Alien Message. i.e., what sorts of approaches would we come up with, if all of human civilization was bent on solving the equivalent problem from our point of view? If instead you're thinking more about a transition like (AI is superintelligent but in a box) => (AI has ~free rein over the internet), then I'd say that I'd expect us to skip the "in a box" step entirely.
AI takeoff story: a continuation of progress by other means
Aegeus50

This is well-written, but I feel like it falls into the same problem a lot of AI-risk stories do.  It follows this pattern:

  1. Plausible (or at least not impossible) near-future developments in AI that could happen if all our current predictions pan out.
  2. ???
  3. Nanotech-enabled fully-general superintelligence converts the universe into paperclips at a significant fraction of lightspeed.

And like, the Step 1 stuff is fascinating and a worthy sci-fi story on its own, but the big question everyone has about AI risk is "How does the AI get from Step 1 to Step 3?"

(T... (read more)

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4Edouard Harris
Thanks! I agree with this critique. Note that Daniel also points out something similar in point 12 of his comment — see my response. To elaborate a bit more on the "missing step" problem though: 1. I suspect many of the most plausible risk models have features that make it undesirable for them to be shared too widely. Please feel free to DM me if you'd like to chat more about this. 2. There will always be some point between Step 1 and Step 3 at which human-legible explanations fail. i.e., it would be extremely surprising if we could tell a coherent story about the whole process — the best we can do is assume the AI gets to the end state because it's highly competent, but we should expect it to do things we can't understand. (To be clear, I don't think this is quite what your comment was about. But it is a fundamental reason why we can't ever expect a complete explanation.)