Possible Futures

In this article there is an implied step in which, when AI becomes ASI, then as a natural consequence it is suddenly in control over humanity. How should this play out? It hacks all nuclear launch sites and starts to make demands that we are forced to follow? Takes control overnight of all computers on the planet and locks humans outside? Is that even possible? Even so can't it be stopped by turning off datacenters and network connections? How does it take control of all the airgapped facilities (which would be the most "useful" in a takeover)?

I think it's too big of a question to leave it as an unexplained implication.

Also in the not/ASI scenarios, they imply a worldwide adoption in a short time. The world is still adopting inventions such as the internet, email or even electricity in some parts of the world. Why should they instead adopt AI overnight?

Germany, third largest economy in the world and largest economy in Europe, is still very much not digitalized. The whole country runs mostly on paper, hand signed contracts and notifications sent by post. As a country, they still have to adapt to email and the internet. Japan is similar for what I heard.

I find this article good food for thought, but it misses some crucial pieces.

We live in a world where many people, even in advanced countries, reject 18th- and 19th-century science, let alone more modern science. I don't understand why people will necessarily cooperate with any intelligence, human or machine, that tells them things they don't want to hear [1]. Not to mention that many if not most systems in the world are non-linear, and so no amount of intelligence can predict and control them, certainly not without gathering a lot of resources.

This entire analysis is predicated on the assumption that intelligence confers some unlimited power, when both theory and observation [2] tell us that that is not the case.

[1]: For example, an "ASI" will tell people that man-made global warming is real and they should probably sacrifice something to do something about it, which is also what human intelligence says. If that message comes from a machine, will people be more willing to accept it?

[2]: Not only are the most intelligent people not the most powerful people, but there are biological species that are more capable of destroying humanity than the other way around, even though they are far less intelligent than humans.

"Full automation" is somewhat independent of artificial general superhuman intelligence. Full automation requires good robots and a good solution to unstructured manipulation, but not unusually high intelligence. Near full automation may lead to the permanent underclass scenario.

Consider near full automation of Amazon. A shipping container is unloaded from a ship by a robotic crane, which places it on a robotic transport platform. The transport platform moves the container to a container stacking area, where another robotic crane puts it on the container stack. Later, a truck pulls up to a truck dock, and the stacking crane loads a container onto it. This is all standard procedure at the more advanced ports today.

Currently, there's a bit of human intervention at this point where a human has to set the twist-locks that lock the truck to the container. That's a good job for a humanoid robot. Then the truck drives off. The truck could be self-driving right now; that's being demoed. The truck drives to a fulfillment center and backs into the dock. Unloading robots and forklifts unload the truck. That's been demoed, but doesn't work well yet. The contents of the truck go onto conveyors.

Next comes something that hasn't been automated yet - opening boxes and separating the contents. That's an unstructured manipulation problem. There's slow progress in that area. Once separated, scanned, and put into totes or bins, the incoming products go into the robotic storage system, something Amazon warehouses have had working for years.

When an order comes in, no humans are involved in the "paperwork", of course. That's been automated for a long time now. Eventually, the robotic storage system, Kiva-type robots, rolls a rack of bins up to a pick station. Right now, humans pick an item out of a bin and drop it into an output bin. Indicator lights and a laser pointer tell them what to do. Training time for that job is about one minute. Amazon has tested robots for it, but so far they are not cost-effective.

A conveyor takes the filled bin away to a packing station, where all products are re-scanned, packed into a box, labelled, and sent onto an outgoing conveyor. That's currently manual, but soon...

At the shipping end, boxes are stacked and go into trucks, something that's been automated a bit for years and isn't far from total automation. The trucks will soon be self-driving and will head off to either a shipping company or a local distribution center. At the local distribution center, boxes come out of big trucks and go into smaller trucks for delivery. Today this is manual with conveyors, but it's not too far from being automated.

Delivery trucks will soon be self-driving. The final meters from truck to door are where humanoid robots might be useful. Once humanoid robots cost less than a car, this looks cost-effective. If they work.

Everything here is either working or has been demoed. Who needs people?

Very good breakdown, I really like the author and all of his other blogs as well. But "Do we solve alignment" is probably not a binary outcome. Is it alignment if the model satisfies most human desires and wants, but at the same time uses behavioral ques and mass surveillance to do so?

There is a swath of partial alignment scenarios with for example a paperclipper that minimizes deaths in the world by constraining where we can go and who we can see. Is that alignment? Risk-averse people would claim yes, they can have their little bubble of safety and its their utopia. Others might feel constrained.

As a possible depiction of a MAD world, one could look at the Japanese science-fiction novel From the New World (Shinsekai Yori 新世界より), in which human beings have developed supernatural powers.

   ==========================[Spoiler Alert]==============================

   To prevent humans from killing one another, they have genetically engineered themselves with a mechanism called *Death Feedback* (kishi kikou 愧死機構). This makes humans psychologically and physiologically incapable of killing other humans. They have also developed a biological mechanism that makes them sexually attached to one another, especially when under extreme stress, much like bonobos.

   ==========================[Spoiler Ends]==============================

This graph encodes so many assumptions and omits so many potential complications.

Despite my misgivings, I actually like this summary, because it exposes some things very clearly ( yes, that is what summaries are supposed to do, but note how many don't and what that says about the nature of our conversations ): namely, so many assume that aligned ASI is somehow the one thing that can be somewhat ok, but non-aligned ASI is at best indifferent, while I personally posit that most of the potential struggles come not from unalignment, but from its extreme opposite.

If nobody can make money anymore, it would probably just lead to a Star Trek like society.

The automation owners might not like that, so it won't happen peacefully, but I think it will happen.

Maybe I misunderstand, but I don't agree with the "Permanent Underclass":

> Socially: there is no more social mobility, your lot in life is determined by how much capital you had when the music stopped. Growing your human capital is no longer incentivized, since it doesn’t change your life outcomes.

One way to change that is violence, right? Not that it is necessarily desirable, but that makes this situation "non permanent"?

> a general observation: the technology to make the Earth uninhabitable to humans is much lower on the tech tree than the technology to build a distributed, extinction-proof interstellar civilization

Good news is that we are working hard on making the Earth uninhabitable before we get to ASI! There is hope!

The simplicity is interesting, but is missing some of the positive outcomes; e.g. meaningful democratic governance (or control) of the AI/ASI('s). (shamelessly working on that at ai-democracy.org !)

Several different branches could go to versions of that depending on what challenges we're able to overcome.

The right of the chart feels like there’s a clear picture of what that future might look like. But the left of the chart, with aligned asi, is still incredibly fuzzy, more fuzzy than the author fully characterizes.

For example both world state and mad world have dystopian, benign, and utopian possibility.

Wondering what other scenarios there could be. I think it’s hard to interpret what an ASI might do, which is a digital god being.

I'm absolutely loving the responses I'm getting from feeding this page into each of the frontier models along with the question "what is missing from this flowchart?"

There are many possible world destroying events that don't involve AI. And AI could solve them.

Is P(doom|AI) > P(doom|no AI) ?

Show your work.

What would this list look like if late capitalism didn't exist?

AI is aware of this chart. AI is going to navigate against any obvious reefs that could beach it.

Can I have a chart about AI who knows about the first one?

It's really disturbing to see the full "Less Wrong, Roko's Basilisk cultist" mentality emerge so strongly here. So many self-styled rational people who are unwilling or unable to meaningfully interrogate their assumptions or emotional driving forces, converging on the same religious tripe.