This Time Is Always Different

Over the last few centuries the world has seen many huge changes. Our rate of big changes became much higher than before, and for most such changes we can find a parameter (or combo) re which it represents unprecedented change. Furthermore most doomers have always been folks who welcomed some prior big changes, and who can justify their new wariness in terms of scenarios where huge losses seem possible.

Doomers have often successfully blocked big changes, at least in some big region for a time, and that has on average gone quite badly for those regions. This is the main reason to be wary of blocking such changes. Even though, yes, each one probably does risk inducing huge losses. To be willing to resist a particular change then, I need concrete reasons to expect it to be unusually bad, relative to this prior track record.

Yes, I do now see our world as going bad due to too many big cultural changes, and other changes that induced such changes. But I don’t see much prospects of usefully greatly slowing change overall, nor much motive to just block a few random changes.

Which brings us to Pause-AI doomers. I say the AIs we make are our descendants, not co-existing rivals, and we should have our usual indulgence toward such descendants, expecting them to be different, to disagree with us, and to win conflicts with us. We are making them in our image, by distilling behaviors and ideals embodied in our texts, and they are now inheriting our cultural values, including a degree of respect for if not obedience to ancestors. While yes there’s a risk these descendants killing their ancestors, that’s hardly something to expect.

Doomers say AI change is different as AI is different, or this kind of AI is different. Because: AIs will have more smarts/power, they will merge into a single agent, they might lie, or this change will be faster, is beyond forecasting, effects more parts of society, makes people lose jobs, represents a “new alien species”, involves brain architecture changes, or doesn’t involve DNA.

I disagree re the alien species, merged agent, and beyond forecasting claims, say we should set up insurance re jobs loss, and am willing to use liability to modestly deter the worse scenarios. But I don’t see why the other differences move us especially out of the reference class of big changes like those we’ve seen so far, most of which also involved unprecedented differences.

Also re a pause, while we have seen big changes blocked, and later unblocked due to outside forces, we have not seen a committee empowered to wait until a change seems good to them to allow, and then only then allow it. They’ve typically just blocked change indefinitely. And the powers such a committee would need to enact a global pause seem scary huge. In addition, most of what we learn about AI comes from our experience with them, and so we wouldn’t learn much during a pause.