The arguments made by AI safety researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies are superficially appealing but fatally flawed, says Jacob Aron
For example, it doesn’t even get through the subhead before calling Yud an “AI researcher”.
All three of these movements [Bay Area rationalists, “AI safety” and Effective Altruists] attempt to derive their way of viewing the world from first principles, applying logic and evidence to determine the best ways of being.
They also seem to broadly agree with the ‘hey, humans are pretty shit at thinking too, you know’ line of LLM apologetics.
“LLMs and humans are both sentence-producing machines, but they were shaped by different processes to do different work,” say the pair – again, I’m in full agreement.
But judging from the rest of the review I can see how you kind of have to be at least somewhat rationalist-adjacent to have a chance of actually reading the thing to the end.
Methods is increasingly looking like Ulysses for the Internet age. You may or may not get anything worthwhile from trying to read it, but the scope and scale are such that it’s impressive it exists and also you will almost certainly not finish it, leaving the parts justifying it’s considerable reputation somewhere in the 40,000 we words you didn’t read.
i actually got hold of a review copy of this
(using the underhand scurvy weasel trick of asking for one)
that was two weeks ago and i still haven’t opened it lol
better get to that, sigh
this review has a number of issues (he liked HPMOR) but the key points are clear: bad argument, bad book, don’t bother
For example, it doesn’t even get through the subhead before calling Yud an “AI researcher”.
Sure, Jan.
Please, it’s “facts and logic”. Has this author never been on the internet?
They also seem to broadly agree with the ‘hey, humans are pretty shit at thinking too, you know’ line of LLM apologetics.
But judging from the rest of the review I can see how you kind of have to be at least somewhat rationalist-adjacent to have a chance of actually reading the thing to the end.
Born to create meaning
Forced to produce sentences
Kind of like saying that humans are car-driving machines because we drive cars.
It’s even worse than Methods? That should be surprising but isn’t.
it’s shorter!
Methods is increasingly looking like Ulysses for the Internet age. You may or may not get anything worthwhile from trying to read it, but the scope and scale are such that it’s impressive it exists and also you will almost certainly not finish it, leaving the parts justifying it’s considerable reputation somewhere in the 40,000 we words you didn’t read.
At least with Ulysses, there’s a brothel chapter.