Friday, April 21, 2023

Is AI Doom as an attempt to hijack reality?

For some reason I can’t stop thinking about the phenomenon of belief in AI Doom. It’s not that I fear it, not at all. While AI certainly presents challenges, even independently of its misuse by bad actors (individuals, corporations, governments, gangs), I see no reason to believe that Rogue AIs are going to paperclip us, disassemble us with nanobots, or, for that matters use us as a source of energy (as in The Matrix). It is utterly implausible.

What stumps me is why so many otherwise intelligent people have bought into it.

At the moment I’m thinking of it as a desperate attempt to “freeze” reality. It gives you a closed world in which to think. This BIG BAD THING of the future is going to destroy us. So, it is our responsibility to plan against that thing. Nothing else matters. The world is closed. Robin Hanson has argued Most AI Fear Is Future Fear. Think of this as a variation on that argument.

Two further thoughts: 1) When I was an undergraduate I read a fair amount of primate ethology. One thing I read was that when an adult baboon wanted to keep a young one from wandering away from the troop, they’d go up to it and give it a sharp blow. The youngster would then move to and cling to them as a source of safety. Think of the assertion “WE’RE DOOMED” as the equivalent of that sharp blow. We recoil in fear and move toward the people who are saying that and so come under the spell of their worldview.

2) After Donald Trump was inaugurated he insisted the crowd was the largest ever, even in the face of photographic evidence to the contrary. He was, in effect, making the point that he gets to determine the nature of reality, not mere “facts.” And the willingness of his minions to promulgate this view was a test of their loyalty and so was a way to show their fealty to them. AI Doom strikes me as a similar attempt to hijack reality, though in this case the Doomers have had to hijack themselves before they can attempt to hijack the rest of us.

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