AI Tug-Of-War: Utopia or Catastrophe?
No one can give you certainity.
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Now to today’s piece 🤝
Within the past week, the firing of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has made global headlines & lit the Internet afire.
Some argued the grave mistake OpenAI made with firing the CEO of one of the world’s fastest growing AI startups. Others pointed to potentially suspicious exiting circumstances of Sam Altman from YC & the firing as proof of someone who simply is incapable of handling the potentially dangerous outcomes of AI. Others called precaution as perhaps the OpenAI board had just cause. Some, like Ben Thompson, pointed out structural inadequacies in OpenAI that forewarned these events happening.
Then the OpenAI board pivoted to hiring former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and Sam & Greg joined Microsoft as top AI researchers. OpenAI employees, livid at the lack of communication & opacity from the board, signed a letter insisting they would resign & join Sam’s new venture should Sam not be reinstated and if the board did not resign.
Overwhelmed by the support Sam Altman received by OpenAI employees, investors, and the general public, OpenAI board agreed to resign.
Note what the OpenAI employee letter said: “We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position.”
At the core of it, this fight is about how OpenAI is shaping the future of AI; particularly the tug-of-war around AI safetyism vs. AI accelerationism.
The general argument goes something like this.
Many of these areas: driving, reading comprehension, writing, even our faces, were believed to be the exclusive domain of humanity.
Out of this phenomenal shift emerged the question:
What happens to humanity when artificial general intelligence is invented?
Once a AGI comes about, the Internet argues wholly one of two extremes will occur:
1. AGI will lift humanity into a utopia as it can better handle markets, allocate resources and solve the problems of disease, aging and conflict. We’ll live in a technological paradise, abundant with liberties and prosperity for all.
2. Humanity will be eradicated as the AGI will recognize the inefficient, silly ways in which humanity operates (including the fact that humanity may try to stop AGI). After all, if the intelligence difference between humans and ants are so large (and we don’t mind bulldozing some ant hills to build homes) what’s to stop AGI, a being/beings many orders of magnitude smarter than humans, from commiting horrible acts against humanity?
This is known as the Super Alignment problem, i.e. aligning the interests of a super intelligence with that of humanity, with many of the brightest minds working hard at it.
But one element in this tug-of-war that hasn’t changed is, well, humans.
Underneath all of the high-minded arguments that exist, we still operate in same fundamental ways that are hundreds of thousands of years old.
One such trait that humans have demonstrated time & time again, is making predictions.
From making predictions about tomorrow’s weather, to stock prices, to whose going to be with who, to who will win a sport’s match tomorrow, we love our predictions.
And how have we fared with our prediction capabilities?
Take the 1798 predictions of English economist Thomas Malthus who was commonly read by esteemed evolutionary biologists such as Charles Darwin.
“That population cannot increase without the means of subsistence is a proposition so evident that it needs no illustration.
That population does invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence, the history of every people that have ever existed will abundantly prove.
And that the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice, the ample portion of these too bitter ingredients in the cup of human life and the continuance of the physical causes that seem to have produced them bear too convincing a testimony.”
An Essay on the Principle of Population - Thomas Robert Malthus
Huh, seems credible, yeah that makes sens- uh what’s this?
How has world population growth changed over time? - Our World in Data
And this?
The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it - Our World in Data
Ruh-roh.
Despite being a esteemed scholar of his time, Malthus’s theories notoriously failed and would go on to fail to predict the Industrial Revolution & how global trade would shape food supplies.
But this shortsightedness was not limited to the ivory towers of academia in flag-down-the-horse-carriage days.
The 1968 book The Population Bomb written by Stanford Professor Paul Erhlich launched into the general consciousness the idea that the world’s population was exploding uncontrollably and that given the current prediction of food production, it would effectively bring an end of humanity thru mass starvation.
To emphasize the immediacy of the issue, the now-heavily disputed words: “While you are reading these words, four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children.” was printed on the cover.
The general public became obsessed with the overpopulation and that severe reduction in population growth was needed. Issues of increasing poverty, famine, genocide, and environmental degradation were pinned on population growth.1
In a panic, the world began accepting harsh efforts to reduce population growth. And as with such poorly thought of and implemented policies, the poor, the disabled, & the marginalized, suffered.
China’s One Child Policy led door-to-door initiatives in rural villages, with some local Chinese officials forcibly holding down women and sterilizing them by hand. Over the decades of the policy till it was removed in 2021, over 100 million Chinese women would be sterilized. Most notoriously, by permitting only one child per family, a preference for male heirs emerged, leading to femicide or abandonment of females in the horrific conditions of state-run orphanages.
India’s forced sterilization efforts, some of which required sterilization in order to access water, electricity, medical care and ration cards, contributed to more than 8 million men & women being sterilized by 1975 alone.
And what actually happened to the global food supply? The Green Revolution aka the Third Agricultural Revolution, happened.
Well before the population craze began, farmers started using higher yielding cereals such as dwarf wheat and chemical fertilizers to get more yield out of less land. To the farmers, it meant same labor = greater profits and as more farmers adopted these practices, global food productions surged & the horrifying projections of population starvation were moot.
While everyone was focused on the projected number of rising population numbers, no one focused on humanity’s ability to produce more food!
Real world harm came about because of this line of thinking. Women and men were subjected to grueling, unsanitary procedures that caused unnecessary pain. Unborn children forcibly aborted. Babies killed immediately after childbirth or abandoned to despicable conditions.
But it’s not only the areas of social policy and health, that poor predictions reign.
When John F. Kennedy stood on that football field in Rice University in 1962 and insisted the humanity would “choose to go to the Moon in this decade”, he simultaneously lit a spark in every person’s mind.
With the 1969 moon landing, and the decades that followed, people believed that the human race would become a massive space dwelling civilization.
Star Wars, Star Trek, Cosmos by Carl Sagan; the space fever was in full swing. An entire generation of children grew up believing they’d live on other planets, live alongside other intelligent species and traverse the stars.
Fast forward to 2023, we have not been to the moon in 51 years.
No one predicted, in 1969, that 54 years later, we would not be a multi-planetary species, much less have zero human presence on the moon.
Why?
Space exploration, beyond national pride, did not provide a major direct economic path forward; we were not generating revenue from each rocket launch nor paving the way for private enterprise to establish a more permanent, forward-thinking economic presence.
So when political will slowly declined then died, space became the destination for billion dollar bus-sized GPS satellites and the occasional NASA research mission; the dreams of millions of people to go to space were put on the backburner.
Malthus never predicted the Industrial Revolution. Deng Xiaoping didn’t bet on the explosion of food productivity. No one bet on the collapse of political will and lack of competitive private enterprise in space.2
This is because all human logic and know-how is fundamentally based on what we know and what we know we don’t know. While it can give us insight, it cannot give us certainity because there will always be some things that we don’t know that we don’t know.
They exist in our blind spots but have huge influence on what shapes our world. Therefore, humans suck at long term prediction.
Well, if we suck at predictions, why are people so vehemently backing one of the two major extremes: AGI utopia or AGI catastrophe?
There are some people who have sincerely evaluated the work who geniunely believe what they do. They’ve looked that the evidence and come to realization that AGI will a) unlock a world of abundance and freedom or b) lead to the demise of humanity.
They are operating from a place of sincerity and trying to convince others of their views.
But many people are operating from a place of uncertainity wanting certainity.
It’s simply evolutionarily true; for our ancestors, not being certain as to whether or not there’s a tiger behind a bush had some serious repercussions.
So, our brains hate nuance.
If you tell someone that there’s a 10% chance of AGI emerging in 10 years, they’ll typically look for evidence that outright corroborates that or outright denies it.
And what this hardens into is certainity. People then become certain that X will happen or Y will.
“It’s normal to want to rid yourself of the painful reality of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Someone who tells you there’s 60 percent chance of a recession happening doesn’t do much to ease that pain. They might be adding to it.
But someone who says, “There is going to be a recession this year” offers something to grab on to with both hands, something that feels like taking control of your future.”
Same As Ever - Morgan Housel
Therefore, accepting that there is some degree of uncertainity is vitally important; we are mostly operating in a fog.
And, while I’m no expert, it strikes me that history has had a tendency for wild predictions and that what generally emerges tends to be neither exceedingly great nor horrifingly bad.
But, hey, I can’t give you certainity.
No one can.
- Kiran
This obsession would influence culture and generate icons that still exist to this day such Marvel’s supervillain Thanos.(Ever wonder why Thanos’s goal in the Marvel Universe is to eradicate half of all life? Now you know.)
Hell, no one even knows what the stock market will do tomorrow even though we have trillions of data points on what’s going on in the world.
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
“I don’t think I’ll live on in history for very long after I die except for boring stuff like my tax records. And I’m fine with that. It’s not clear that living a historically noteworthy life is desirable in and of itself. But I do want a noteworthy life on my own terms.” - Matt Lakeman presents a great heuristic on living a great life.
“It wasn’t that I stopped thinking about suicide. I simply kicked the can further down the road—I’ll live whatever life I can muster and kill myself at 40, I decided… I’m seven-and-a-half years away from that deadline I set twenty years ago—and I still don’t know if I want to live, in the grand sense, in a long-term way... I thought so many things in life would help me feel otherwise—the pedigree that my parents and I had always wanted, an impressive job, great friends, a loving partner—but I am slowly coming to the realization that the only person who can help me feel otherwise is me. Myself. That 12-year-old me inside, who first asked the question Is life worth living? and no one answered.” - Cece’s telling of overindexing on academic achievement, her relationship to her parents & to herself is a read not worth missing.
"Unless you become the #1 person in your field, you will always have someone else ahead of you…Therefore, unless you are prepared to continually battle to be on top, you should accept now that you won’t be. I don’t say this to dissuade you from aiming higher, but to make you reconsider why you are aiming higher in the first place. Are you doing it because you enjoy it? Or do you have ulterior motives? Does your current behavior align with your long term goals? Or has your ego taken control of your choices?” - Nick Magguli dropping wisdom bombs out here on how what we pursue in life never gets easier.