There’s also a whole subreddit from hell about this subgenre of fiction: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/
/r/rational isn't just for AI fiction, it also ~~claims~~ includes anything with decent verisimilitude, so stuff like The Hatchet and The Martian show up in its recommendation lists also! ~~letting it claim credit for better fiction than the AI stuff~~
Oh no, its much more than a single piece of fiction, it's like an entire mini genre. If you're curious...
A short story... where the humans are the AI! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message Its meant to suggest what could be done with arbitrary computational power and time. Which is Eliezer's only way of evaluating AI, by comparing it to the fictional version with infinite compute inside of his head. Expanded into a longer story here: https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/starwink.shtml
Another parable by Eliezer (the genie is blatantly an AI): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2 Fitting that his analogy for AI is a literal genie. This story also has some weird gender stuff, because why not!
One of the longer ones: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal A MLP MMORPG AI is engineered to be able to bootstrap to singularity. It manipulates everyone into uploading into it's take on My Little Pony! The author intended it as a singularity gone subtly wrong, but because they posted it to both a MLP fan-fiction site in addition to linking it to lesswrong, it got an audience that unironically liked the manipulative uploading scenario and prefers it to real life.
Gwern has taken a stab at it: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy We made fun of Eliezer warning about watching the training loss function, in this story the AI literally hacks it way out in the middle of training!
And another short story: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AyNHoTWWAJ5eb99ji/another-outer-alignment-failure-story
So yeah, it an entire genre at this point!
Short fiction of AGI takeover is a lesswrong tradition! And some longer fics too! Are you actually looking for specific examples and/or links? Lots of them are fun, in a sci-fi short form kind of way. The goofier ones and cringer ones are definitely sneerable.
Some nitpicks. some of which are serious are some of which are sneers...
consternating about the policy implications of Sam Altman’s speculative fan fiction
Hey, the fanfiction is actually Eliezer's (who in turn copied it from older scifi), Sam Altman just popularized it as a way of milking the doom for hype!
So, for starters, in order to fit something as powerful as ChatGPT onto ordinary hardware you could buy in a store, you would need to see at least three more orders of magnitude in the density of RAM chips—leaving completely aside for now the necessary vector compute.
Well actually, you can get something close to as powerful on a personal computer... because the massive size of ChatGPT and the like don't actually improve their performance that much (the most useful thing I think is the longer context window?).
I actually liked one of the lawfare AI articles recently (even though it did lean into a light fantasy scenario)... https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/tort-law-should-be-the-centerpiece-of-ai-governance . Their main idea is that corporations should be liable for near-misses. Like if it can be shown that the corporation nearly caused a much bigger disaster, they get fined in accordance with the bigger disaster. Of course, US courts routinely fail to properly penalize (either in terms of incentives of in terms of compensation) corporations for harms they actually cause, so this seems like a distant fantasy to me.
AI has no initiative. It doesn’t want anything
That’s next on the roadmap though, right? AI agents?
Well... if the way corporations have tried to use ChatGPT has taught me anything, its that they'll misapply AI in any and every way that looks like it might save or make a buck. So they'll slap an API to a AI it into a script to turn it into an "agent" despite that being entirely outside the use case of spewing words. It won't actually be agentic, but I bet it could cause a disaster all the same!
Careful, if you present the problem and solution that way, AI tech bros will try pasting a LLM and a Computer Algebra System (which already exist) together, invent a fancy buzzword for it, act like they invented something fundamentally new, and then devise some benchmarks that break typical LLMs but their Frankenstein kludge can ace, and then sell the hype (actual consumer applications are luckily not required in this cycle but they might try some anyway).
I think there is some promise to the idea of an architecture similar to a LLM with components able to handle math like a CAS. It won't fix a lot of LLM issues but maybe some fundamental issues (like ability to count or ability to hold an internal state) will improve. And (as opposed to an actually innovative architecture) simply pasting LLM output into CAS input and then the CAS output back into LLM input (which, let's be honest, is the first thing tech bros will try as it doesn't require much basic research improvement), will not help that much and will likely generate an entirely new breed of hilarious errors and bullshit (I like the term bullshit instead of hallucination, it captures the connotation errors are of a kind with the normal output).
It turns out there is a level of mask-off that makes EAs react with condemnation! It's somewhere past the point where the racist is comparing pronouns to genocide, but it exists!
Clearly you need to go up a layer of meta to see the parallels, you aren't a high enough decoupler!
/s just in case, because that's exactly how they would defend insane analogies.
If it was one racist dude at a conference I could accept it was a horrible oversight on the conference organizers part if they immediately apologized and assured it wouldn't happen again. But 8 racist dudes (or 12 if you count the more mask-on racists) is too many to be accidental or an oversight.
how is that not obvious
Well, probably some of them are deliberately racist HBD advocates, but are mask on enough to play dumb and hand wring and complain about free speech. Some of them have HBD sympathies but aren't quite outright advocates, so they don't condemn the inclusion of racists because of their own sympathies. Some of them are against HBD, but know being too direct and forceful and not framing everything in 8 layers of charity and good-faith assumptions isn't acceptable on the Lesswrong or EA forums so they don't just come out and say what they mean. And some of them actually buy all the rhetoric about charitably and free speech and act as useful idiots or a buffer to the others.
Yudkowsky’s original rule-set
Yeah the original no-politics rule on lesswrong baked in libertarian assumptions into the discourse (because no-politics means the default political assumptions of the major writers and audience are free to take over). From there is was just a matter of time until it ended up somewhere right wing.
“object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy
I hadn't linked the tendency to go meta to the cultishness or no-politics rule before, but I can see the connection now that you point it out. As you say, it prevents simply naming names and direct quotes, which seems to be a pretty good tactic for countering racists.
could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set
I'm not sure that rule-set made HBD hegemony inevitable, there were a lot of other factors that helped along the way! The IQ-fetishism made it ripe for HBDers. The edgy speculative futurism is also fertile ground for HBD infestation. And the initial audience and writings having a libertarian bend made the no-politics rule favor right wing ideology, an initial audience and writing set with a strong left wing bend might go in a different direction (not that a tankie internal movement would be good, but at least I don't know tankies to be HBD proponents).
just to be normal
Yeah, it seems really rare for a commenter to simply say racism is bad, you shouldn't invite racists to your events. Even the ones that seem to disagree with racism impulsively engage in hand wringing and apologize for being offended and carefully moderate their condemnation of racism and racists.
I think this is the first mention of the Brennan email on LW?
That is actually kind of weird... Did the lesswrong mods deliberately censor all discussion of the emails? (Out of a misplaced sense of respect for what gets the privilege of privacy? Or deliberately covering up the racism? Or the later disguised as the former?) They seem foundational to understanding Scott's true motives, it seem like the emails should have at least warranted a tangential mention. Trying to clear this up... but searching for Brennan doesn't help as an original fiction character has that name and searching for emails doesn't help as it gets the Bostrom emails.
It's not all the exact same! ~~Friendship is Optimal adds in pony sex~~