Rob Bensinger
Article
Rob Bensinger is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 01, 2022 and October 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Several AI political compasses going around, I was happiest with Rob Bensinger’s”; “I agree with him, and disagree with Rob Bensinger, about how bad this might be”. It most often appears alongside DeepMind, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Holly Elmore.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 01, 2022
- Last seen: October 05, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- DeepMind (2 shared issues)
-
- Eliezer Yudkowsky (2 shared issues)
-
- Holly Elmore (2 shared issues)
-
- Less Wrong (2 shared issues)
-
- @a_centrism (1 shared issues)
-
- @amplituhedron (1 shared issues)
-
- AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse (1 shared issues)
-
- AI Pause Will Likely Backfire (1 shared issues)
-
- AI Policy Institute (1 shared issues)
-
- Aim For Conditional AI Pauses (1 shared issues)
-
- AISafetySupport.com (1 shared issues)
-
- AnonResearcherAtMajorAILab (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
26: Several AI political compasses going around, I was happiest with Rob Bensinger’s (version below slightly edited by Michael Trazzi):
Inline links: Rob Bensinger’s
HARDWARE PROGRESS. Also the laptops keep getting better, because of Moore’s Law. Regulators can plausibly control the flow of supercomputers, at least domestically. But eventually technology will advance to the point where you can train an AI on anything. Then you either have to ban all computing, restrict it at gradually more extreme levels (1990 MS-DOS machines! No, punch cards!) or accept that AI is going to happen. Still, you can imagine this buying us a few decades. Rob Bensinger defended this view in Comments On Manheim’s “What’s In A Pause?”, and it’s the backdrop to Holly Elmore’s Case For AI Advocacy To The Public2. No Pause: Or we could not do any of that. If we think alignment research is going well, and that a pause would mess it up, or cause a compute overhang leading to un-research-able fast takeoff, or cede the lead to China, maybe we should stick with the current rate of progress. Nora Belrose made this argument in AI Pause Will Likely Backfire. Specifically: [A pause] would have several predictable negative effects: Illegal AI labs develop inside pause countries, remotely using training hardware outsourced to non-pause countries to evade detection. Illegal labs would presumably put much less emphasis on safety than legal ones.
Inline links: Comments On Manheim’s “What’s In A Pause?”, Case For AI Advocacy To The Public, 2, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire
My biggest surprise was how misleading the terms being used were, and think that many opponents were opposed to something different than what supporters were interested in suggesting. Even some supporters Second, I was very surprised to find opposition to the claim that AI might not be safe, and could pose serious future risks, largely because the systems would be aligned by default - i.e. without any enforced mechanisms for safety. I also found out that there was a non-trivial group that wants to roll back AI progress to before GPT-4 for safety reasons, as opposed to job displacement and copyright reasons. I was convinced by Gerald Monroe that getting a full moratorium was harder than I have previously argued based on an analogy to nuclear weapons. (I was not convinced that it “isn't going to happen without a series of extremely improbable events happening simultaneously” - largely because I think that countries will be motivated to preserve the status quo.) I am mostly convinced by Matthew Barnett’s claim that advanced AI could be delayed by a decade, if restrictions are put in place - I was less optimistic, or what he would claim is pessimistic. As explained above, I was very much not convinced that a policy which was agreed to be irrelevant would remain in place indefinitely. I also didn’t think that there’s any reason to expect a naive pause for a fixed period, but he convinced me that this is more plausible than I had previously thought - and I agree with him, and disagree with Rob Bensinger, about how bad this might be. Lastly, I have been convinced by Nora that the vast majority of the differences in positions is predictive, rather than about values. Those optimistic about alignment are against pausing, and in most cases, I think those pessimistic about alignment are open to evidence that specific systems are safe. This is greatly heartening, because I think that over time, we’ll continue to see evidence in one direction or another about what is likely, and if we can stay in a scout-mindset, we will (eventually) agree on the path forward.