Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Out of responsibility to the future humans we could carry with higher carrying capacity by scaling up civilization. Out of responsibility to those humans, I think we have to make the greater, grander future happen.
I think, like I said, the market will exhibit caution. Every organism, company, consumer is acting out of self-interest and they won't assign capital to things that have negative utility to them.
Well, that's why we need freedom of information, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought in order to converge, be able to converge on the subspace of technologies that have positive utility for us all.
I'm not a fan of that calculation. I think people just throw numbers out there. It's a very sloppy calculation, right? To calculate a probability, let's say you model the world as some sort of Markov process, if you have enough variables or hidden Markov process. You need to do a stochastic path integral through the space of all possible futures, not just...
the futures that your brain naturally steers towards, right? I think that the estimators of PDU are biased because of our biology, right? We've evolved to... have biased sampling towards negative futures that are scary because that was an evolutionary optimum, right?
And so, people that are of, let's say, higher neuroticism will just think of negative futures where everything goes wrong all day every day and claim that they're doing unbiased sampling. And in a sense, like, they're not normalizing for the space of all possibilities and the space of all possibilities is like super exponentially large. And it's very hard to have this estimate.
And in general, I don't think that we can predict the future with that much granularity because of chaos, right? If you have a complex system, you have some uncertainty and a couple of variables. If you let time evolve, You have this concept of a Lyapunov exponent, right? A bit of fuzz becomes a lot of fuzz in our estimate, exponentially so over time.
And I think we need to show some humility that we can't actually predict the future. All we know, the only prior we have is the laws of physics. And that's what we're arguing for. The laws of physics say the system will want to grow. And subsystems that are optimized for growth and replication are more likely in the future.
And so we should aim to maximize our current mutual information with the future. And the path towards that is for us to accelerate rather than decelerate. So I don't have a PDoom because I think that similar to... The quantum supremacy experiment at Google, I was in the room when they were running the simulations for that.
That was an example of a quantum chaotic system where you cannot even estimate probabilities of certain outcomes with even the biggest supercomputer in the world. And so that's an example of chaos. And I think the system is far too chaotic for anybody to have an accurate estimate of the likelihood of certain futures.
If they were that good, I think they would be very rich trading on the stock market.
I think to me, one of the biggest existential risks would be the concentration of the power of AI in the hands of the very few, especially if it's a mix between the companies that control the flow of information and the government. Because that could...
set things up for a sort of dystopian future where only a very few and an oligopoly in the government have AI and they could even convince the public that AI never existed. And that opens up sort of these scenarios for authoritarian centralized control, which to me is the darkest timeline. And the reality is that we have
We have a prior, we have a data-driven prior of these things happening, right? When you give too much power, when you centralize power too much, humans do horrible things, right? And to me, that has a much higher likelihood in my Bayesian inference than sci-fi-based priors, right? Like my prior came from the Terminator movie, right?
And so when I talk to these AI doomers, I just ask them to trace a path through this Markov chain of events that would lead to our doom, right? And to actually give me a good probability for each transition. And very often... there's a unphysical or highly unlikely transition in that chain, right?
But of course, we're wired to fear things and we're wired to respond to danger and we're wired to deem the unknown to be dangerous because that's a good heuristic for survival, right? But there's much more to lose out of fear, right? We have so much to lose, so much upside to lose by preemptively stopping the positive futures from happening out of fear.
And so I think that we shouldn't give in to fear. Fear is the mind killer. I think it's also the civilization killer.
I do think that right now there's a bias towards over centralization of AI because of compute density and centralization of data and how we're training models. I think over time, we're going to run out of data to scrape over the internet.
And I think that, well, actually, I'm working on increasing the compute density so that compute can be everywhere and acquire information and test hypotheses in the environment in a distributed way.
I think that fundamentally centralized cybernetic control, so having one intelligence that is massive, that fuses many sensors and is trying to perceive the world accurately, predict it accurately, predict many, many variables and control it, enact its will upon the world, I think that's just never possible. been the optimum, right?
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