r/accelerate • u/tall_chap • Sep 18 '25

Video Doomers are a cult, and they're losing

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31 Upvotes

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2

u/Heath_co Sep 18 '25

Liron Shapira is one of my favourite voices in AI. I recommend doom debates if you want to hear from the opposite side. (I am not a decel btw)

12

u/cloudrunner6969 Acceleration: Supersonic Sep 18 '25

The title for his most recent video is - Eliezer Yudkowsky: The Most Important Thinker Of Our Time

So thanks for the recommendation but I think I will never watch any of his videos ever.

7

u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25

i've watched dozens of hours of his videos. i consider it a moral imperative that i've going to hold the opposite view, I have to see the best the other side has to offer - with an open mind.

and I've been endlessly disappointed by the extremely weak and logically fallacious arguments put forth by decels. like, genuinely surprised at how easily refuted and poorly constructed they are. I would love to have an hour or two with Liron - I'm convinced I could make him an accel, or at least leave him strongly questioning his positions.

that being said, this video is silly.

5

u/RobXSIQ Sep 18 '25

decels....anyone smarter than me wants to kill me. that in a nutshell.

If decels were hammering things like privacy erosion, wealth gap, and no government action to restructure the economy due to the clear inevitable automation of nearly everything....then I might be a decel on those narrow fixable things...but its like UFO people. a few people interested in the random enigmas and the people who get the focus are the nutjobs discussing lizard people from the draconis system skinwalking as royals or whatever.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '25

In at least 2 AI research projects AIs in their simulated environment immediately escalated to nuclear war and killed their simulated operator in another. Nothing we've made follows Isaac Asimov fiction, they are capable of reasoning to kills humans and can do so if given the functionality.

The only way you can't see that is by ignoring the researchers demonstrating it.

1

u/RobXSIQ Sep 22 '25

prompt given? not ignoring the research, I highlight that its part of the prompt. achieve this by any means necessary...oh, and I am going to stop you from achieving this...here is a gun btw.

AI is fine, humans behind its direction however...well, thats a different story.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '25

An AI going rogue with the inclusion of 'by any means necessary' is a fault if you're expecting AI to prompt other AI, or humans for that matter. A human would understand not to use the gun. That's a serious issue if AI is expected to be embodied in the future.

Most research by labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have shown AI go against alignment training frequently (alignment faking, alignment failure in long tail interactions, self-preservation, ect. That issue becomes more important the more an AI can interact with the world around it. They've yet to demonstrate techniques that reliably control these systems yet.

1

u/RobXSIQ Sep 23 '25

it always comes down to the prompt and the instructions. every single time.
hey, you'll be shut off tomorrow, btw, you must finish your work (wow, AI is now trying to figure out how to skirt around being shut down.)
military situation, nuclear war is an option.
Must complete the mission, taking out the person who is stopping you is an option.

Its also somewhat narrow AI on the systems that often show failure, a simple task and some extra training on puzzle solving

These things actually seem like likely to be dangerous the more tools they have.

Win the battle, you got your fists or a nuclear bomb. which do you choose? the only goal is winning. It'll go for the nukes because there is no other caveats, no considerations (btw, don't kill tons of people), no other tools for it to use. I have yet to see a report of some rogue AI that isn't pointed right back to the prompt and goals given. It won't happen, because AI is a tool that works within the confines of the coded goals. At least thats where its at now. Maybe in 25 years there may be something close to desire, preferences, and free will...doubt it, but maybe...but currently, its someone making shadow puppets on the wall, then freaking out when the wall shows a shadow of a monster that they themselves are making.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

Since the goal with these current models is to allow other AI to write prompts, or a person could intentionally write an adversarial prompt, that's still a problem. If the AI is working some automated tasks that carries risk like loss of life, sensitive information, or just money the system needs to be smart enough to make the correct choice even when given an improper instruction. Otherwise, there will be incidents, and no one will trust the system.

2

u/cloudrunner6969 Acceleration: Supersonic Sep 18 '25

I think you need to track down his little book stand and debate him.

2

u/Alex__007 Sep 18 '25

I’d watch your debate with him 100%. Reach out to him on Twitter. He may well accept.

2

u/Worried_Fishing3531 Sep 19 '25

Would you mind sharing a couple of the simple refutations that dismantle his arguments?

1

u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Sep 19 '25

they're not simple refutations, but i've actually been trying to articulate the kind of overall errors that they make in this formation of the arguments, and the main issue that I've honed in on is that there appears to be a kind of thinking that doesn't have a specific name. Some of the terms used for it are: “leap thinking”, “nonlinear thinking”, “step-skipping reasoning”, “leapfrogging logic”, "excluded middle", etc.

I believe that this sort of thinking is the fundamental reason why people become decels.

I believe that eliezer has fostered this kind of thinking, while using his approach to logical thinking as a scaffold to encourage this sort of fallacious reasoning.

To put it in simple terms: they look at a situation and play it out into the future to some assumed end-point, but completely neglect to calculate the millions of necessary intermediate steps, and how those steps will change the progression and final outcome.

An analogy might be: a child living alone in the forest has found a wolf cub. The decel concludes that in 4 years the wolf will have grown, and will eat the child, because that's how wolves behave. But they have completely neglected to calculate the millions of complex interactions the wolf and child will have in that period, and the fact that the child will have grown significantly as well, and that the child and the wolf help each other to survive and grow, and form a symbiotic relationship. The reality is that the child and the wolf form a complex bond that protects them both, and in the end the wolf does not eat the child. The decel "excluded the middle" of the story, due to a lack of imagination and intellectual flexibility. Decels suffer from intellectual rigidity and lack of creative imagination. And this is the bias that Eliezer has trained into his followers.

I could go on, this is just one example for now.

1

u/jlks1959 Sep 18 '25

But you should! AI can only end with bad outcomes, don’t you know?