Alignment is EASY and Roko's Basilisk is GOOD?!

Roko Mijic has been an active member of the LessWrong and AI safety community since 2008. He’s best known for “Roko’s Basilisk”, a thought experiment he posted on LessWrong that made Eliezer Yudkowsky freak out, and years later became the topic that helped Elon Musk get interested in Grimes. His view on AI doom is that:* AI alignment is an easy problem* But the chaos and fighting from building superintelligence poses a high near-term existential risk* But humanity’s course without AI has an even higher near-term existential risk While my own view is very different, I’m interested to learn more about Roko’s views and nail down our cruxes of disagreement. 00:00 Introducing Roko 03:33 Realizing that AI is the only thing that matters 06:51 Cyc: AI with “common sense” 15:15 Is alignment easy? 21:19 What’s Your P(Doom)™ 25:14 Why civilization is doomed anyway 37:07 Roko’s AI nightmare scenario 47:00 AI risk mitigation 52:07 Market Incentives and AI Safety 57:13 Are RL and GANs good enough for superalignment? 01:00:54 If humans learned to be honest, why can’t AIs? 01:10:29 Is our test environment sufficiently similar to production? 01:23:56 AGI Timelines 01:26:35 Headroom above human intelligence 01:42:22 Roko’s Basilisk 01:54:01 Post-Debate Monologue Show Notes Roko’s Twitter: https://x.com/RokoMijic Explanation of Roko’s Basilisk on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/rokos-basilisk Watch the Lethal Intelligence Guide, the ultimate introduction to AI x-risk! https://www.youtube.com/@lethal-intelligence PauseAI, the volunteer organization I’m part of: https://pauseai.info Join the PauseAI Discord — https://discord.gg/2XXWXvErfA — and say hi to me in the #doom-debates-podcast channel! Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at https://doomdebates.com and to https://youtube.com/@DoomDebates Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe