Brendan McCord discusses the massive scale of global capital expenditure required for artificial intelligence computing infrastructure.
Opinion
McCord: Treating AI progress as ultimate end risks abandoning human defense
“To say that that is the ultimate end of human life, that that's what we move towards, gives you these kind of sinister conclusions, which is like, we should pass the baton to this higher, better intelligence if we can. You know, in other words, like. There's n…”
Insight
McCord: Complex systems adapt best under simple property and liability rules
“Actually, the best way in complex systems is to have
A very simple uniform set of rules like property rights or contract law or tort liability.
And these things are much better at adapting than trying to come up with a patchwork of systems that just lead to in…”
Assertion Supported
McCord: 4,000 Google Employees Protested Project Maven Military AI Work
“After I left, after I rolled off the project, we had deployed it in Afghanistan, all that, 4000 people came together and they protested Google's involvement.”
Insight
McCord: Outsourcing moral deliberation leads ordinary people to commit atrocities
“Normal people, people who don't have great evil you know, genetically or pre, or, you know, they weren't engaging in active malice. Became concentration camp guards. Because they outsourced gradually, you know, bit by bit, pieces of their moral deliberation.”
Insight
McCord: Human biological passivity makes AI cognitive offloading uniquely dangerous
“Human brain works on glucose. There's only so much glucose to go around. We're biologically wired to be passive. So AI presents this very interesting, sinister. It's very good in the sense that it can offload plausibly everything, but it's bad in the sense tha…”
Opinion
McCord: EA, Rationalism, and Longtermism Dominate the AI Practitioner Community
“That's the most common dominant philosophy in the practitioner community, and it's three philosophies in a trench coat, but they're all very entangled. One is effective altruism, One is rationalism, one is long-termism.”