In a $30 million mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a gaggle of AI researchers, philosophers, and technologists gathered to debate the top of humanity.
The Sunday afternoon symposium, referred to as “Worthy Successor,” revolved round a provocative concept from entrepreneur Daniel Faggella: The “ethical goal” of superior AI needs to be to create a type of intelligence so highly effective and sensible that “you’ll gladly desire that it (not humanity) decide the long run path of life itself.”
Faggella made the theme clear in his invitation. “This occasion may be very a lot targeted on posthuman transition,” he wrote to me by way of X DMs. “Not on AGI that eternally serves as a device for humanity.”
A celebration full of futuristic fantasies, the place attendees talk about the top of humanity as a logistics downside fairly than a metaphorical one, may very well be described as area of interest. If you happen to reside in San Francisco and work in AI, then it is a typical Sunday.
About 100 visitors nursed nonalcoholic cocktails and nibbled on cheese plates close to floor-to-ceiling home windows going through the Pacific ocean earlier than gathering to listen to three talks on the way forward for intelligence. One attendee sported a shirt that mentioned “Kurzweil was proper,” seemingly a reference to Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicted machines will surpass human intelligence within the coming years. One other wore a shirt that mentioned “does this assist us get to secure AGI?” accompanied by a considering face emoji.
Faggella informed WIRED that he threw this occasion as a result of “the massive labs, the those that know that AGI is prone to finish humanity, do not discuss it as a result of the incentives do not allow it” and referenced early feedback from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, who “have been all fairly frank about the opportunity of AGI killing us all.” Now that the incentives are to compete, he says, “they’re all racing full bore to construct it.” (To be truthful, Musk nonetheless talks concerning the dangers related to superior AI, although this hasn’t stopped him from racing forward).
On LinkedIn, Faggella boasted a star-studded visitor checklist, with AI founders, researchers from all the highest Western AI labs, and “many of the vital philosophical thinkers on AGI.”
The primary speaker, Ginevera Davis, a author based mostly in New York, warned that human values may be unimaginable to translate to AI. Machines could by no means perceive what it’s prefer to be acutely aware, she mentioned, and attempting to hard-code human preferences into future methods could also be shortsighted. As a substitute, she proposed a lofty-sounding concept referred to as “cosmic alignment”—constructing AI that may hunt down deeper, extra common values we haven’t but found. Her slides typically confirmed a seemingly AI-generated picture of a techno-utopia, with a gaggle of people gathered on a grass knoll overlooking a futuristic metropolis within the distance.
Critics of machine consciousness will say that giant language fashions are merely stochastic parrots—a metaphor coined by a gaggle of researchers, a few of whom labored at Google, who wrote in a well-known paper that LLMs don’t truly perceive language and are solely probabilistic machines. However that debate wasn’t a part of the symposium, the place audio system took as a given the concept that superintelligence is coming, and quick.
