Rich Sutton
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2023–2025
17:52 · 13K views · Sep 9, 2023
A short pre-recorded talk by Rich Sutton for the World AI Conference in Shanghai arguing that succession from humanity to AI is inevitable. He lays out his view of that transition.
Cited critically, as evidence of the unsettling perspective of a prominent AI researcher who seems to accept humanity being replaced.
4 comments from Hacker News
Clearly Rich Sutton is a giant in AI for his contributions in RL, but his recent brief talk "AI Succession" ( this video ) made me worry a bit about the sort of perspective he has on what the "good" outcome here looks like. I say this as someone who is generally optimistic about the promise of AGI. I have no love for the machines as a "species", and by Rich's definition here, yeah, I am "specist" in favor of humans. I think we should use technology for our own benefit, and that it's not inevitable that machines "replace" us. I also think his framing of the counterarguments is not charitable. The serious AI-risk arguments do not argue that a super-intelligent AI will necessarily be evil. They only argue that its motivations will be unaligned with ours, that it will be more competent in achieving goals than us, and that this will be bad for humans as a side effect. I think a good comparison is humans building a highway that incidentally crushes an ant colony. They didn't set out on an evil mission to destroy ants because they hate them, it just happened as a side effect of something the humans wanted. No evil required.
He is not really convinced you can align an AI that is intelligent past some threshold with aims of a single entity. His risk calculations derive primarily from the AI itself, not weaponization of AI by others. Rich Sutton seems to agree with this take and embraces our extinction: this video
Richard Sutton has done fascinating RL research in the past. Lately, though, he has been advocating for ending humanity, which is a bit more chilling[1]. [1]: this video
Good time to remind everyone that Sutton is a human successionist and doesn't care if humans all die. He is not to be trusted nor celebrated: this video