Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 AI Takeaways, published by Zvi on November 1, 2023 on LessWrong.

Given Joe Biden seems to have become more worried about AI risk after having seen the movie, it seems worth putting my observations about it into its own post.

This is what I wrote back then

, except for the introduction and final note.

We now must modify the paragraph about whether to see this movie. Given its new historical importance, combined with its action scenes being pretty good, if you have not yet seen it you should now probably see this movie. And of course it now deserves a much higher rating than 70.

There are of course things such as 'it is super cool to jump from a motorcycle into a dive onto a moving train' but also there are actual things to ponder here.

Spoiler-Free Review

There may never be a more fitting title than Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Each of these four words is doing important work. And it is very much a Part 1.

There are two clear cases against seeing this movie.

This is a two hour and forty five minute series of action set pieces whose title ends in part one. That is too long. The sequences are mostly very good and a few are great, but at some point it is enough already. They could have simply had fewer and shorter set pieces that contained all the best ideas and trimmed 30-45 minutes - everyone should pretty much agree on a rank order here.

This is not how this works. This is not how any of this works. I mean, some of it is sometimes how some of it works, including what ideally should be some nasty wake-up calls or reality checks, and some of it has already been established as how the MI-movie-verse works, but wow is a lot of it brand new complete nonsense, not all of it even related to the technology or gadgets. Which is also a hint about how, on another level, any of this works. That's part of the price of admission.

Thus, you should see this movie if and only if the idea of watching a series of action scenes sounds like a decent time, as they will come in a fun package and with a side of actual insight into real future questions if you are paying attention to that and able to look past the nonsense.

If that's not your cup of tea, then you won't be missing much.

MI has an 81 on Metacritic. It's good, but it's more like 70 good.

No One Noticed or Cared That The Alignment Plan Was Obvious Nonsense

Most real world alignment plans cannot possibly work. There still are levels. The idea that, when faced with a recursively self-improving intelligence that learns, rewrites its own code and has taken over the internet, you can either kill or control The Entity by using an early version of its code stored in a submarine but otherwise nothing can be done?

I point this out for two reasons.

First, it is indeed the common pattern. People flat out do not think about whether scenarios make sense or plans would work, or how they would work. No one calls them out on it. Hopefully a clear example of obvious nonsense illustrates this.

Second, they have the opportunity in Part 2 to do the funniest thing possible, and I really, really hope they do. Which is to have the whole McGuffin not work. At all. Someone gets hold of the old code, tries to use it to control the AI. It flat out doesn't work. Everyone dies. End of franchise.

Presumably they would then instead invent a way Hunt saves the day anyway, that also makes no sense, but even then it would at least be something.

Then there is the Even Worse Alignment Plan, where in quite the glorious scene someone claims to be the only one who has the means to control or kill The Entity and proposes a partnership, upon which The Entity, of course, kills him on the spot, because wow you are an idiot. I presume your plan is not quite so stupid as this, but consider the possibility that it mostly is no...