FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
I suspect they might not be smart enough to do some of the most complicated tasks proficiently.
Again: I am absolutely not dogmatic about the following, just groping for description of my experience.
They seem smart enough to do almost anything, but only when actual crystalized smartness is arranged in a properly-aligned constellation around them such that the focal geometry works properly. As soon as the alignment is broken, they get real stupid real fast. From this I infer that they are not themselves intelligent; the constellation is where the intelligence is, they're only focusing it, or channeling it, or pumping it.
Actual intelligence would actively align itself, would internalize the constellation in a cohesive way. And the AI seems to do this, just to a very limited degree? Maybe, even probably, it'll do it better as the tech matures? Certainly I can imagine an AI actually built for the work I'm trying to do with it, which has in fact internalized these specific constellations to a degree indistinguishable from a human expert, and we just aren't there yet for 1900s-era tank cannon design simulations.
In any case, it's not that it's stupid; as you say, humans are stupid too. It's the way it's stupid, how stupidity spikes massively and unpredictably. The "channeling intelligence" model would seem to imply that this is going to be a chronic problem in the long term, but I'm just some dude bullshitting on the internet about my bottom-tier subscription shenanigans. I'm pretty excited to see how it goes.
But their inability then didn't mean they weren't intelligent, just that their intelligence was weaker.
Is a for loop intelligent, in any meaningful sense? are intelligence and automation synonyms, and it really is just a matter of scale? I would bet no, at least in terms of practical scale, but I'd readily admit that my position is largely held by inertia and that I'm standing to be corrected here. There's very plausibly going to come a point in the next year or two when the focal geometry auto-focuses in real-time and you can't find the seams any more, and the question becomes something you should probably just ask the machine itself and accept that the answer is the best you're going to get.
on to the more contentious part:
Lobotomies also work, it's just that they aren't really helpful.
This statement is fundamentally wrong. Lobotomies do something; they aren't a sugar pill. They absolutely do not work, as in do the thing their developers and promoters claimed they did to get them accepted as a valid medical treatment. The difference, I think, ought to be instructive in a context where I am pointing out that your claims vastly exceed the empirical evidence.
OK, so they oversold what could be done with crude brain surgeries.
And the field and the public at large overbought. And this pattern repeats itself everywhere throughout the history of psychology as a "science". You yourself are, I argue, overbuying the claim that "the brain is a computer". If the brain is a computer, it is a computer that we do not know how to do any computer-specific things with or to, and that is an observable fact.
But wireheading definitely works, there was that woman who rubbed her thumbs raw against the button. How is that not direct interaction with the brain?
We have heroin. how is heroin addiction not direct interaction with the brain? Show me how wireheading can be used to actually control people as one controls a machine, in any one of the millions and millions of ways that being able to control a specific person as one does a machine would be immediately and obviously useful. This is my understanding of your claim, and it is the claim I am disagreeing with. You said:
The brain is real, can be tested, it's composed of tiny transmitters and recievers and obeys mathematical principles, albeit with great complexity. The philosophers with dud theories can cope about it.
My understanding is that you are claiming the brain is a machine. I am asking you to show me a way that we can do machine shit with it. Smashing a machine with a baseball bat is not using it as a machine. Melting it into a brightly glowing puddle is not using it as a machine either. sitting it on a turntable and spinning it also is not using it as a machine. If the brain is a computer, show me code executing arbitrary operations, the way computers do. If the brain is a can opener, show me how you open a can of beans with it. And show me how you do these things against the will of the person currently occupying that brain, which is the obvious contrary hypothesis that is supposed to be refuted here.
But eventually something like that is going to be possible.
It might be. I'll believe it when I see it. Until I can see it, I'm going to point out that this is a faith-based claim.
Brain surgery is a real thing. This would just be an extension of brain surgery.
The mechanics of brain surgery are well understood in most cases, as they are an extension of the mechanics of regular surgery: stuff has been broken apart, you stitch it back together so it can heal. As noted above, this has not resulted in the development of mind surgery, despite a bunch of prominent scientists claiming it absolutely had, and then brain-damaging a bunch of people in a wildly irresponsible manner before common knowledge accumulated that they had lied.
Why are you so skeptical of this?
Because vast evil has been resulted from people being insufficiently skeptical of "scientific" "materialism" that was neither scientific nor materialist, and lobotomies are the very least of it. Similar claims about this specific subject have caused significant individual and collective harms over the course of the last century, because trusted authorities asserted them in a confident voice and sufficient skepticism could not be mustered to dissuade them. A huge portion of the culture war has been directly driven by these sorts of claims.
You are presenting this:
But eventually something like that is going to be possible.
...as a scientific, materialist claim. It is not scientific, and it is not materialist. That doesn't mean it is wrong, it means it can't actually be tested via the scientific method and the results observed. You think it ought to be true, that it is highly likely to be true, by inference from other scientific, materialist claims that have been verified, and that is well enough. But there not only is not solid, direct evidence that this is true, but there is solid evidence that it is not true: all the previous theories attempting to act productively on it that demonstrably failed when implemented, and the subsequent retreat into Determinism of the gaps.
Cheap, precise, non-invasive, long-lasting, permitted by the ethics board... That's the missing part, there's no actual impossibility.
I'll believe it when I see it. I used to be 100% on board with the idea that the brain was a computer and all that this would imply. But a big part of what made me on board with it was that I wanted to believe it was true, because I'd been sold all the shiny ideas and cool things we could do if it were true. Then I got the other half of the pitch, and my conclusion is two-fold: firstly, we do not actually have a solid basis to claim that the brain is a computer, and secondly, if the brain is in fact a computer, I very much hope I'm safely dead before they figure out mature brain-computer-science.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21hr ago
I'm aware of the general vibe you're pointing at, but I've honestly never come across a strong claim by someone I'd consider a serious scientist (i.e. someone who has made a meaningful contribution in some scientific field) that resembles anything akin to mind control or mind reading, that's more or less the domain of speculative fiction authors.
At least arguably Freud, depending on how much weight you're willing to give to his motte-and-bailey caveats.
At least arguably Dewey and many of his disciples in the blank-slate educators camp.
Marx, notably not a scientist, but a whole lot of scientists don't seem to have been able to tell.
What is commonly argued, and what I personally also find defensible given what we know about material reality, is that the human brain, which for the purposes of this argument is assumed to be equivalent to the mind in terms of functional behavior apparent to outside observers, is in principle a deterministic material thing and thus predictable just like any other material system is, again in principle.
I have zero argument with an axiom that the human mind is a materialistic machine, so long as it's recognized that this is, in fact, being used as an axiom, not as something that's been empirically proven. My objection is to the often-conflated claim that the brain has been empirically proven to be a machine. I object to this because the great majority of useful things that we can do to and with machines that make the label such a useful one, we can't actually do to or with the brain.
I'm hearing good things about Ozempic, though it's not as effective as it is with hunger.
I'm on Ozempic, and it's not exactly a silver bullet for hunger either. But in the case of both alcohol and Ozempic, we're still a long, long way from mechanistic interactions, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I was picturing more this sort of situation, but one must admit it's a phrase with endless possibilities for interpretation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
while scrolling the firehose view, I misread #2 as "This Toilet Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us", and must admit some disappointment now that I've corrected the misimpression.
It's not like you have to care, of course, and plenty of people on this board have made it clear that they don't. But being broadly pro-Trump was very common for younger Reds in Europe in 2023: Farage rallies etc. were full of Trump supporters (like me) and now you can barely find any.
What would you have us do? Your governments are no longer a threat to you, because a threat implies eventuality, and there is nothing eventual about the ruin they are inflicting on you. Your red analogues failed and were utterly suppressed, or in some cases their leadership openly betrayed them in a bid to secure Blue approval. Those governments are still an active threat to us, in that they have not yet suppressed us, but are actively working to do so. Ignoring that threat materially decreases our chances of survival. If we survive, we might be able to offer you more direct aid in the future, but if we fail as you have then there is no hope at all.
European/Western governments actively participate in the American political process, and they participate uniformly in support of Blues, and have done so for decades. Well, that's a two-way street as it turns out, and no amount of smoll bean pretense changes the logic.
And none of this is an argument that the way we're doing this is the best way possible, or even not a mistake; Trump is very far from an ideal tool for securing better policies, given his numerous evident failings. But what is the better option?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
You're familiar with the term "manipulation of procedural outcomes", I presume?
It’s not news that I believe the Cathedral is evil. And since it’s 2008, you’d expect evil to have not only a name, but a blog. And sure enough it does. Evil’s name is Timothy Burke, he is a professor of history (specializing in southern Africa) at Swarthmore, and his blog is Easily Distracted.
The great thing about Professor Burke is that he appears to have a conscience. Almost every post in his blog can be understood as a kind of rhetorical struggle to repress some inner pang of doubt. He is the Good German par excellence. When people of this mindset found themselves in the Third Reich, they were “moderate Nazis.” In Czechoslovakia or Poland they “worked within the system.” Professor Burke is nowhere near being a dissident, but there is a dissident inside him. He doesn’t like it, not at all. He stabs it with his steely knives. He can check out any time. But he can never leave. His position is a high one, and not easy to get.
The entire blog is characterized—indeed it could serve as a type specimen for—the quality that Nabokov called poshlost. Simply an embarrassment of riches. I am saddened by the fact that, as a new parent, I cannot devour the whole thing. But as a case study, I have selected this. The whole post is a treat, but I am especially tickled by the line:
I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes.
“Manipulating procedural outcomes.” My entire post—maybe even my entire blog—reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by manipulating procedural outcomes. It’s perfect. It belongs on someone’s tomb.
Also they were caught systematically destroying evidence and sabotaging oversight, and they repeatedly lied to the public and the authorities about their actions, uniformly in ways that minimized or hid evidence that would indicate personal responsibility for the pandemic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Can you clarify what you mean by this? What qualifies as deterministic in your view?
At least weak versions of mind reading or mind control, essentially. Science as a social institution spent the first half of the twentieth century claiming not only that these were possible, but that it had practical methods for implementing them.
Are you aware of a reliable cure for alcoholism?
A guy used TNT back in the day, blew a hole straight through his head and that certainly affected his personality, he got all aggressive and dour.
Black powder, actually, and last time I read up on him, I recall a fair amount of evidence for replication crisis issues. That is, there's evidence the scientists studying him had an agenda, and shaped their studies and the reporting of those studies to fit that agenda, rather than impartially reporting facts. which actually feeds directly into:
Neuralink. Lobotomies.
Neither impinge on the objection I'm raising, though the actual history of Lobotomies is actually a really good example of the history I'm pointing to. Psychology and Psychiatry and the medical field generally repeatedly claimed they could deliver practical mind reading or mind control, gained massive sociopolitical power from these claims, and then failed to deliver them while gaslighting the public into a messy, ad-hoc combination of "we delivered them" and "we never promised to deliver them". Massive parts of history make a lot more sense if you understand this, because this particular scam was wildly impactful on the political history of the Modern era. If you want a bit of the flavor, read old Sci-Fi, it's absolutely riddled with the resulting tropes. If you dig into the political and institutional histories, you'll find the same thing, because the Sci-Fi was extrapolating from the understanding of science promulgated by the actual scientists. Lobotomies were established as a legitimate technique because the scientists claimed that psycho-surgery was a real thing they could do, and fell when it became unavoidably evident that those claims were categorically false.
We have a map of what the brain does, we've isolated what parts do language or other roles and can turn parts off and on. You underestimate what progress has been made in neuroscience:
I don't think I do. Mind Reading and Mind Control were the table stakes proposed by the Humanist contingent in the turn of the last century, and it does not appear to me that we are any closer to these now than we were then. If the brain is a computer, we are researching how to plug in different keyboards, monitors, mice and headphones, and at the bleeding edge we're figuring out how to bypass damaged USB ports by soldering wires directly to the board, while the modernist claim you seem to be repeating is that we can edit the source code. The distinction matters. In this too, I'm open to being proven wrong: maybe next year we'll actually have mind reading and mind control. But I observe that one of the worst and most common failures of the Scientific Materialist mindset is the propensity to assume things are empirically proven when they haven't. And again, mind reading and mind control is both what we should expect if the brain really is like a computer, and something science as an institution started claiming it could deliver something like a hundred years ago.
What is the distinction between channelling intelligence and possessing it?
I'm making mathematical models of tank guns. The AI is amazingly knowledgeable about physics, engineering, math generally, military history, and on and on. I say I want to figure out a general model for gun weight based on peak pressure generated by the propellent and the shell. It can do this! It calculates hoop-stress for steel, calculates the pressure curve...
...and then it explains to me that shortening a gun's barrel increases the peak pressure its shell generates. Only, that's not true. Hold the shell weight and propellent charge constant, and barrel length cannot increase peak pressure, only reduce it. I'm not particularly proficient in physics or mathematics or engineering, but even I know that. It's simple logic if you understand even the basics of what these words in combination are describing.
It "knows" a vast amount, and it presents its "knowledge" in what appears to be a very human way from the perspective of the user, but the knowledge is not integrated or manipulated in the way I would expect from a human. The gaps in knowledge and certainty appear in places I've never seen in humans, and working around those gaps involves a different process than I've ever used with humans. The AI doesn't actually understand anything about hoop stress or the physical properties of steel or the internal ballistics of tank cannons, or possibly anything at all. It's not an actor in its own right, the way we commonly think of them. It's a lens, some sort of high-dimensional refractor that concentrates diffuse, disparate elements into a specific focal point, but fundamentally dependent on the physical positioning of those elements and of the lens itself for the content of that focal point.
...And again, maybe this is me just using it wrong. If so, I'm very interested in how to use it better! I'm only a bit over a month into my career as a serious AI prompter, so I claim no deep insight into the actual frontier capabilities of all AI or even the models I'm using. I'm just describing what I'm personally seeing. Further, even this is fundamentally amazing! We've legitimately created a repeatable, mass-production terminal for coding in Grad Student! That by itself with no further improvement is probably the biggest technological breakthrough of the last century! But while it presents itself as a person, it pretty clearly isn't a person, and the illusion only holds even briefly at the focal point itself. sidestep, and it fuzzes out and breaks apart.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Of course, the easier way was cut-throat scheming within the harem and the court of eunuchs to put forward 'their' candidate for successor instead of the perceived favourite for crown prince.
Scheming Eunuchs, you say?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
None of that impinges on the mountain of evidence that the human mind cannot be manipulated deterministically, whereas our machines generally can be, nor on why this difference should be disregarded. You are claiming that the brain is essentially a computer, "albeit with great complexity", but in fact all the things that make a computer a computer cannot be found in any of the parts of a human brain we directly observe, and can only be supposed, evidence free, to be hiding in the "great complexity" part. This, after several decades of scientists claiming to be able to both locate and interact with them and uniformly failing.
AIs are extremely amazing, but from working with them myself it seems pretty clear that there's not actually anything resembling a mind in there, at least in the versions I've used the way I've used them. I think it's entirely possible that additional matrix multiplication might change that in the future, but right now, it's doesn't appear to me to be happening. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the bot appears to me to be channeling intelligence, not possessing it. It doesn't seem to me that the difference is subtle, though I am again open to being persuaded that my technique is bad or the models I'm using aren't the good ones.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
It turns out it's possible to speak English without actually being able to think. Some argue that we did not need the doped silicon to learn this, but here we are.
I would argue, based on my experience, that the AI I'm working with is channeling intelligence, not possessing it. You have to metaphorically dip it into the pool of intelligence and prime the pump to get flow. I'm entirely open to the idea that I'm bad at using it or that newer models are better (I'm mostly using opus and a bit of fable), but that's how I'd describe my experience.
Yes, it's factual. It's maddening that people don't know this sort of thing, given our society's purported obsession with searching for any visible sign, marker or dogwhistle of genocidal totalitarianism, provided it's not visible signs, markers or dogwhistles of the genocidal totalitarianism that's considered super-cool and popular with large portions of the tribe most obsessed with the search.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Things we make out of tiny transmitters and recievers which obey mathematical principles are in every case things we can manipulate deterministically to a high level of detail. Human minds are notable in the ways in which they depart from this paradigm. A whole lot of scientists have expended very large sums of money and time attempting to prove, in your words, "dud theories" to the contrary.
Meanwhile, when was the last time you've come across any such establishment that is as right-wing as this place is left-wing?
An example of a fairly small, low-cost-to-entry organization is an indie game studio. These can be so small, in fact, that they can be done as one-man-bands, but then can scale up from there. Why don't we see more right-wing indies?
Scott Braden Cawthon (born June 4, 1978) is an American video game developer, writer, and producer best known for creating Five Nights at Freddy's, a series of horror video games which expanded into a media franchise.
Five Nights At Freddie's is one of the most successful indie games of all time, and it earned him a ton of money and fame and a massive fanbase. Then it was revealed that Scott Cawthon was Red Tribe.
In June 2021, Cawthon became a trending topic on Twitter when his publicly available political donations were shared on the website. Except for one donation to then-Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard and another donation to former Indiana House Speaker John R. Gregg, also a Democrat, all of Cawthon's donations were to Republican politicians, including Mitch McConnell and U.S. President Donald Trump. He posted on Reddit to confirm his support for the Republican Party, describing himself as pro-life. He claimed that he had been doxxed and had received threats of violence and home invasion after his donations were publicized. Reactions on social media were mixed, with some people reacting negatively.[24] Days later, Cawthon announced his intention to step away from professional game development and appoint someone else to assume creative control of the franchise.
Strangely, harassment, death threats and literal home invasions of a popular celebrity did not draw support for that celebrity, nor condemnation of such tactics, nor broad discourse that online toxicity was a serious problem. The Dev did not receive wall-to-wall coverage portraying him as a saintly victim from a sympathetic press, who oddly failed to coordinate broad-spectrum condemnation for the internet trolls and other deplorables engaging in this horrifying behavior. The Dev was not invited to speak at the UN.
Scott Cawthon will not be making any more video games.
Any attempt to stand up something like the right-wing equivalent of the DSA or Antifa is immediately torn apart by infighting and ideological purity-spiraling.
"political infighting" and "ideological purity spiraling" is not what I have observed killing attempts to stand up right-wing equivalents to the DSA or Antifa. Selective prosecution seems like a much larger factor. This is your reminder that posting anonymous "It's okay to be white" posters on a college campus resulted in an actual investigation by the for-real FBI.
Meanwhile I walk out my door and find no shortage of Pride parades and anti-ICE protests, all seeming to go off like clockwork, with no subsequent chorus of left-wing influencers asserting that these events are "false flags" or whatever.
Also riots and the occasional, wildly celebrated political murder. Mustn't forget those.
We will be fired from our jobs and beaten in the streets if we do the right-wing equivalents of these things, and the police will look the other way for those inflicting the latter. This does not mean that right-wing political action is impossible, only much, much harder, with the concomitant increased likelihood that coordinated meanness outside the standard system of procedures will ultimately prove necessary. We'll get there, don't you worry.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I won't take mere decades as evidence of durability here, on historical clocks it should at least be 100 years to transcend the realm of suspected expedience.
Your argument is that Nationalism has a worse record for international cooperation than Progressivism/Blue/Globalist Ideology, correct? If so, asking for a century's record seems to me to define away the discussion. Communism as an official system didn't last a hundred years, so the China-Vietnam-Cambodia wars don't count, presumably the USSR violently suppressing Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia and making repeated attempts on Tito in Yugoslavia doesn't count, And Angola's civil war doesn't count. Likewise the numerous civil wars/purges/whatever-we-call-mass-killing-your-own-citizens. And as you note, Nationalism itself isn't actually much older, maybe 50 years more, and you've said the US and Britain don't count because they're the same country. I'll note that once we're past Napoleon, Britain and France seem to hang together fairly well; ending up on the same side in two world wars and the cold war ought to count for something. But overall, if you draw your standards of evidence in this way, it seems to me that I probably can't demonstrate a solid record of nationalism being good for cooperation, but likewise you can't draw a solid record of it being bad at it either. By your reckoning, it seems not enough time has passed to draw any conclusions at all.
I would argue a looser standard, and point out that we do actually have around two centuries of nationalism and around a century of Progressivism as large-scale reigning ideologies, and I would much, much prefer the nationalist experience across that time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I'd imagine the point is that it makes the AI x% more productive according to the standard benchmarks.
Fully agreed, though. I'm pretty far in the accelerationist camp and put very little stock in the idea of AI safety, but if we're going to entertain the idea of moving at something less than maximum speed, this seems like a real good place to coordinate the slowdowns.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Would European Red-analogues, if they were had their day in the limelight, even be natural allies to American Reds?
Yes, I think so. Mutual admiration, mutual support and mutual cooperation are completely possible, provided there's a foundation of shared values. I like England and Japan, I want them to continue and to prosper. We've been allies with England for well over a century at this point; we've been allies with Japan since the end of World War II. There's no reason in principle that we shouldn't continue to be close allies with these nations for centuries to come. I'm not sure where this argument that "nationalists can only have temporary allies of convenience" actually is supposed to come from. Numerous western countries engaged in both nationalism and durable alliances spanning decades or even centuries; numerous Communist countries fought wars with fraternal socialist allies even in the short span of formal Communism.
But if that is how you feel, I'd prefer America just separate.
If there were a cleaner way to do it, I'd be all for it. The situation is several different flavors of fucked due to multiple decades' worth of disastrous errors. Any possible plan has to account for the fact that Blues will get back in control and try to reverse any actions made, and staying inside the bounds they've dictated makes this a lot easier for them to do. Their plan for a decade now has been to play off Trump as an aberration, soon to be forgotten while their consensus resumes the reigns of power. This is wrong because Trump is the effect, not the cause. The fact is that, so long as the paradigm for cooperation Europe is planning for involves Blue-consensus dominance, we fundamentally are not reliable allies and probably aren't capable of being allies at all. Trump is the most effective way we currently have to send that message in a way that can't be ignored; maybe the democrats sweep the election this year and maybe they grab it all in 2028, but whether they do or not, Europe will have to remember that we elected Trump twice, and a large portion of us are willing to do worse yet.
Obviously, European leadership and the population at large aren't fully getting that message, probably for the same reason American Blues haven't gotten it, for the simple reason that it isn't a message they're particularly interested in hearing. So much the worse for us all. What doesn't change is that the world we were sleepwalking into prior to 2016 is not a world I or people like me are willing to accept, and we will do whatever is necessary to prevent the foreclosure of our future that such a world represents.
The conflict between American Reds and Blues continues to escalate, with no end in sight. Consensus European values are innately hostile to American Red Values and virtually indistinguishable from American Blue values. European institutions are joined at the hip to uniformly-Blue American institutions, and there is no reason to expect this to change. Anything resembling a European Red Tribe has been thoroughly suppressed and is utterly incapable of meaningful cooperation with American Reds in any but the loosest sense. Given these facts, there is no route for meaningful cooperation with Europe as it currently stands, any more than there is with American Blues. There is no way to get along, because our values are flatly incompatible; "Cooperation" means securing support for Blue Tribe in their efforts to remake America into something much more like what Europe is now, and that is not a form of cooperation worth pursuing.
I sympathize with European Red-analogues, but there is very little to be done. The overwhelming consensus in your societies is overwhelmingly hostile to everything I value, so it needs to be fought vigorously.
Your model seems generally sound, as far as it goes. You ask how people see it going further. I think the part you aren't clearly accounting for is, for lack of a better term, systemic risk of serious collapse throughout the current socio-economic system. You're framing this in terms of the preferences of large-type movers and shakers because that's generally been proven to be a reasonable thing to do when you're talking about geopolitics. I think for a couple of reasons that you're underpricing the risk of intractably adversarial conditions for large-type movers and shakers as a general class.
- The System, if you'll forgive the cliche, is sclerotic and ossified. It wields considerable social and economic power by a particular set of methods, and really, really needs those methods to keep working as close to the same way they've previously worked as possible. The more resources and energy the system expends trying to keep things from significantly changing, the less it has available to deal with changes it can't prevent.
- A lot of things are diverging from the way they used to work, and that divergence is observably accelerating. The culture war escalation spiral is one obvious example, but the American economy seems to be on a similar path, as do political norms and a lot of other apparently load-bearing members of the sociopolitical structure.
- Change does not diffuse like ideal gas into a perfect vacuum. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." There can potentially be overhangs, areas where potential change builds up in a similar way to potential energy in a cliff face, until random chance starts a cascade down into the low-energy trough. The System's efforts to forestall change, and the ordinary inertia of population-summed human perspectives, greatly increase the potential size of these overhangs: they kick the can down the road on unworkable systems until a painful but necessary change grows into a completely insoluble and unavoidable disaster.
- I am highly confident that some of these overhangs are not potential, but directly observable in the present moment.
If I understand it correctly, your model seems to assume that there are no small-scale overhangs on the road to the really big ones, where AI kicks off a new industrial revolution and previous modes of organizing society obviously stop making any kind of sense as the economic graphs go vertical. I think it's at least plausible that this sort of timeline is correct, that white-knuckling just the next one or two or five years might get us to the sort of runaway tech breakthrough sufficient to reshuffle our present concerns until the socio-political landscape is completely unrecognizable. The problem firstly is that such a shuffling does not seem to be a necessary consequence of an AI revolution, and less necessary the slower the revolution goes, and secondly that it's possible to identify existing overhangs of sufficient magnitude to at least potentially demolish society as we know it. It's probably a lot harder to develop AI in Bostrom's "easy nukes" vulnerable world. The world we are in is probably not that vulnerable, but it seems to me that it's very probably a couple orders of magnitude more vulnerable than you or, I think, most others are accounting for, and maybe vulnerable enough that large, complex organizations couldn't keep the lights on.
Worse, it's hard for me to see that vulnerability as strictly negative. I do not want to live in the world where the Authorities pay me in Starbucks coupons and slot-machine tokens while banning ownership of good steel and machine tools forever. I do not want to live in such a world badly enough that I would rather the world I do live in be vulnerable, and indeed be made additionally vulnerable, if it means significantly lowering the probability of such an outcome.
I think a lot of people arrive at a similar conclusion, if by different paths. People do not want to be cattle. Politics runs on hope, and hope is harnessed by plausible paths forward toward a better tomorrow. Those, it seems to me, are growing increasingly thin on the ground regardless of one's tribal affiliation. Extremism appears to me to be flourishing, and the modern Western world is still best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. If an overhang drops, that's the path I expect the energy to be channeled down, and given the overhangs I'm observing, I don't expect that to be a path the current system can easily survive.
TL;DR - current US AI dominance doesn't survive if the labs all burn down before they finish immanentizing the eschaton.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Anti-Yuddites Don’t understand that you don’t need omnipotence to do major damage here. AI is probably, if so directed, perfectly capable of taking down the banking system.
Social Security is also probably capable of taking down the banking system. "Taking down the banking system" is very clearly a human-scale problem with human-scale solutions; Yuddism is entirely about appealing to supra-human-scale problems that purportedly don't have solutions outside Yuddism. I am 100% on board with the argument that AI safety, were it to be a thing, should focus on the human-scale problems and not the supra-human ones, which I'm not confident exist and which I'm not confident have reachable solutions if they do exist. But this approach is very clearly incompatible with Yuddism.
you really ought to watch Death of Stalin. It's probably the best black comedy of the last decade, maybe longer.
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