I went back into the archives to figure out how we ended up with the "safety" company running The Pentagon's KillNet.
Anthropic's approach towards safety requires them to a) not transgress certain ethical boundaries b) become the most important and powerful AI company in the world. It doesn't surprise me to see these goals conflict.
perhaps funnier for the people not doing eight flights of stairs each time...
Wow. The bomb shelters are eight flights underground?
Sure. And I had some sympathy with Anthropic on the issues, actually, both times.
I'm more remarking that Anthropic's leadership has consistently seriously overestimated how much ability they have to hold stuff hostage, and underestimated how much customers dislike being earnestly told that what they want is very naughty.
Now, personally I want to generate sexy stories about vampires rather than make autonomous killbots, but IMO it generates really serious ill will when you the user think that something is okay and then the AI either huffs and turns up its nose at you, or quietly sabotages and undercuts you. I doubt Anthropic have reckoned with how much it pisses off career soldiers to be told that killing people is bad, actually.
Corvos
10hr ago
Used to happen in New York, and I think in many big US cities. Jews, Irish, Italians all had their well-recognised machines.
Anthropic has always been open that their founding principle is that AI must not be used in certain ways, and their mission has always been to to develop AI and enforce that it cannot be used in those ways, becoming dominant in the space to make sure that others can’t break that pact.
Putting aside the specific ethics of the matter, you can see why the government doesn’t like Anthropic attempting to use a market dominant position to impose its ethics policy on them. You can also see why the engineers who are sweating over this thing want to say how it’s used. Ultimately the government is far more powerful and therefore it’s legitimate desires get respected over Anthropic’s legitimate desires.
That said, including the OpenAI board fiasco, this is the second time Anthropic and EA have stepped on this rake. Customers do not like you asserting your ideology over their needs.
Corvos
23hr ago
I'm open to that, I just want ideally to:
a) set an expectation that it has to be really, really bad before the company starts cutting you off. Apocalypse bad, not misgendering-bad or said-nigger bad
b) require serious defence of the above assertion to a hostile audience
Killing people isn't that hard. If you're worried about big society-spanning plagues then those are difficult (plague is spread by fleas, are you breeding those too?) and potentially possible to mitigate without sending the police into everybody's browser. I don't want 'suppress info' to be the default response.
But both of those are different from 'hackers can insert stuff into emails to reprogram the email-checking bot'.
To me both of your doom scenarios boil down to 'our naughty customers want to do something that we benevolent overlords forbid, tsk tsk' rather than 'our customers' bots aren't doing what our customers intend it to do'. The first is faux-benevolent bullshit that is marketed as 'we are stopping terrorism' and ends up being 'you will have our corporate HR living in your tools and you will like it', the second is doing your best to provide good service to your customers.
To quote Hegseth 'when we buy a Boeing plane, Boeing doesn't get to tell us where we fly it'.
Corvos
1d ago
Naysaying, "catastrophizing," doomcasting, blackpilling, playing Devil's advocate for any and all proposals… these are the skills I've spent a lifetime honing.
Perhaps consider security work.
Corvos
7d ago
Not being able to see the ball in any other sport is an immediate crisis.
Someone once very kindly took me to the most important cricket field in the UK to see a game. Cricket balls are red. I am red/green colourblind.
It was very awkward making sure they didn't catch on.
The populist coded version I like re: Will to Power is
“Please stop fighting for the car keys and then happily tossing them out the window when you get them. It doesn't protect us from the powerful, all that happens is that then they get picked up by the other side anyway.”
Corvos
7d ago
IANAL but it seems to me that a big part of the problem comes from common law resting on case law and therefore requiring that complex cases are ground out to a satisfactory conclusion. There seems to be no concept of ‘it would take a year to solve this complex case and all the claims and counter claims but you’ve got a week so do whatever you can’.
Corvos
8d ago
Okay, that works. FWIW none of the people I know in the UK who fall into the latter category have chefs or full-time staff, though they often have cleaners a couple of times a week.
Corvos
8d ago
Not in the UK they don't, unless we're talking about the real super-rich older people with 10s or 100s of millions.
How are you dividing the PMC from the upper classes? Most of the upper class are PMC these days. Or do you mean it in the American sense where it's only big capitalists like Warren Buffet?
Corvos
8d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the new PM instituted such a thing. It's partly what I'm annoyed about - I lived there for most of a decade and the tourists are going to make it far more difficult to go back.
Japan/Thailand where there's gigantic swarms of tourists and they've been relegated to pests
Yeah, @oats_son and I were reading a news article about a town near Fuji stopping its annual cherry blossom festival because all the tourists completely overwhelm the place. I feel kind of bad about it because I lived in Japan for most of a decade and got to enjoy it, but now literally everyone I meet tells me they want to go. I don't feel right discouraging them or being anything less than enthusiastic and helpful on their behalf, but there are far too many.
Corvos
8d ago
This sounds very sensible, and is what I’m going to try and do too. I believe it’s broadly the old position.
@Catholics of the Motte, what do you do during Lent? I having been going to Church properly this year and have been informed that we are supposed to fast today (Ash Wednesday). I have also been told that pre-1917 the structure of fasting looked very different, being required on every Lenten weekday and broadly forbidding meals before sunset. I am in a reasonably privileged position and I don't want to be too easy on myself, equally I don't want to make a fuss and cause trouble for those around me.
I would be interested to hear about real people's practices, and any advice that people have?
Corvos
10d ago
Isn't that what they say about China? "The country long united must divide. The country long divided must unite." America is still comparatively young.
In terms of scenarios, what do you think about the odds of having two self-proclaimed 'America's, both of which consider themselves to be the true one and the other to be a rump state that for one reason or another can't yet be brought back into the fold?
I am a scientist. Newspaper articles have been written on my work, albeit ones over which I had little control; I have read them and I have sighed over their inaccuracies. I am well aware of what you meant, as I suspect is @RenOS.
I am telling you as a scientist that it’s really easy to use this reasoning to work yourself into some very shady places. Reaching its nadir when you start musing happily about how all the lay people don’t really understand how these things are done…
It’s precisely because it’s partly true that it’s so fucking seductive.
Corvos
11d ago
negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true
I love this.
you [...] start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is [feed] them information selectively
But this is where you are in great danger of throwing away your soul and admitting you are not a scientist or a teacher but a shepherd of men.
Saying, 'the plum pudding model is less accurate than other models which I will explain later but I am using this now because the best model needs to be taken in bite-size chunks' is one thing. Similarly, avoiding hot-button words like quantum in favour of something equally descriptive when talking to people can be wise for the reasons you give: I have sat in on interviews where the beleaguered interviewer has twenty minutes to try and fish something out of the firehose of words coming from a professor and produces something obviously insane based on the word 'quantum'. But this is in aid of greater comprehension.
in trying to persuade an audience that Sparta is not a society to be glorified or emulated, the Cartledge position is the obviously superior persuasive position
this series was immediately prompted by dueling essays about the value of Sparta as an exemplar for modern politics – the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people
This is not epistemics.
This. Is. DIDACTIIIIICS!
(couldn't resist)
In all seriousness, the above is not a matter of being correct or incorrect about the facts. It's the author using scholarship which he suspects to be wrong ("old, if not busted") in service of the author's moral, political goal. And that, as someone intimately familiar with the difficulties of scientific explanation, strikes me as a very different ball game. Being less than 100% open and honest with people for the sake of their own edification slides so easily and neatly into being less than honest because it serves your own goals that it's really really dangerous to get into the habit of doing it. I'm not joking when I say this is how senior academics lose their souls.
To some extent yes, you can always rederive things for yourself, in the same way that you could from a bunch of chemistry textbooks. In practice, censored topics create a kind of conceptual dead zone. In the same way that a model with the Golden Gate Bridge concept dialled up started finding ways to slip it into every conversation no matter how strained, censored models will smoothly elide anything conceptually close to naughtiness.
In practice, it’s easier to take an open source model and abliterate it by turning off the neurons that activate when you discuss censored topics.
This to me illustrates the disconnect in perspective. Anthropic has been very open IMO that they see AI as the most disruptive tech of the modern era and the likely source of all future power and prestige. And the government is at least aware of the possibility that this is true.
IMO what's happening is less about 'do we have to do this silly new customer requirement' and more 'who gets to own, train and use the god-machine'? Of course the government cares about who owns and trains and controls Claude. It's a straightforward power struggle rather than a disagreement with a contractor.
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