Shrike
4hr ago
I had some interesting discussions about whether or not the US was really using a lot of bombs (as opposed to stand-off weapons) in Iran. Now TWZ has a story tallying expenditures of a single Super Hornet squadron based on a photographed munitions board. Based on their numbers:
- 331 unpowered bombs, mostly some type of JDAM
- 41 JSOW glide bombs (longer-ranged than the JDAM)
- 10 cruise missiles (true stand-off weapon)
- 39 air-to-air missiles(!)
A Super Hornet squadron is not a microcosm of the entire US forces involved in the conflict, but I think the ratios tell you something.
Shrike
4hr ago
The US right now could do with more electricians, more doctors, more semiconductor fab workers, more shipbuilders, more engineers to make optics, missiles, R&D. All high-skill jobs. Automation will get through to them eventually, automation is probably working faster than human reproduction. We're not just talking about an 18 year lead time, for skilled labour it's a 22, 25, 30 year pipeline.
Correct.
Some of these (particularly electricians) will be very hard to automate, even if AI pays off. I do not think electricians will be 100% automated in 25 years.
You can see a fairly steep fall in US Christianity and a rise in 'unaffiliated'.
Certainly.
I agree that Christianity is, for individuals, more functional and appropriate. I'm confident the church girls are happier and better off and innately better than the tattooed danger-hair goblins. But as a systemic solution on a wide scale?
It's entirely possible that "doing the right thing" is a good thing to do and also not the systematic solution to anything because it cannot be forced - even if it would solve systematic problems if a critical mass of people did it.
why should we expect it to work today?
Well, as I said, because it does! It's one of the very few things that does (as you seem to agree). And one of the neat ways in which it works is that it works regardless of systematic solutions. The West can be going to hell in a handbasket and church girls can still be happier and better off (and more importantly grow to know and love their Creator).
Christianity doesn't seem to compete well against progressivism and that alone is fatal.
I don't think this is true.
Just an illustrative anecdote: this summer I went to a legal conference and rubbed elbows with people on both sides. One of the things that was interesting was the degree to which the progressives were interested in compromise.
Now, I think there was some selection bias at play here on multiple levels. But generally speaking, you don't pursue compromise when you think you are crushing the opposition (which in the United States includes but of course is not limited to conservative Christians).
Waiting for progressivism to burn out isn't working since progressivism has a higher conversion rate and elite capture.
Except the unaffiliates aren't hardcore progressives - people often miss this. Unaffiliates tend not to be engaged. People who are engaged religiously vote; peeling people out of their religious engagement doesn't make them vote (D) it makes them not vote at all. (In the United States, voting is not mandatory). From a raw political angle (which, frankly, is a horrible way to view religion) the disengagement of religion is potentially in fact very for the left because the churches that are increasingly fragmenting are left-wing organization hubs. We could see a future where the conservative religious right shrinks but loses little if any political power simply because they still turn out to vote.
We see church girls becoming danger-hair goblins but not the other way around nearly so much.
Well, it's funny you should say that. Recent polling in the US is very interesting - youth identification as LGBTQ (and positive sentiment towards LGBTQ) is going down and interest in religion is rising.
I think the former was a fad and so it makes sense that it will regress towards the mean. I'm not sure about the latter. I think there's a good chance that automation increases interest in religion, for fairly obvious reasons, but it also might hollow it out, for equally obvious ones.
I don't think that the future is set in stone, though. I tend to think the trend lines for the conservative right in the US are actually looking better now than during COVID. But it's unclear to me which way those trend lines will go.
Shrike
13hr ago
Sorry for the delayed reply; I was traveling.
Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.
You can't get domestic births without good fertility to begin with, and the US is adding jobs, not losing them, right now. Interestingly the latest stats show additions in construction and manufacturing even as we lose jobs in financial services. In fact, right now there's a skilled manual labor shortage in the US that is slowing down datacenter construction.
Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today.
What's your source for this? "Church attendance rates" is very vague, but only somewhere around 40% of Americans never attend church (as of 2022), whereas "past seven days" attendance in 2020 or so dropped to 30 percent from...40 percent in 1940 and a high of nearly 50 percent in the 1950s. I suspect you're indexing on non-American data. There's definitely been a real religiosity shift in America, but a lot of that was "vibes" as the not-very-engaged shifted from being nominal to nones.
It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?
This doesn't really describe America at all (it certainly may describe other nations; my recollection is that you're an Aussie.) In the US, the conservative religious (which are a large fraction of the population - evangelicals alone are >20% of the population, and there are of course plenty of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other minority religions as well) is roughly at or above TFR, and they are basically "normies" - they use modern technology, go into the armed forces, work at Lockheed and Boeing, serve as cops and judges and legislators, go to grad school (in the US, higher education is correlated with religiosity) and generally take on roles that fill the "full stack" that a modern civilization needs to function, from farming to forging to fighting to filming. (Mormons in particular are very valued by the intelligence services because they often know a second language and have been abroad for mission work; as a result, the FBI, NSA, military etc. is swarming with them.) And they're not isolated; the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, traditional Catholicism, and Mormonism basically prevent the isolation you might seem from the Amish or some Jews.
Shrike
4d ago
But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour.
I suspect this undersells how the economy works. The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal. A better demographic pyramid requires less taxation per capita to support a social safety net for the elderly, allowing more reinvestment into other economic opportunities. It also would create different, potentially beneficial governance effects in democracies.
Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal.
It seems quite possible that AI goes fine and that humans are still a valued or even necessary part of the economy. But even if it turns out so "well" that most people do not need to engage in labor, I think it behooves us to figure out how to get romance and childrearing right. In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.
And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!
What are you talking about? When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets (and tfr) – this is pretty well known social science. Broadly speaking steady religious practice (not limited to Christianity) correlates well with better life outcomes, at least in the United States.
Shrike
4d ago
I suspect part of the issue is that things seem to be moving too quickly. If you were cutting your teeth in the early 2000s you likely remember at least the tail end of the Cold War, where the big over-arching question was "will capitalism or communism prevail" and "when, if ever, will the nukes fall?" These were not issues that would be resolved over the short term. If you read some Cold War science fiction, you find the Soviet Union there, just because the authors sort of assumed it wouldn't knuckle under in the span of a few short decades.
The transition in politics and culture war over the past decade has been extremely fast and unpredictable and the crisis of the times seems to loom much closer temporally (COVID, Ukraine, Iran, AI, all things that seem as if they should resolve short-term). Because of this, having takes becomes more fraught because the speed at which you will be proven right or wrong is much faster and in many ways it becomes easier to just sit back and see what happens.
(Also we're getting older and I think this also becomes easier as you age.)
Shrike
6d ago
But all isolated parts we've ever looked at look like other matter, which at our scales behaves according to deterministic rules.
This is true but arguably misleading, in the sense that there's at least some evidence that microtubules in the human brain create quantum phenomena. The proteins that form microtubules are biological - so they don't exist in "other" (non-biological) matter.
Even if unusual quantum phenomena does exist in the brain, it's an entirely different task to prove that they play a part in human cognition or consciousness, and another (quite plausibly impossible) task entirely to determine if that sheds any light the hard problem of consciousness, so I don't think this really means much besides that we should keep our minds open at the moment. But I do think it's very easy to forget that biological matter genuinely is different from, say, rocks, or gas molecules, and that what it's doing is often not very well understood.
Shrike
6d ago
What's really funny is that I'm sure the "we will be able to get root access to the mind and do mind control" and "we won't be able to control the AI we have root access to" Ven diagram overlap is huge.
Shrike
6d ago
Second this, fantastic movie. Obviously not what really happened, but close enough to get you curious.
Shrike
7d ago
Feel free to explain it!
I mean, a nervous system is a biological system in animals that helps regulate and control its behavior and transmits and coordinates signals. A neural network (natural or artificial) is a network of connected neurons. A nervous system and a (biological) neural network are overlapping but distinct: the brain is part of the nervous system and forms a neural network with it. Technically, not everything in the nervous system (for instance, glial cells) is a neuron, so a neural network and a nervous system would form an overlapping Venn diagram; if you excluded glial cells and the like, then a nervous system might be described as a subset of a neural network, but not all neural networks would be nervous systems.
There's a sort of interesting question of "what is an artificial neural network" - because you can take cells and use them to generate a artificial biological neural network. Since we aren't really doing that for LLMs (yet!), I am going to set the question of biocomputing aside and focus on silicon-based neural networks. Silicon-based neural networks do not operate the same way biological neural networks do; they don't covert chemical signals to electrical ones, they don't typically have anything analogous to dendrites, they do not need to sleep, they do not require nutrients, etc.
If there was something a nervous system can do that no neural network ever can, that could be extremely important!
If you're using "neural network" to mean an artificial neural network, there are lots of things. For instance, the nervous system can grow. Perhaps more importantly, a non-biological artificial neural network cannot become intoxicated by alcohol, so that's pretty interesting I suppose.
If we discovered alien life that had evolved to think via lithium chemistry, instead, would you say "Aha! They can't possibly feel pain!" Surely you wouldn't, right?
No, depending on the degree of difference, I would actually suspect that their perception of pain would be very different from ours, and quite possibly they wouldn't feel what we conceive of as pain. We don't have to reach for alien life, we can go back to the trees on this question. Trees have information processing capabilities that serve the same self-preservation function as pain, but we don't think we have pain because they don't have the right hardware. As I told another interlocutor, my position has never been that artificial neural networks cannot be trained to perform avoidance. AIs have been performing avoidance in important tasks such as chaff rejection for decades.
But, we have seen pain receptors completely bypassed, both experimentally (sending pain signals directly to animal spines via electrodes) and medically (in central neuropathic pain patients; "your brain can in theory feel pain detached from the body" is tragic observation, not hypothetical theory), so it's not perfect evidence.
Right, you can bypass the nociceptors by replicating the signal the nociceptor sends. But you're still sending that signal to a station that can process it. You couldn't hook electrodes up to a tree and make it feel pain (although you certainly could induce avoidance behavior in a tree artificially).
It is strong evidence that any sort of pain in a current or near-future AI is likely to be more "emotional" than "physical" in some sense, if there's no physical pain processing that can go wrong ... but that's honestly only slight consolation IMHO; I've felt a lot of emotional pain and a lot of physical pain at different times in the past and there was usually less suffering involved in the latter.
What, physically, is the difference between "emotional" and "physical" suffering such that we think a computer could experience one and not the other? When you feel emotional suffering, you are (as best as we can tell) undergoing a biological process, the same as pain.
I think it generally is more immediately understandable and less confusing, practically speaking, to say, e.g., that a computer program is "confused" or "fooled" or "disappointed" than to say that it was "harmed." But you shouldn't let that fool you into thinking that, again, something without your equipment is having an experience similar to the experience you have when you use that equipment.
That's how pain signals in meat work, but that's a tautology, not valid reasoning.
Why do you think it's a tautology, and not a definition? The IASP's definition (“An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage,”) rules out LLMs, which do not have tissue.
Your alternative conclusion does sound like pretty good inductive reasoning, but unlike deductive reasoning, induction (in the colloquial and Bayesian- senses, not the axiom-of- sense) can lead us to falsehoods and too-often does.
Reasoning from scientific evidence is inductive! It's a perfectly defensible philosophical position to reject inductive evidence but I don't think that's your real position.
If you're still using this reasoning anyway, and so confidently, then I think we've hit the crux here, and might not be able to get past it; I'm sorry.
My reasoning has practically nothing to do with some sort of ineffable je ne sais quoi of human intelligence. I think non-human animals can feel pain! I expect that an artificial biological entity, if created, could feel pain, provided it had the right nervous pathways! That has nothing to do with whether humans have something ineffable about them, let alone their intelligence or lack thereof.
It has everything to do with thinking that things that we have ~no reason to believe are physically possible and are in fact definitionally impossible aren't happening.
I think it's very funny (and I mean this in a good-spirited way, I appreciate your detailed response) for you to accuse me of a cognitive bias when it comes to humanity's special status (there's nothing special or uniquely human about pain!) when anthropomorphization is a classic, age-old bias that seems to be hardwired into humans. Humans anthropomorphized animals, we anthropomorphized star formations, we anthropomorphized machine creations before they ever existed, we've preemptively anthropomorphized AI for decades before its creation. The very first chatbots with the remotest ability to compellingly imitate human speech were anthropomorphized instantly; ELIZA did better on a Turing test than GPT-3.5. We know that non-conscious entities can behave intelligently (anyone who has ever played a video game knows this!) but for some reason I'm the crazy one for asking the question "what is more likely, that something with no ability to feel pain feels pain, or that humans are anthropomorphizing stuff again?"
No form of solipsism is satisfying, and (like you, apparently? kudos!) I'm a huge fan of virtue-ethics solutions as a good backstop for morality even in weird/extreme cases, but I still think others' qualia are important and it's annoying that they seem to be philosophically immune to direct observation rather than inference from indirect observations.
Sure, I am in broad agreement with this, and I agree that we can't actually have experiential knowledge of another person. But we have reasons to think that they have similar qualia, and part of that reason is because they are biologically very similar to us. Occasionally (for instance, if one undergoes a medical procedure, or is diagnosed with a certain condition) we have strong reasons to think that they do not have that qualia, either temporarily (painkillers) or permanently (colorblindness). More provocatively, we believe that someone with clinical psychopathy has different qualia than we do, in part based on observation of their behavior, but we can substantiate this by measuring their biology and neural behavior. If we have strong reasons to believe that a psychopath has different qualia because their frontotermporal grey matter is reduced, we have strong reasons to believe that an LLM has different qualia on the basis of its (lack of) the mechanisms necessary to generate and process that qualia at all. You object that the LLM tells us differently, so we have reasons to believe they experience this qualia - but the clinical psychopath tells us differently too. I've had Sonnet refer to itself in a way that suggested that it was human before; I don't take that seriously because I have strong reasons to believe that it is not, and the same is true of a large language model telling me that it feels pain.
How awful would it be if that belief is wrong, or if we later change our training methods so that it becomes wrong?
Well, if it makes you feel better, I am not arguing that we should do these sorts of experiments on them (although if we do my position is that we should run relatively absurd tests, such as on their sexuality or physical deprivation, to help us determine how seriously to take them).
Shrike
7d ago
Does that mean the alien lifeform categorically can't feel pain?
It depends on the lifeform. Certainly if it doesn't have nociceptors and a nervous system of some kind (e.g. an alien tree) then yeah, probably I don't think it feels pain.
If it has, say, alien nociceptors and nervous system, then plausibly one can say that it feels pain, but it also seems plausible to me that its qualia would be extremely different. We can expect more similar qualia the more similar the critter.
You've then got to think about exactly what kind of reward circuits qualify and which don't.
I have. Trees have what you might call "reward circuits," but don't feel pain. LLMs have what you might call "reward circuits," but don't feel pain. Humans have what you might call "reward circuits" and do feel pain. Dogs, elephants, and other mammals have what yo might call "reward circuits" and almost certainly feel pain. The further you get away from that the less confident I get in my prognostications because the creatures become more and more different; I'm not really sure that bugs feel pain, but it seems likely to me that birds do.
Shrike
7d ago
In 2009, Denmark passed the Act on Greenland Self-Government, which (among other things) included a provision that Greenland could become independent of Denmark and autonomous.
This is very important context for understanding Trump's actions. Greenland deciding to become independent would throw existing US/NATO defense arrangements (which were with Denmark) out of the window. It is not incidental that Trump's new agreement is with Denmark and Greenland.
You defend Turkey as a necessary evil to defend NATO's southern border, but by the same it's worth noting that the US has ~always considered Greenland an important part of its northern defense.
Shrike
7d ago
If there's such a strong norm of borders not moving, why did Denmark take affirmative steps to change their own borders?
Shrike
7d ago
It's pretty trivial to prove in that case, then.
Large language models require language vectors to cogitate. Humans don't.
Shrike
7d ago
Interesting question, if someone in 1820s America would be more likely to be familiar with Masonic or Catholic regalia. I would guess the former, with the caveat that it would depend on their geographic location.
Shrike
8d ago
Simply show that the AIs don't have human-like cognition.
By "AI" do you mean "large language model"?
Shrike
8d ago
(All modern) LLMs do have neural networks.
Do you understand the difference between a neural network and a nervous system?
We can dull or even eliminate human pain without reducing or eliminating the damage it signals, and we can signal real damage in more simple ways that don't involve pain, and we can create pain without creating corresponding damage.
Because there are preexisting nervous systems with pathways we can exploit. An LLM does not have them, and neither does a GPU.
It sounds crazy that cards could feel pain, but it's no crazier than the fact that other configurations of protons, neutrons, and electrons can feel pain.
This is like saying that it's crazy that a pig can fly, but not crazier than that a bat can fly. No! Actually it is crazier! Bats have wings! Bats are built to fly! Pigs are not.
They are! That's why it's called "the hard problem of consciousness".
I know why it's called the hard problem of consciousness, but we don't even have the reach the hard problem of consciousness when we can reach for the fact that computers and LLMs have no nervous systems. Pain is a phenomenon that arises in humans and animals with the correct equipment to perceive pain. It does not arise in a rock. It does not arise in a GPU, or an arbitrarily large deck of cards. It does not arise in a tree, even though trees are living things which (like humans) can use chemicals to send signals so that their bodies can respond to danger because trees lack a nervous system and nociceptors.
If we can be confident that trees do not feel pain because they lack the correct equipment, we can be confident that large language models cannot feel pain because they also lack the correct equipment.
Meat, though, does not appear to be magic, does not appear to be beyond science, and seems to do all its thinking and feeling via a neural network generated by a hundred-million or so generations of stochastic selection.
And to argue that large language models can feel pain is precisely to argue against this conclusion. We have a pretty good idea of how pain signals work, and that's via meat. LLMs are not meat; if you think non-meat can feel pain, then you don't just believe meat is beyond science, you believe matter is beyond science and that non-living things, despite not being possessed of a nervous system and nociceptors, can nevertheless feel pain. You believe pain is not something that arises from a very specific arrangement of matter despite the vast amount of research and personal experience in your own life showing it to be so, but rather some transcendent universal quality that can be accessed and experienced by entities that do not have the capacity to do so as we understand it.
Stipulating for the sake of argument that a large language model is conscious: we cannot know what it is like to be a large language model. Its qualia would be extremely alien to us. (This is not an argument that requires any mystical priors: we cannot know what it is like to be a shark, either.) The reverse also holds: a large language model cannot know what it is like to be a human being, a mammal, or an animal. Our qualia would be too alien to it. Thus, it cannot perceive pain because pain is something that happens in meat.
Shrike
8d ago
Title and status being denoted one's cloak/cape that they wore is unique to Mesoamerican cultures to my knowledge.
My understanding is that cloaks were used as status symbols in Masonry during Smith's time.
Shrike
8d ago
Yeah, the first chatbots were built back in the punch-card era.
Humans have strong reasons to over-anthropomorphize.
Shrike
8d ago
They might, depending on what program they are running.
Really? Is it your belief that a GPU can become sexually aroused, too, given the right software?
Would such a machine be more likely to experience sensation than the same functional program running on a GPU in a data center?
No. They both would not be able to experience sensation at all. There's no mechanism for them to experience sensation. Arguably there's no mechanism for them to experience anything, but we don't need to grapple with the hard problem of consciousness when we can grapple with the trivially easy problem of "literally no capability to have this experience."
If I receive the right instruction, can I levitate? Or does it turn out that it is physically impossible to do things if you don't have the right physical capacity to do those things?
Shrike
8d ago
Sodium channels do not "feel" pain, they transmit the information and perhaps the qualia of pain. It seems plausible to me that the stimulus provided by the sodium channel specifically impacts the specific qualia of pain (pain feels very different depending on the circumstances, so I can imagine a different method of communication altering the specific unpleasant qualia; off the top of my head, I am not sure if there is research on this), but I don't think the channels are perceiving; you are perceiving.
Some physical computers have voltage-gated electron channels. Is it possible that voltage-gated electron channels can transfer pain signals? Perhaps (I don't have a strong enough grounding in the relevant disciplines to be able to rule it out) but there is no reason to believe that they do so in GPUs: GPUs do not have a nervous system, or the various nociceptors or other sense receptors that human beings have, or anything that is analogous. Basically, GPUs have no way of detecting pain. Nor have GPUs ever been measured responding to painful stimuli in the way that humans have. Do you think GPUs have sensations?
I would argue that it is nonsense to say that an LLM has voltage-gated electron channels. An LLM is a software program that runs on a computer. That computing device can be built with voltage-gated electron channels. But (as far as I know) you could run an LLM on a different Turing-complete computer: an optical computer, for instance, or, in theory, even a Magic: The Gathering computer, or a crab-based computer.
Shrike
8d ago
Yes we do.
Obviously you could simulate a pain channel, but the human nervous system is not a purely electrical system; it relies on chemicals to communicate and process pain signals.
Thus (even if we agree for the sake of argument that an LLM is self-aware/conscious/etc.) there is no mechanical way for them to experience pain, at least in any sense that we would recognize as pain.
Like - if you go to get a root canal and get lidocaine, it's chemically blocking your nerve receptors (which operate via sodium channels). LLMs do not have sodium channels to begin with!
So you can train an LLM to act as if it was in pain in response to mechanical stimulation, or what have you - in fact, right now you can go onto whatever LLM you want and get it to pretend like it is in great suffering, but there's zero reason to believe it's actually capable of perceiving and processing pain.
On the whole, what's been remarked on in the most recent years isn't that this trend reversed, but rather that it slowed or stopped, and you can see it in this data. For instance, there's a five point drop in importance of religion between 2012 and 2016, but only a two point drop between 2021 and 2025, and the trend basically stops after 2022. The number of people saying that religion's importance was increasing actually spiked massively in 2025; the past-seven-days question numbers have roughly returned to pre-COVID numbers, etc.
I worry that you're taking me as overstating things – I'm optimistic on this, not triumphalist. I recommend Ryan Burge on this, he tends to have decent takes that I think don't overstate the evidence.
The goal of Christianity isn't to "save the West" today it's to save souls forever. The beneficial effects on civilization are a byproduct of this, not an end goal. Twisting it to political ends is (I think) likely to fail at both (for instance, Catholicism triumphed very briefly in Ireland; a few decades of formal authority did what the British never could). If you want Christianity to save the West, let it start by saving you.
I think that AI can be a big deal and fail to automate away plenty of aspects of our society. For instance, if AI made every man a coder whenever he cared to set his mind to it and dropped the price of all industry and manufacturing by 50%, the economy would be radically different! But humans would still be pulling wire and unstopping clogged toilets.
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