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You are making an "argument from incredulity", i.e. the beliefs of Sam Altman are so crazy that they can’t be real. I don't think this is the case. Many powerful people in Silicon Valley have beliefs that are far outside the Overton Window.
Say what you will about Elon Musk, he is at least pro-human. This is not at all the case for many of his peers. For example, Larry Page and Elon Musk broke up as friends over Musk's "speciesist" belief that humanity should remain dominant over god-like AI's.
The idea that Sam Altman would literally want to destroy humanity to birth in a superior AI life form might sound ridiculous to you. But you don't know these people.
There's a good chance (not 100%, but not 0% either) that we're going to build superintelligence while the "adults in the room" argue about GDP numbers or whatever. If this happens it could make some people (perhaps a single person) more powerful than anyone in history. Do you want Sam Altman to be that person? Because I sure as hell don't.
Besides this being a gossip thread, your argument likewise seems to boil down to "but the beliefs might be real, you don't know". I don't know what to answer other than reiterate that they also might not, and you don't know either. No point in back-and-forth I suppose.
At least the real load-bearing assumption came out. I've given up on reassuring doomers or harping on the wisdom of Pascal's mugging, so I'll simply grunt my isolated agreement that Altman is not the guy I'd like to see in charge of... anything really. If it's any consolation I doubt OpenAI is going to get that far ahead in the foreseeable future. I already mentioned my doubts on the latest o1, and coupled with the vacuous strawberry hype and Sam's antics apparently scaring a lot of actually competent people out of the company, I don't believe Sam is gonna be our shiny metal AI overlord even if I grant the eventual existence of one.
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Since this is a gossip thread...
I have a couple friends who genuinely want the extinction of the human race. Not in a mass murder sense as they conceptualize it, but in a create a successor species, give a good life to the remaining humans, maybe offer them the chance for brain uploads, sense. Details and red lines vary between them, but they'd broadly agree that this is a fair characterization of their goals and desires.
Where do they work? OAI, Anthropic, GDM.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for their viewpoints, but it's still genuinely shocking. It's as if you suddenly found out that every government official was secretly a Hare Krishna or part of the People's Temple, and then when you point it out, everyone thinks the accusation is too absurd to be real.
In their defense: why do we care so much about the survival of homo sapiens qua sapiens? We're different from how we were 50,000 years ago, and we'll be more different still in 5,000, and maybe even 500. So what? So long as we have continuity of culture and memory, does it matter if we engineer ourselves into immortal cyborgs or whatever is coming? What's so special about the biped mammal vessel for a mind?
The biped mammal vessel. An immortal cyborg is a qualitatively different existence and so it will have a correspondingly different mind.
A 6'7 NBA player has a qualitatively different experience from a 5'1 ballerina, but they're both humans with minds.
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Hubris of the highest order.
We don't let humans so much as stitch up some skin unless they've gone through a decade of training. We don't let new engineers commit new code, unless they've spent time understanding the base architecture. What makes you think we know enough about what it means to be homo sapiens that we can go replacing entire parts wholesale ?
Just look at the last few decades. We put a whole generation of women on pills that accidentally change that characteristics of which men they're attracted to. The last-gen painkillers caused the biggest drug epidemic in the country. The primary stimulant of the century (cigarettes) was causing early death enmasse. We don't know why there is a detectable difference in immunity between c-section vs natural deliveries, and this is a difference of a few seconds. That's how little we know about these flesh-suits of ours. We have no clue what we're doing.
Don't take this the wrong way. What I'm about to say is definitely stereotyping a certain type of person.
But, I only ever see internet neuro-divergents ask these sort of questions. To normies, your question sounds like the equivalent of ,"What's so great about fries?". You'd only ever ask the question if you've never enjoyed a good pack of fries or a equivalent food that makes you feel that special thing. It reveals the absence of a fundamental human experience. To a degree, it reveals that you're less human or at least 'dis-abled'.
I'm entitled. I don't think I need to explain what makes some things special. The first day of the monsoon, petting a puppy, making faces at a toddler, a warm hug, the top of a mountain, soul food, soul music, the first time you hold your child, the last time you hold your parent, the first time a sibling defeats you at a game.
In a way, these unspoken common traits are what makes all of us human. I care about the survival of these consistent 300k-old traits, because I cherish these things. And I believe that a non-human would not be able to. Because we aren't taught to cherish these things. We just do. I don't expect everyone to have experienced all of these, in the same way. Civilizational differences mean that specifics differ. But, the patterns are undeniable.
Why do I care about the authentic experiences of my imperfect body and imperfect mind ? Because that is what it means to be human.
P.S: and I am every bit an atheist. Do I have to believe in divinity to believe in beauty ?
Haven’t heard of this one. What pill was it, and what men did those women get attracted to instead?
And what if a post-human species is just as capable of experiencing such emotions? Would you still privilege humans? (As a hypothetical, since you don’t believe non-humans to be capable of such emotions.)
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Not gonna make an argument here because I don't think there would be a point, but I'll mention that you're doing a great job demonstrating my concerns about atheists.
Well, leaving it at that would be a cheap shot, so,
I don't think I'm my mind any more than I'm my body. Which is to say, yes to both, but there's more going on than that. Also, human beings are uniquely divine, and God is a man in heaven. Human existence and experience are uniquely important, and uniquely destined.
Believe it or not I'm open to the idea that at some point 'we' make the transition to non-organic substrates. I just don't know enough about what actually matters to rule that out. But when people are eager to make the jump to artificial bodies and minds (not that you actually advocated for this), they strike me as dangerously naive in terms of their assumptions.
How sure are you that what we are can be digitized? What, specifically, is valuable to you, and worthy of cultivation? In symbolic terms, which gods do you actually serve?
So you're arguing for qualia and souls, yes? I believe I am my mind, that the mind is computation, and that its computational substrate is irrelevant. I'm honestly baffled by people who hold otherwise --- I want to be charitable, but I'm having a hard time seeing past opposition being ultimately a product of personal incredulity regarding our conscious experience being a worldly, temporal information processing phenomenon.
Our minds are worldly, temporal information processing phenomena, yes. At least mostly, as we experience them. No disagreement there. The question is whether, if and when our minds die, there is anything of us left. I think so.
We have no idea what consciousness is, how it happens, or even why it should ever arise in the first place. Until that's sorted there's a ton of room for other perspectives. Soul of the gaps, sure. That accusation wouldn't trouble me.
Perhaps I could say that I think our minds are so loud in our conscious experience that we fall into the mistaken assumption that everything occurring in our consciousness is our minds. The only way to find out is to die. In the meantime I'm not in a rush to create perfect, immortal copies of my mind which have no internal conscious experience, let the last bio-humans die off, and call it a day.
But I want to repeat the question:
Your position is fundamentally religious, isn't it? We feel that existing, thinking, being are so profound that they must continue after death. But what if they aren't? I've never seen evidence that they are. If you'd like to adopt a religiously flavored epistemology, that's fine, but having done so, you've departed from the realm of logical argumentation.
There are several parts of your comment to which I could respond, but we're fundamentally coming at this in different reference frames and it would take an entire overhaul to communicate the things I want to. All I can say is that I used to see it your way, and now I don't, and basically feel about your perspective the way you feel about mine. Also that we've had different experiences, and mine have me as entirely convinced as I can be, I think.
It would be rude to throw out a bunch of examples knowing full well that I don't intend to try to discuss them since, as I just said, that'd be pretty fruitless. So I won't.
But I do want to ask again, and let me rephrase here. Gonna ramble a bit.
Let's talk about concepts. Patterns. From a strictly reductionist standpoint, all that exists is the quantum waveform, and no part of it can be severed from the whole. It's normal to regard concepts like 'justice' or 'joy' as abstract, somehow qualitatively different from concepts like 'elk' or 'door'. But again, strictly speaking from a reductionist standpoint, none of these things actually exist. Or if you don't care for the quantum thing, let's say that all that exists is fundamental particles and energy. You can take what we call a door (or an elk) apart particle by particle -- at what point does it stop being that thing? Was it ever that thing, or are concepts like 'door' and 'elk' entirely artifacts of conscious minds? Does our categorization of a thing make it into what it is? If there were no conscious life in our universe, would there be planets? Or only the configurations of matter that we call planets? If there were humans (but without consciousness), would they still be humans?
At its root, theism is the perspective that these concepts, these 'gods', exist independently of our perception of them. An easy example which people often go to for other reasons is, do numbers exist independently of us, or is their existence intrinsic to (perhaps emergent from) the universe?
I'm throwing all of this out there to hopefully help you see what I'm asking when I ask you: Which gods do you serve? Are there any patterns, gods, that you think should exist; which deserve to be prioritized over others? What do you value? And why?
All I have from you is that you think it's good (personally preferable?) for cultural continuity and memory to be cultivated, presumably until it's all wiped away in some kind of cosmic apocalypse beyond our ability to control. And no, I'm not planning on going anywhere with this. There's no 'gotcha' waiting for you around the corner. I'm just having a hard time seeing why you're saying what you're saying.
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Regarding the realm of logical argumentation, what's your view on Determinism and the free-will problem?
"Free will" is an ill-defined concept. I've never seen a definition precise enough to be wrong. All I can tell is that "free will" is the persistent ecstatic emotion one feels when contemplating the idea that the mind is so special that it must belong to a category of object distinct from ordinary matter and exempt from the ordinary rules of causality. I see no reason to accept this premise. It's impossible to argue against a feeling.
The most parsimonious model of consciousness is that it's just computation.
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I'm sure the Neanderthals' last thoughts included "so what, those skinny folks with the funny heads will survive even after they've wiped us out. We shall go gently into that good night."
We're homo sapiens. If we take AI true believers seriously, this isn't hundreds of years in someone else's lifetime; it could be less than ten years before an amoral sociopath unleashes something beyond our control. I plan on being alive in ten years.
I do not happen to think AI (from the LLM model) is likely to be an extinction-level threat (that's a specific phrasing). I do think Sam Altman is a skilled amoral sociopath who shouldn't be trusted with so much as kiddy scissors, and it should haunt Paul Graham that he didn't smother Altman's career when he had a chance.
We're also part Neanderthal. (Most people reading this message in 2024 are, anyway.) Their legacy got folded into ours. Why does their story have a sad ending?
Agreed on jitters about Altman. I'm just pointing out that the AI successor species people kind of have a point.
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The companies being a cult is a big part of their strategy.
Information secrecy is top notch, everyone willingly works insane hours and you can get engineers to do borderline illegal things (around data privacy and ownership) without being questioned.
I know a few people at Facebook AI research, MSR and (old) Google Brain. They seem normal. But folks at OpenAI, Anthropic & Deep mind are well known to be ..... peculiar (and admittedly smarter than I am).There's peculiar people at every part of every company. IME people at deep mind are not more peculiar than those working at other parts of Goog, and I certainly wouldn't describe them as cultists. Can't speak for the other labs.
On further thought, I have met more cultists at some of these companies, but a majority (50%+) have been normal. Also, can't exactly scale those anecdotes up.
With that reflection, I'll take back my earlier comment.
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I imagine many people of the more materialist bend are both more likely to be excited by AI and more likely to not believe uploading is extinction (in a way that matters).
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