This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think that asking for a path to it becoming anything "in a human sense" is just trying to force the problem into a domain where it is easy for you to dismiss concerns, because deep down you feel that whatever magic spark defines humans isn't there and the expectation that at some point it would appear is as laughable and unfounded as it was with tech from a few hundred years ago. It might be easy to misunderstand the "AI doom" arguments as resting on some assumption that AI will become human-like, given that proponents talk about the AI "wanting" or "feeling" things all the time, but I think most of this is just nerds playing fast and loose with the notion of volition - we say things like "this triangle wants to have approximately equal angles" all the time.
AI doesn't need "agency", "personality" or "self-awareness" to cause killbots to be built. In fact, all of the critics' dismissals can be true, if you want. The thing is that LLMs can already produce reasonable lists in response to a prompt to break down a goal into steps, and they can generate plausible paragraphs of spite when prompted to imitate a human response to slander. We can grant that there is no real thinking or emotion or anything behind this and it's all just synthesised from lots of examples of similar things in the training corpus, because this does not matter: these capabilities only need to get quantitatively better for someone to hook up "break down into subgoals until you generate Terraform scripts for the servers controlling our fab" and "generate an essay arguing for a top-level goal that a reasonable human would pursue", and the latter comes out to "burn it all down" by roll of the dice and too much edgy posting in the training set. You can ascribe all the agency behind the resulting killbots to the 20something humans with more VC money than common sense who will build and deploy the system but be too lazy to monitor it, but it doesn't change the outcome.
Oh, I see.
"AI Doom" includes a scenario where humans are the actors that cause the bad outcome using AI.
In other words, humans might try to do really bad things.
Yep. We agree.
Nothing new under the sun.
The difference between the scenario I outlined and the most clichéd Mother Brain story you can come up with does not seem particularly relevant in my eyes - of course humans cause any bad outcome in either case, per a simple but-for causality test, because humans could collectively stop doing technology and then we would neither get "make step-by-step instruction for killbots" AI nor the "believes it is a god and can put its money where its mouth is" AI. In the same vein, I'd say some Australopithecus's decision to reproduce caused every bad outcome we experienced and will experience - though probably you have a different view of causality that privileges "full-fledged humans" in some way, so another entity's causal "responsibility" can't flow through them. Either way, I don't see how whether one sees the potentially doombringing AI as an agent with feelings has any influence on whether one should be concerned about AI doom and what one should do about it. P-zombie AIs build the same killbots and respond to the same interventions.
Could you try to rephrase your post? I don't understand a lot of the references in it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link