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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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So, my church doesn't have an official position on this, but the unofficial one I've seen in a lot of places is that if 'true' GAI happens it'll be used as a puppet by demons.

This makes sense on a secular level if we translate demons to something like Scott's take on Moloch. Naturally-emergent suboptimal (or downright deleterious) local minima / pernicious local attractors in the possibility space of ways-of-being, of niches.

But I don't see why it needs to be either/or.

It's a surprisingly wise position re: human Agency but it's still going to be very easy to manipulate by any system with above human intelligence.

I am not a member of any organized religion, but I think that your post nails something very important.

And is pragmatic intelligence really anything other than an ability to objectively survey the field, especially when that means being able to see past the local maximum to a higher one?

But though I agree with you at least in that there is a similarity between the religious notion of a demon and the possible darkness of AI, I am not convinced that the argument makes sense unless I accept your metaphysical perspectives. From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?

I suppose the non-secular, more optimistic argument would hold that humans have some kind of extra sauce, something that naturally makes them less demonic, maybe more altruistic, than an AI following pure gradient descent on matrix math would have. But what is the evidence that this is true?

And I say this as someone who thinks that consciousness might be beyond the ability of humans to ever understand. But when it comes to ordered/demonic, I'm not sure why the AI would tend to be more demonic, unless I buy into some kind of metaphysics that I see no reason to buy into so far at least.

From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?

Darwin. The human brain, and its various chordate forerunners, is the product of hundreds of millions of years of ruthless selection forces; who knows how many vulnerabilities and failure modes both gross and subtle have been winnowed out over the aeons?

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