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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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What I don’t understand about Elon is his push for Mars colonization, given his views on AI. AI is either going to kill us or greatly accelerate technological progress. If it kills us, it will find us on Mars. If it accelerates technology, it will make getting to Mars much easier than it is today. Given the likely progress of AI over the next 15 years, why is Elon bothering with trying to colonize Mars in the near future?

There are some "mutual kill" scenarios where we kill Skynet but Skynet unleashes something that kills all Earthbound humans (e.g. Operation Dark Storm, or an alga that isn't digestible, doesn't need phosphate and has a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO). Not high-probability, though.

There's also the AI-pessimist view: "neural-net alignment is impossible, so if neural-net AGI happens we're all doomed". No point planning for worlds where you're dead anyway; you want to play to 1) stop near-term AGI, 2) succeed in an AGI-less world. This a) negates your point, but also b) means you probably want to have "building things" projects that aren't AI, in order to pull the smart, driven people out of the AI field (where their talents are an outright detriment to humanity).

Plus Elon poured blood, sweat and tears into his rocketry well before near-term AI looked likely. How could he think about it rationally, SpaceX is his baby! It's got X in its name.

Even if the purest rational move is to go all in on AI and drop the Mars mission, he's already invested so much into the latter it's too hard to give up.

Yeah but based on the past two hundred years of human history, you will always have an easier time doing anything if you wait fifteen years. In fifteen years time the ai will be good at getting us to Mars, but if we wait another fifteen years on top of that the ai will be even better at getting to Mars! You can always find a reason to wait, the 'any delay is death' philosophy allows Musk to do things we didn't think possible.

Elon might be able to get humans to Mars before someone creates a computer superintelligence, but it seems very unlikely he could create a self-sustaining Martian colony before superintelligence is created.

Interesting that strong AI is now taken as consensus? I believe superintelligence is not possible. LLMs hitting a ceiling recently is one sign for that, but I don’t believe LLM can be intelligent anyway.

I believe superintelligence is not possible.

I see no reason to expect that humans are the most intelligent being possible.

I hope that AIs are nowhere close to that. LLM managing to succeed here would be just sad, being outcompeted by glorified Markov chains would be too much.

Strong AI (and strong AI hurtling towards humanity) has enjoyed a lot of general agreement on the Motte for years. So much so that the odd user here and there will express a sudden disinterest in the culture war, the result of a belief that AI will come soon and obliviate every modern-day political concern by turning Earth into a paradise or a hellscape mountain range of paperclips.

One user maybe a year ago posted a big departure comment saying that everyone here was stressing him out talking about AI so much, and how mind-blowingly fantastically utterly unrecognizable the world with AI will be. He couldn't handle it and took the grill pill. A good choice, I think.

To your point about LLMs and intelligence, it doesn't matter what theory of intelligence you use. If it can be programmed to talk, it can be programmed to laugh, or cry, or scream in pain; and then people are going to try to give it voting rights.

It does, but it's about the attitude. Necessity is the mother of invention you know? Behave as if you have no choice but to find a solution and you will likely find solutions that never occurred to anyone before. Ai might kill us in 15 years, or solve everything or hit a cap we didn't previously understand or anticipate. Elon wants to go to Mars now though, so that means throwing everything he can now at it.

Probably better to have our eggs in more than one basket and no one else was making that one happen.

Yes, but building multiple underground bunkers run on geothermal power that have mass food stockpiles would probably do more to increase humanity's survival chances than trying to colonize Mars would.

A sufficient speed differential between Earth and a kilometer wide object would literally destroy the Earth, flipping it inside out and melting it.

Maybe if the goal is solely survival. But there is something romantic about trying to expand the aim of humanity and to raise it to heights it dreamt but never could achieve. Colonizing Mars may not per se by smart but it is human and I hope to see it in my life time.

Right, I just said so elsewhere in this thread. Btw food stockpiles are good but the ability to grow more is a much bigger deal. No telling how long that winter will last.

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