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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Thus I'm going to give the chad "yes". Maybe one day I get killed by a robot, and maybe that robot is not conscious and has no self-awareness. That it killed me proves nothing.

I think you're burying the lede here, it matters how a machine kills you.

If you get run over by a Waymo robotaxi because of a sensor glitch, you're dead, but it's an entirely different story if some misaligned AGI seized control of all robotaxis and systematically started murdering humans. The former is machine error and/or stupidity. The latter is intelligence.

I don't really care about whether they have qualia or consciousness, and make no positive claims in that regard, my argument is that those factors, or even 'reasoning' in a human manner, matter not a jot when it comes to the prospect of creating entities far more intelligent than us and which could kill us using that intelligence. It could well lack a grasp of the ineffable redness of red, but it can still act in ways that increase rgb(255,0,0) as measured by its visual sensors when it shoots you.

Something like dumb grey-goo, or synthetic biological equivalents, are almost certainly going to be the products of intelligence.