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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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I mean, I ignored that the AI would have a plethora of ways to kill a person directly.

Fly a drone in through a window and spray any given toxin in their face, then fly it out.

Hijack their car's software, disable the brakes at an opportune time.

I'm sort of gesturing at the fact that a superintelligent AI can probably carry out Rube-Goldberg-esque plans with enough precision to hit multiple targets at once, with the aim of achieving multiple goals at once, all without immediately tipping any observers off as to their ultimate plans.

So assuming their ultimate plan isn't to just kill humanity as a whole, there is an 'interesting' world that emerges that ultimately bends towards the AI's preferences but doesn't necessarily require omniscience and 'solving' the game. The AI still has to adjust the plan in progress, might miss some of its targets, and unforeseen events can still surprise it, but nonetheless, the state of the world ticks inexorably towards the outcome it wants.

And its moves can occur on such a high dimension that no single human, even given access to all the necessary information, could see what its doing or even hope to outsmart it.

Yes, it's an interesting theory. I guess my point is that due to information friction I think humans can carry out plans - perhaps ones that might not be as good as those of a theoretical superintelligence, but still plans that confound observers. I mean shoot there's still (good faith?) arguments about whether COVID-19 was a lab leak or not despite all the evidence there.

Now, and I apologize for the tangent, but if the scenario you describe came about (or even became plausible) it would be unfalsifiable, leading to a world where Superintelligence replaces the Illuminati as the hidden hand behind world events.

Yes, exactly.

And then we're living in a world where even our own motivations for taking a given action could be the result of an upstream manipulation.