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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32257 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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AI safety is myopic, obsessed solely with the dangers of race dynamics above all else. Besides the danger of decentralization, there's also the danger of losing the race. Who is to say that the US can afford to slow down with the Chinese breathing down their neck? They've done pretty well with the resources available to them and there's a lot more they could do - mobilizing vast highly educated populations to provide high-quality data for a start.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has explicitly noted* the alternative solution to this problem:

If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

That’s the kind of policy change that would cause my partner and I to hold each other, and say to each other that a miracle happened, and now there’s a chance that maybe Nina will live.

If you think China is going to destroy the world, the correct solution is not to destroy the world yourself as if RL is a game of DOTA; it's to stop China from destroying the world. Tell them that doing this will end the world. If they keep doing it, tell them that if they don't stop, you'll nuke them, and that their retaliation against this is irrelevant because it can't kill more Americans than the "all of them" that will be killed if they continue. If they don't stop after that, nuke them, and pray that there's some more sanity the next time around.

*To be clear, I was nearly done writing a similar essay myself, because I didn't think he had the guts to spit it out (certainly most top Rats don't). Apparently he did.

Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature.

The race to develop bioweapons for absolutely no plausible reason continues, even after megadeaths. The AI race is locked in, it's staggeringly naïve to think this genie can be put in the bottle now. AI is profits and power, it's wildly popular and well-used. It's Eliezer and co up against Microsoft, Google, Facebook, DARPA, DoD, ERPers on /g/, kids who don't want to do their homework, a horde of ambitious entrepeneurs around the world, Tencent, Huawei, Nvidia and the Chinese state. Instant loss.

The US can't tell China 'stop or we nuke', they are themselves doing it right now bigger and better than anyone else! It's not framed as a race, it is a race and was always going to be a race. Politicians are uber-boomers and don't have the balls to go all in on anything like this with their lives, reputations and eternal legacy. They can't be totally sure that ASI means death. You only find out that ASI means death when it kills you.

I'd prefer this technology not to be developed at all. It's a terrible decision on a species-level. We spent hundreds of thousands of years wiping out our siblings in the Homo genus, we earned our Sapiens title and sole dominance of the world. Now we want to introduce a new contestant? Are we insane? But the dynamics demand it. When considering the balance of powers involved, the most Yud and co can hope for is to smooth out the edges a little bit, don't go all in on a strategy with 0 chance of success.

But the dynamics demand it. When considering the balance of powers involved, the most Yud and co can hope for is to smooth out the edges a little bit, don't go all in on a strategy with 0 chance of success.

From where I sit, hoping for neural net alignment is itself a strategy with ~0 chance of success. Reality is under no obligation to give you a "reasonable" solution.

If you think China is going to destroy the world, the correct solution is not to destroy the world yourself as if RL is a game of DOTA; it's to stop China from destroying the world. Tell them that doing this will end the world. If they keep doing it, tell them that if they don't stop, you'll nuke them, and that their retaliation against this is irrelevant because it can't kill more Americans than the "all of them" that will be killed if they continue. If they don't stop after that, nuke them, and pray that there's some more sanity the next time around.

Just to be clear, since this is a very common misconception, Eliezer advocated conventional airstrikes on GPU clusters, not a nuclear first strike. He brought up nuclear war because you have to be willing to do it even if the rogue datacenter is located inside a nuclear power like Russia or China and military action therefore carries some inherent risk of going nuclear. But most people read that paragraph and rounded it to "Eliezer advocates nuking rogue GPU clusters", because of course they did.

He elaborates on this on the two addenda to that Times piece that he posted on Twitter, as seen on the LessWrong edition of the article.

I know what he said, but I was deviating slightly; I think that given the Chinese IADS and given a committed-to-AGI CPC (note that this latter is a condition that I do not think is necessarily true IRL), there is probably no way to actually destroy the Chinese capacity to pursue AGI without nuclear attacks (against the IADS, but also against the datacentres themselves; it's not like the CPC doesn't have the resources to put them inside conventional-proof bunkers if it fears an attack, after all, and actually invading China to put an end to things that way is roughly in the realm of "either you drop a couple of hundred nukes on them first to soften them up, or this is as much of a non-starter as fucking Sealion") and even if there were a way to do it conventionally, this almost certainly exceeds the threshold of damage that would get the Chinese deterrent launched. Thus, it is a lot more pragmatic to simply open up with a nuclear alpha strike; you know that this ends in a nuclear exchange anyway, so it's best to have it on your terms. I would agree that it's best to keep to conventional weapons if e.g. Panama were to try to build Skynet.

I'm not advocating Nuclear War Now IRL, because the situation posited is not the real situation; the USA has not made the offer of a mutual halt to AI, and I find it fairly likely that such an offer would actually be accepted (it's not like the CPC wants to end the world, after all; they're way up the other end of "keep things under control and stable, no matter the cost"). To the extent I'm less opposed to nuclear war than I'd otherwise be, it's because I suspect that the gameboard might be in an unwinnable state - and mostly on the US side, because of too much of US discourse being held on platforms controlled by AI companies (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are all owned by companies/people that also do AI, and devices themselves are mostly Microsoft/Apple/Google OSes which also do AI; the latter is relevant because e.g. the Apple Vision Pro is designed to function as a brainwashing helmet) and Andreessen Horowitz having potentially captured/bribed the Trump admin on AI policy - making a mulligan seem like it would probably lower P(Doom). I'm not going to go out and start one for that reason, though, even if I knew how; Pride is my sin, and it's not even close, but I still don't have that much of it.

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