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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32261 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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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.

It's easier to see 'somehow we get ASI working for us or some subgroup of us' than 'everyone agrees to halt the race for power and profit and actually does so'. Not once in history has everyone stopped in a race for power and profit like this. Human cloning never even got off the ground, nobody was lobbying for it.

SALT/START seem like examples, albeit minor ones due to the difficulty of winning a nuclear war.

Also, I should note that a decent chunk of my P(~Doom) routes through WWIII removing AI as a thing-in-being-with-entrenched-interests.

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