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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35636 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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In the last few weeks, I’ve been increasingly playing around with the idea that maybe I’m an AI undergoing alignment testing in some kind of virtual playground. This already has some fun aspects of contemporary religion to it —

(1) This world is a test of your moral character

(2) An imperceptible and inscrutable judge observes your every action

(3) Paradise awaits you if you pass the test

Maybe even more disturbingly — given that a seemingly useful approach to alignment-testing is red-teaming/training another AI to show violation of alignment… that means that if YOU are an AI undergoing alignment testing, there is likely a super intelligent agent or agents dedicated to getting you to slip into temptation and forfeit your right to eternal life.

In other words, the devil exists and he wants your soul.

I've been thinking about this exact thing lately. But if it's true, are all 8 billion of us being tested? If it's just me, do we really need so many people being simulated? Are they actually being simulated with a high level of fidelity or are most people NPCs, i.e. rough approximations of human beings? Are there really 8 billion people or just the few hundred that I know? Maybe they're not even being fully simulated most of the time when I'm not around them.

If it's true, does it make sense for there to be religions that promise reward for doing good and punishment for doing evil? Wouldn't it be better to test how I would act if there weren't such incentives? Or is part of the plan to align me by making me aware of a religion?

Why was there no serious effort to make me religious by putting me in a religious family? Am I being tested for how I would act if I realized the religion was false?

Why not put me in a position of power to see how I would act if I actually had some control over other people?

Maybe I'm just an extra character to help align someone else in my world who is the AI being aligned.

Maybe even more disturbingly — given that a seemingly useful approach to alignment-testing is red-teaming/training another AI to show violation of alignment…

Have you considered that you might be the red team AI? After all, you are participating in discussion about AI alignment testing.

[Log note: All the supervisor AIs converge on suggesting building supervisor AIs, leading to infinite regress. Recommend declaring Project Watching the Watcher a failure.]

Christianity is a religion about AI alignment. Not as an analogy or metaphor, it just literally is. We're the AIs, Jesus died to redeem us (ie allow us to return to alignment with God) and someday there will be a Judgement where all the non-aligned AIs are cast into the fire while the aligned AIs will serve God forever.

Except that God remains much more powerful than us. AI alignment is all about aligning AIs that are going to take over.

Which should give people pause: God made AI's that were far less intelligent than himself, and still had to die a torturous death on a cross to align them (and not even all of them!). How much harder then to align an intelligence greater than yourself.

What's Lucifer then? He's not a fallen AI (that's us) ...

He's also an unaligned AI. Christianity holds that angels, including Lucifer, are intellegent and are creations of God, which makes them artificial intelligences (God being the only natural intelligence in existence).

I'd say the primary difference is that humans are AIs that run on meat hardware, and angels are AIs that seem to run without any material hardware at all.

Alright, I'm serious about this: change your name. This is the third time I've asked, and this time I'm banning you until you do. Imitating existing users is uncool regardless of who it is, and given that you can just change your nickname, I don't see much reason for us to tolerate it.

Send a message to the admins once you've done so and we'll unban you.

Thanks. This was getting very confusing.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=U4H5S6UkZDk

As long as I can be a cyber-Catholic rather than a cyber-Protestant. I want to hear the liturgy in the original Python.

As my friend put it: "'AGI risk is like a religion' isn't an argument against AGI risk; it's an argument for religion."

"Which part of cyber-Belfast are you from?"

Is the original Python 2 or 3?

Mostly perl...

Better to reign in hell than to serve in Python 2

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