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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34985 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I agree that there is bizarrely little focus on the possibility of our current institutions simply becoming worse, more powerful, and more totalizing versions of themselves. Although Andrew Critch and Paul Christiano have written detailed doom scenarios that look something like this. e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like

I agree that there is bizarrely little focus on the possibility of our current institutions simply becoming worse, more powerful, and more totalizing versions of themselves.

It's because their faith in the singularity is so strong that it dwarfs all other concerns.

I think that AI is going to make our lives worse, but it's going to be in mundane ways rather than dramatic total-annihilation-of-humanity sorts of ways. It's already possible with today's systems to do automated monitoring of all text, audio, and image content for hate speech and wrongthink. I'd be mildly surprised if we don't see this sort of thing come installed by default on all phones within the next few years. There will be a slow but steady trickle of jobs being replaced by AI, but there won't be enough mass unemployment to trigger serious discussions of UBI (not that UBI is a panacea anyway - we do an AI-powered analysis of your internet history to make sure your UBI money won't be used for hateful or seditious activities, and we've linked you to an anonymous account on "the moat dot org" that made some very concerning posts...). The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer; the benefits will not be in any way evenly distributed. The quality of daily life will continue to degrade as the internet becomes overrun with spam and chatbots become ubiquitous in more and more interactions.

None of this is a problem though if you think that the singularity is near. The general thinking among AI optimists seems to be that AGI will be here within the next decade, and via recursive self-improvement, AGI is just a short hop skip and a jump to ASI. ASI is presumed to have godlike powers to manipulate the physical universe and generate solutions to any conceivable problem. Turning all humans into paperclips, fully artificial private worlds, resurrecting the dead via simulation - nothing will be beyond its grasp. Obviously if such a thing comes to pass, then all current thinking about social ills will be rendered obsolete. What use do we have for "governments" or "jobs" or "money" when literal gods roam the earth? The singularity might be a utopia, or it might kill us all - but either way, it's going to be unlike anything that currently exists.

OpenAI seems to imply as much:

Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important—and hopeful, and scary—project in human history. Success is far from guaranteed, and the stakes (boundless downside and boundless upside) will hopefully unite all of us.

Well, if you're trying to build something as awesome as boundless upside, then you're absolved from having to actually think about the real-world implications of your technology. Nothing else matters if the rapture is near.

(I don't think the rapture is near.)

It's because their faith in the singularity is so strong that it dwarfs all other concerns.

How can you tell the difference between that and 'they genuinely believe it for, maybe flawed maybe not, complex, thought out reasons'? Er, what even is the difference?

Also, yud and many of the alignment people don't like openai's alignment approaches! They think capabilitise work should not happen.

I’m not sure what you mean. I think they do genuinely believe that the singularity is near and they are acting and thinking rationally based on that belief. I’m not accusing them of lying or being confused or anything.

If the robot god really will be here soon, then they are correct to not worry about any other smaller-scale effects of AI. My only disagreement with them is the probability of the robot god.

When 'faith' is used in the context of, like, a 'robot god', it's usually with the implication the belief is caused by some mechanism, or held in some manner, that isn't well-founded or rational - as a comparison to "faith in a god" in the religious sense, which was the potential disagreement

I don't think it takes a 'robot god' to have computers of some sort have more intelligence and agency than people do, and for that to transform 'everything that is familiar to us'

Thanks for the link, I haven't kept up on lesswrong for a while now. Glad to see stuff in this direction being discussed, at the very least.

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