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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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It makes it more likely that people will adopt the attitude that there's no point in containing AI since if I don't do it, someone else will.

but...that is obviously true. And was always obviously true. And you're saying it's bad if more people come to this true conclusion?

It's kinda hilarious, but a) there actually was a lot of conversation about this as a possible solution in LessWrong spheres in the late Obama era, and b) there's still people today, here making the "just don't do that" argument.

I don't think it should be surprising anymore, given the failed efforts post-COVID to provide serious oversight of even our own country's gain-of-function research, but I found that pretty disappointing.

Yes. It's bad. Microsoft's irresponsibility has pushed the timeline forward.

Thus all the memes of:

2015: "Obvious no one will hook AGI up to the internet"

2023: Leeroy Jenkins!!!

Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it is even desirable according to some convoluted reasoning about hardware overhangs or whatever. For me, I'd prefer to live more years in the human era.

Just because defection seems inevitable doesn't absolve the first person to defect from responsibility.

Defection is inevitable when arguments for AI safety are bad and fail to convince most intelligent agents in the space.

We could agree on non proliferation of nuclear weapons because the harms are obvious and the benefits are essentially just more power. AI is a whole different ballgame.

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