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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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more generous to people without negotiating power than altman

Huh? Altman seems to be genuinely motivated by AI dramatically improving life for all humans. I assume that coexists with the usual ambition and political ruthlessness, but the two can coexist, and altman seems like he'd support UBI along whatever personal spoils he wants. Anyway, i'd expect the 'generosity to people without negotiating power' of future AIs to be incredibly contingent on the way they're created and the situation they're in. And the same is true for humans - our 'generosity' is clearly genetically influenced and who we're generous to (other tribes? which social classes? universalism?) depends on upbringing, beliefs, etc.

Yud's foom claims were wrong, but when advanced AI becomes the 'driving force' of technological and civilizational action instead of humans, I don't see what would keep them from 'acting in human interests', in the way most people claim to understand human interests, even if it's been thoroughly RLHFed etc. Which makes 'alignment' concerns, broadly, correct. (Separate issue - what are human interests? Why should a superior being put its entire will into tending to the whims of lesser beings? Should we dedicate our time to maximizing bacterial satisfaction?). "Power-seeking" doesn't matter as much when we'll voluntarily give AI as much power as it can manage!

Agree on "gpt4 is misaligned" and waluigis being dumb though - "data quality is mixed, including lots of dumb people and copywriting and a few trolls, so it'll give incoherent outputs sometimes" is much better than "it's simulating a superposition of honest and trickster agents!!!!", which is optimistically a loose analogy and more realistically directly incorrect.

Yud's foom claims were wrong, but when advanced AI becomes the 'driving force' of technological and civilizational action instead of humans, I don't see what would keep them from 'acting in human interests', in the way most people claim to understand human interests,

Unless there's an entirely catastrophic outcome and AIs all have a single agenda imagined by people like Sam Altman, there are going to be many AI competing factions and and once there are bots with human-like fine motor abilities and greater than human intelligence, people will be almost entirely irrelevant except as pets/ pests to be managed.

Although I expect psyopping people into worshipping them and working like slaves in blissful fulfillment will be common initially.

'Human interest' will be even less important than it is now, when powers that be actually need to motivate people to do stuff.