This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As always your descriptions are on point, and I don’t disagree that our current situation is far from ideal assuming we have working AGI. I don’t have any sort of Stockholm syndrome about the status quo, in fact you could certainly put me in the effective accelerationism camp. (As much as that’s a coherent camp.)
My concerns are twofold - one, what if AGI does not ‘work as intended?’ What if we reach scaling limits soon, and only replace vast swathes of white collar work but don’t get into the recursive ASI machine god territory you seem to take for granted?
In that situation we could rapidly have a large class of people who are dispossessed, both economically and from a perspective of purpose, with our society. In the past these labor revolutions have primarily touched the underclass, but now we’re talking intelligent, well connected, moneyed classes being hit by massive layoffs all at once. Even if we do get ASI in 10-15 years it will be a brutal transition period.
Second, what if we do get ASI but TPTB succeed in regulating/controlling the systems to the degree where we do get a UBI, but everyone not owning a piece of the machine lives in gray square tenements the rest of their earthly lives?
Just because ASI holds promise doesn’t mean it automatically tears us from the embrace of ‘the festering undying corpse of our industrial civilization.’ Those poor incentives could well haunt us into the next era. I see no guarantee that ASI always decides to break our chains.
I do not actually assume recursively improving ASI in the true sense: returns from debugging and modest data engineering seem to have a ceiling, and we're not sure about much else working. But I also don't have to assume that.
Specifically my conservative prediction is something like this: near-term (<2027) AIs based on LLMs will have the general reasoning capability of a 130-140 IQ person as assessed either by success on real-world problems not loaded on esoteric knowledge or motor/perceptual abilities, or by long-term economic productivity; all the while being significantly cheaper to employ than such a person (say, <$3/hr, or <$3/amount of inference equivalent in output to 1 hour of such a person's labor).
What I do take for granted is that we have not exhausted the already published literature, to say nothing of in-house advances. Even GPT-4 is very likely far from the bleeding edge of research. Thus, I confidently say that it'd be asinine to expect the wave of progress that has carried us from GPT-2 to GPT-4 in four years to stop right about now, on white-collar midwit level – except by political fiat.
This conservative result would still be sufficient to blast through our current economic paradigm. Imagine multiplying the population of +2-2,5SD people in the world one hundredfold, but they only work and do not consume. Almost inevitably, in a few years we'll commodify human-level autonomous robotics, and that's, well, that's endgame.
It sure will. I don't expect much finesse even from well-meaning regulators.
Well, I basically buy that OpenAI is a new Manhattan Project, so that's not my biggest concern.
I’m glad you expect progress to continue. I do as well but I’m heavily biased so I try to temper my hopes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's always possible to say 'what if' . We have centuries of data to draw upon regarding new technologies. the track record for job destruction is poor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link