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 -
I believe there are two broad scenarios for what might happen with ML from an economics/politics perspective.
Scenario 1 is that ML will be a powerful productive tool (ie capital) in the hands of those that can afford it just like many other inventions throughout history.
If this happens the reaction will be along the lines we all know too well. The left will complain that those in power gain even more power and now have novel ways to control and/or extract value from workers. Plus a lot more low-skilled people will become unemployable and redundant so class tensions will probably get worse. On the flip side a few smart early movers will make insane bank and shape the way the next few decades will go. Could be interesting to see how different nation states adopt the new technology.
Scenario 2 is the "things get crazy" scenario. What if ML takes off far quicker than people are expecting, for example by recursively improving itself? I believe in that case we might be unable to fit the development into our usual political lens. If one company has twice as much capital than everyone else combined our systems of power distribution fall apart. If one nation has capabilities that make it effectively invincible our models for foreign relations stop working. If that happens it will be more akin to a scenario where superintelligent aliens have landed on earth and all bets are off.
I expect that "recursively improving itself" will lead to the AI going off into the weeds -- that is, evolving in ways unconnected to the real world. The output will quickly become bizarre and not particularly useful. It works for formal systems like Go because the rules are well-defined, but you can't simulate reality to a sufficient degree of precision.
I think the idea behind recursive self-improvement is more like, a 150 IQ AI should be able to find a way to increase its IQ to 151, a 151 IQ AI should be able to increase its IQ to 152, and so on and so forth until it reaches godhood.
It doesn't necessarily have to simulate large portions of reality, if it's able to find a way to isolate the factors responsible for its g factor and come up with a generalized way of making improvements to those factors. Presumably as part of the cycles of improvement it could interact with the real world in order to get more training and data. But this sort of scenario has its own issues.
Especially if it can spin up various copies of itself and make minute changes to see how that effects performance. Basically massive, parallel experimentation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm a little disconcerted at how many people who are working in the industry seem to hold this as the explicit goal and are intentionally maneuvering things so as to prevent anyone from intervening until it's too late.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link