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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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There is no such thing as mutually assured destruction. It does not exist, and the potential existence of such a nuclear exchange is still in the realm of fantasy.

That is not the case with the conventional competition from Asian autocracies, which is real, really happens, and is a real threat that we have already spilled the blood of countless generations trying to control.

Time to press the button?

I'd say the correct analogy is to the idea that a nuclear bomb will create an unstoppable chain reaction in the atmosphere.

MAD is nothing more than deploying ordinance. Ordinance that is already created, already armed, already combined with delivery systems which are already standing at the ready. None of those characteristics are shared with the AGI doomsday scenario, which is much more like the fear of the unknown in a new technology.

Let me know when the god machine is created, armed, deliverable, and ready.

I'm not sure I understand your position. At what point along the process of replacing all of our economy and military with robots, or at least machine-coordinated corporations, do you want to be notified?

When it is considered.

I will take the charge that the certainty of MAD (now) is greater than the certainty of a superintelligent machine, but I disagree that the unstoppable chain reaction idea is at all in the same ballpark. At this point it is pretty clear how a machine having human-level performance on intellectual tasks can be built, and scaling it up in a way that increases IQ score by common definition is then just a matter of pumping more and better compute (we haven't even dipped into ASICs for a specific NN architecture yet). The chain reaction thing, on the other hand, was based on hypothetical physics with no evidence for and lots of circumstantial evidence against (like Earth's continued existence in spite of billions of years in which natural nuclear chain reactions could have set off a similar event, and the circumstance that oxygen and nitrogen came to be in the universe in large quantities to begin with, implying upper bounds on how reactive they are in a nuclear chain reaction setting).

I'll take "risk of MAD, as seen from a 1940 vantage point" as a more appropriate analogy than either.

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