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…I think you should read another guru, preferably one who never made it to Twitter. Prigozhin (not to be confused with the catering/suicide squad dude), Pitirim Sorokin, Kojève, maybe Wolfram if you want spicy stuff.
They are. Kamala Harris, for example, is clearly more competent than Yud. As evidence: she wins, and now is «coordinating» AI policy.
Technocratic fetishization of getting Really Serious People In Charge is tiresome once you see enough of it in the fossil record. Technocracy is unworkable and undesirable. With 10% YoY growth we'll build general-purpose pandemic countermeasures on spare change, as an afterthought, with the same clowns in charge. We do these things often. Overpasses for wild animals, prohibition on lead-laced gasoline. Just small fixes popular with the public, when extra capacity is found.
Doesn't it? What if it does?
I think it's embarrassing when Yud condescends to monke… people with that rhetoric, though I can see how identifying with his posture can make one feel wiser. He strawmans personally disliked opinions on very nontrivial questions like complexity, emergence, economic equilibria, mechanistic account of development of AI goals, optimization processes, risk tradeoffs, game theory, international treaties etc… to support a stilted predefined conclusion that relies more on intuition about tropes in irony-poisoned Anglo-Japanese millenial fiction. This isn't really all that cool. Lesswrongers may feel they've broken into the Tropeverse with all the AI stuff and it validates their world model as a whole, but it doesn't, they haven't, and it's still uncool and, more importantly, prevents them from updating on evidence.
Yeah, technological progress is cool, which is my point. It allows me to dunk on Americans from another hemisphere, even though they've invented all this crap, and they can understand me. First mover advantages do not necessarily need to centralization.
(A wild thought: thanks to AI my children will theoretically be able to not learn English, and think properly, in Russian and some other languages).
No, it's the property of being things that optimize for their welfare really well.
And before you say anything about instrumental convergence: please consider on whose behalf a realistically trained, profitable in deployment, decision-making AI assistant will pursue them.
I did not mean what I said specifically as a slight against our current rulers, but rather as a general reproach of human rationality. In the end, it's just far far easier for present-day people to imagine that future people will show concern for something, than it is for anyone in the present day to do anything differently. The former is cheap and scores lots of social points; the latter, expensive.
I have seen his Twitter replies. I do not think it is good for him to be as arrogant and condescending as he is, but I understand.
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