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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Yeah, reactiveness is underestimated – when they’re mapping out dramatic scenarios, they tend to ignore possible responses in their extrapolations. So climate change may well increase mosquito penetration, tornadoes or whatever, but if they ever reach a critical threshold, we can wipe out all mosquitoes, build tornado-resistant houses etc. If an AI decides to kill us with a virus, we will have an AI pumping out defense proteins too. Explosive mini-killbots => body armor. Energy ROI sinking => all in nuclear. Plus all the good responses we haven’t thought about yet, unknown unknowns work both ways. No doom scenario survives contact with the enemy.

I’ve always found the Cassandra story strange, as it seems the opposite is far more common : enthusiastically believed doom predictions left and right, and nary a storm in sight. I think people are incentivized to be doomers as a haggling tactic. Things are bad => I’m unhappy => give me stuff. Optimism is for suckers, even if it is more accurate. You can’t get a good deal if you advertise your satisfaction.

But while it started as a negotiating tactic, lately people have started believing the lie to an unhealthy degree, paralyzing them. Here in germany half the news stories are about the ‘climate apocalypse’ that seemingly awaits us. Everyone's hysterical, I can't tell which of my friends are naturally depressed and which take this stuff at face value anymore. And here on the motte, a large amount of comments find it necessary to add an asterisk saying ‘if we’re not all dead from AI by then”.

Some of it may just be neuroticism or some other evolutionary residue like you say, better safe than sorry when you used to live among venimous animals. The slave morality/ Oppression olympics/Whining Contest regime we’re currently living under doesn’t help.

I'm pretty sure that building "tornado-resistant houses" is not an approach that is viable on a larger scale. We're talking about tornadoes, after all.

Also, I assume that wiping out mosquitoes would necessitate using lots of chemical pesticides, similar to DDT, for example. Chemicals with side effects etc. Who would stand for that?

Nah baby just fire up the gene drive.

AI really is different though. Unlike other worries such as climate change or killer bees or whatever, it is itself intelligent and can adapt. Humanity no longer has an asymmetrical advantage.

I'm not going to make any specific doomerish predictions here except to say that neither you, nor I, nor EY have any idea what's coming with AI, whereas I can confidently say we will mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

Intelligence really is singular.

Every worry is unlike every other. In terms of qualitative danger, AI is more like other worries than commonly believed, because its unique property of reactiveness, which it shares with us, loads on both ends of the scale. Sometimes it's about optimizing for the exact same criterion, just with outputs going to different people. Cases in point:

and so on. Importantly, this isn't the case where the defense has to crush every single attack to be successful whereas attackers need to only triumph once, like doomers often say. Successful attacks will not be existentially threatening (unless the attacker does have a tremendous advantage in technical capability, but that's trivial and a good reason to commoditize the technology, if anything). Attacks still have cost, their perpetrators still work with limited resources, leave a footprint and are vulnerable to discovery, and while it is not a given that attackers learn effectively from each other, the next iteration of defense is better-informed; until attacks run into fundamental constraints.

All that information will be banned, just as facial recognition software has been banned for police

US cities are already reversing facial recognition bans, New Orleans did just a few months ago iirc. If it works, it will happen.

I know this is a hobby horse, but once AI is trained on gait recognition and body language of labelled examples of millions of hours of countless criminals’ movements recorded by CCTV, tiny little telltale patterns might well allow for effective pre-crime in the case of almost all premeditated criminal activity. People show their nerves, everyone has a tell, etc.

I have trouble believing there's enough information content present in CCTV streams to uniquely identify individuals confidently. I see how it maybe could work, but it's not something I'd focus on directly. Are human gaits really that different as to be identifiable from distant security cameras? Are they even consistent for a single person day-to-day?

The longer I think about it, I've also started thinking that AI likely scales sub-linearly (logarithmic?) with the size of the training dataset. "But the AI can viably consider a larger dataset than human experts" may be true, but may not generate hugely better results.

Interesting! Any good papers or summary articles you'd recommend?

Sure, there's a decades-long history of forensic gait analysis (long predating AI of course) in criminology. A nice overview is here. It's actively employed in China integrated with AI, although not widely in the West. In the West, gait analysis by experts has been a feature of trials for a long time - even before CCTV, it was used (and still is) on footprints left at crime scenes to identify suspects.

The challenge, of course, is that for now the applications of current forensic gait analysis are highly limited. The lack of comprehensive gait libraries for the wider population means that, unlike DNA (at least in recent memory) it's generally only used to support attempts to prove a suspect on trial was or was not someone in video footage. The real benefit is in scanning a library of millions or billions of hours of video taken from a network of surveillance cameras (which have ideally already been used to build up a 'library' of the entire population) to find possible 'matches' (the search space can be narrowed by geography and other quantitative or qualitative information recorded by police) in the general public, just like police DNA databases and Ancestry.com data are today.

In the West, research has been slow for a while. It's generally focused on identifying diseases like Parkinsons, the racing industry uses it for analysing horses etc, so a lot of Western research uses Lidar and multiple cameras; these achieve extremely high accuracy (often over 90%), but obviously aren't hugely helpful when the footage is actually blurry black-and-white CCTV at night.

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