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We haven't drifted from the high-decoupling crowd, the crowd has drifted away from high-decoupling. I used to love these sorts of thought experiments, now I roll my eyes at them at best.
Right, because the Culture War has taught many the lesson that an invitation to engage in high-decoupling analysis is a trap.
Okay, teleport back to the 1700s. You're a Christian. A high decoupler invites you to a talk about how to assess the historicity of the bible. Do you accept?
On the one hand, yeah, it's a trap to
convince you to be a non-denominational Deistdamn you to hell for eternity and expel you from polite society.On the other hand, the person's more right than they know, because the Christian God actually isn't real!
The ideologies and material practices of the next 50 years will be different from those of today, in ways that will necessarily not be emotionally 'coupled' in the way today's issues are. By refusing to 'decouple', you're covering your ears as the world changes around you.
La-la-la, can't hear you.
Honestly, "Christian God not real!" and you know this how? Oh, Science, blah blah blah, let's argue this out with the same arguments for the past three hundred years.
That's not a good example - they were right for the wrong reasons? they were right but didn't know how right they were? they were right because I know they were right because I don't believe in Christian God?
I'm sure society will be very different in 50 years time. I've already seen huge changes in the society I grew up in, over the past 40 years. But that does not mean that someone proposing a 'decoupled' idea is right; am I to 'emotionally uncouple' and go "well back when I was in my 30s it was generally frowned upon to rape 6 year olds, but hey today is a different era and let's not cover our ears as the world changes!"
Evolution by natural selection is easily the most important 'theological' thing to ever happen, it (together with history) explains every impulse that God is claimed to have given to man by independent choice. Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science - even today's Christians still claim various modern miracles (and if you investigate one of them deeply enough, it inevitably collapses). Like, how does Christianity relate to AGI? It doesn't! Does this mean AGI won't happen?
It means that some of them are in some parts right, and if you don't decouple you'll not be able to notice that
Your question can be broken down into two parts (I'm assuming AGI means "Artificial General Intelligence").
(1) How does Christianity relate to AGI?
On the same basis it relates to all other creations of humanity and the way we conduct ourselves, are we trying to make a heaven on earth that will instead result in a hell on earth?
(2) Does this mean AGI won't happen?
Yes. But that's because I don't believe all the hopes/fears about Fairy Godmother AI and Paperclippers. We'll get machine intelligence of a kind, but we won't get Colossus or HAL or the Culture AIs. What we'll get will be even more of the same that we're seeing now - using AGI to fake up term papers etc., to generate articles for online and mainstream media, to assist scammers in scamming, and used as a very blunt sorting instrument by government. White collar jobs will now be as precarious as blue collar jobs have been. But we're not going to get the Singularity, post-scarcity, or even dystopias. Just more of the same, even faster.
The argument is incredibly compact. Do you believe that 1) computers can't have the intelligence and independent action of humans, despite obvious material paths to accomplishing that we currently are aggressively pursuing or that 2) we won't unleash that intelligence and independent action, despite the truly enormous potential individual and collective benefits of doing so?
Like, a million years ago there weren't humans (homo sapien). We evolved. Whether or not you believe in god, the fossil record and DNA clearly demonstrates that. Imagine a million years from now. If we create things smarter and more capable than ourselves, why won't they end up on top in a million years, in the same way we did?
And how long does it look like it'll take? A thousand seems more plausible than a million, given computers weren't a thing 200 years ago. A hundred or two seems more plausible than a thousand. And suddenly it's an issue for your grandchildren, at least.
(1) Yup (2) Also yup - "unleashing intelligence and independent action" my left foot, there won't be any happy-clappy choice about it: it will be "use AI or your business is not competitive", and as always, AI will be to make the rich richer and nothing to do with "every single existing human will suddenly be rich and happy". AI will be used to nudge us into buying more crap to make big businesses even more profitable. That's the path, why do you think Microsoft etc. are working so hard on it? To make a Third World Indian peasant farmer into the equivalent of a Californian middle class tech employee?
To quote an anecdote about Irish political history, "Ireland will get its freedom and you still be breaking stones".
We got here - metal towers that scrape the sky, man's foot touching the moon, seeing the faces and hearing the voices of men ten thousand miles away, a billion peoples' labor acting in a decentralized yet coordinated dance - purely by human intelligence and capability. The specific structures of morality, governance, economy, and society that we imagine are fixed were created by us and for our purposes. They have changed, and they will change.
If we create something smarter than us, why won't it do the same - create its own structures, that wn't involve us? Now, you describe accurately what microsoft wants. But Microsoft doesn't get everything it wants. And microsoft only wants what it wants because those specific social and material technologies make them powerful. What makes microsoft want money or powerful computers? They lend Microsoft and employees power, influence, capability. What'll give Microsoft even more of that? Creating AGI. Giving AGI more power and influence. And then the AGI can, uh, do that itself. And then?
500 years ago, "capitalism" and "computers" didn't exist. Why do you expect computers and capitalism to last for another 500 years, "just as it's always been". "consumerism" and "profitable joint stock corporations", that's just how it is, haha. Nothing caused that, and whatever caused it certainly can't change, we can't lose our position as kings of the world.
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What's your stance on human free will?
A reasonable question, and an important one, but not one I really want to discuss right now tbh.
I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago. Whether there's something non-mechanistic going on with the universe - important, tied up in why people are so attracted to things like Christianity, but still doesn't prove Christianity true.
That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.
I agree there's a lot to think about there. But the materialist narrative isn't at all dishonest, I think it's clear how an honest and discerning person would come to believe that, even if wrong. It's very easy to be horrifically wrong without being dishonest.
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When the 6 year olds are potentially smarter and stronger and more intelligent than the average human alive today, then it becomes a farcical hill to die on. I chuckle at the mental image of telling a transhuman gigachad "child" that they're not allowed to have sex because of rules put in place before they were beyond the fervent dreams of futurists.
Changes of a similar magnitude are about to happen, in decades rather than centuries. For a more prosaic example, all the legal and moral injunctions against drunk driving cease to apply when the vehicles are autonomously driving themselves.
If your future six year old is as big, strong, intelligent, and developmentally mature as a 30 year old of today, then they'll be adults. Adults can have sex.
What we are talking about is "in twenty years time, when six year olds are still at the development rate that six year olds of today are, will the cultural viewpoints have shifted to make it acceptable for 30 year old adults of then to fuck six year olds of then?" and not some fevered transhumanist dream.
Decades won't make a difference, and I think you are vastly overestimating the rate and ease of technological progress to bring your dream about. As to autonomous vehicles - well, let's wait and see how that turns out. A drunk guy decides to over-ride his autonomous vehicle? That's going to incur the same legal penalties. Somebody hacks the software for the lulz and makes cars drive into crowds? Ditto. Nobody is going to say "well it was a driverless car, there's no law about that!"
Congratulations! You've now decoupled from the current implications of being a 6 year old child, and considered how norms might change as circumstances do. I wonder what the implications are that certain people have very different cognitive maturities at different ages, wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to wait two decades to consider whether a 16 yo child getting admitted to MIT might benefit from a waiver of the restrictions typically enforced on all teens till an arbitrary and not particularly well grounded age?
The point of decoupling is that it lets you see that the differences you perceive as qualitative are merely quantitative, even if in this particular scenario there's likely no actual 6 year old child out there with the cognitive abilities of a typical adult.
As for the whole "fevered transhumanist dream" bit, well there's nothing I need to tell you that reality won't set straight shortly. I don't think you're in such ill health that you can't reasonably expect to be around in 20 years to see for yourself. I for one enjoy it immensely when the genre of reality itself changes to science fiction, while reserving my judgement of whether or not to add the dystopia/utopia tag afterwards.
Funny, I thought we were talking about adults fucking six year olds and not "very Smart Big Brain teenager start uni sooner, yes yes?"
You seem to be shifting your ground.
No, that's a clear example of decoupling a fact, someone having existed from a temporal duration of 6 round trips of the Earth around the Sun, from the current implications of said facts. Offering examples of why decoupling is laudable is not shifting the ground.
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I would like to be confident we'll all be immortal in 20 years, but so far bright-eyed futurists have been vastly overoptimistic. So many new things, and yet things are mostly the same.
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I'm not refusing to decouple, I'm refusing to publicly engage in high-decoupling analysis with someone acting in bad faith. The only point in publicly engaging in Aella's thought experiment is to demonstrate that I'm willing to consider something generally considered anathema.
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Even anonymously?
I guess Nybbler understood "trap" different than I did, but for me anonymity does not enter into it.
I'm not afraid of being caught expressing a naughty opinion and getting cancelled (well there's that too, I guess), I think all these high-decoupling thought experiments are a lie. Their goal isn't to analyse something from all possible avenues, their goal is to get you to agree with something you normally wouldn't, by presenting you with a novel scenario that you didn't have time to process fully yet. It would be bad enough if this game had fair rules, but the same people who demand you change your mind on abortion, because of your answer to a convoluted scenario involving an abducted violinist, feel no obligation to participate in the conversation when you point out their logic justifies infanticide as well. This is why the "lower class" responses that Hanania is whining about are 100% correct, as they refuse to participate in something that was not put forward in good faith.
Yes, there's that trap too.
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Even pseudonymously; you burn that pseudonym. Anonymously, sure, but then you're just jerking around on 4chan or the equivalent.
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