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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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It's not just the lack of trust in EAs, E/Accs' approach also seems to lead down a dark path. Basically, I expect the same result as what happened with software, social media, and the Internet generally. At least with software there's the FOSS movement, as helpless as it ultimately turned out to be. Is there a Stallman of AI? Is there even a fraction of energy behind him that there was for FOSS in the 90's and 00's?

Open models, data sets, and training/inference code have become a pretty big thing. In general e/acc is highly favorable toward this.

I completely agree with you about EA. My point is that you need to play the game with your own side and try to find likeminded people to support. Running away is a losing move.

Of course you personally not wanting to do that is understandable. But when it comes to what is better to do it requires people who try to create alternative platforms and participate in them.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle. Either they monopolize the genies, or others use them too.

Wel, like I said, it's not just the EAs, it's also the E/Accs that I have a problem with.

As for not being able to put the genie back in the bottle, yeah that's one of my fears, but I don't know if this is already decided. By current demographic trends, the Amish are scheduled to inherit America. AI might very well turn out to be a suicidal technology, and Luddites the only survivors.

There will be no survivors. You think not having a cell signal saves you from a Paperclip Maximizer that's demolishing the biosphere for spare parts? Come the fuck on.

I think the Paperclip Maximizer is a boogeyman, and if AI does cause us to go extinct, it will be in a completely different manner than the AI-safety people predict. Like I said above, this is precisely what drives me up the wall in this conversation.

I do not see how there's any remotely plausible world where AI somehow causes us to go extinct while sparing the Amish. Unless the Amish have some really sick data centers hidden under those barns of theirs.

X, no. X is X. You get an AI that wins, the Amish are just more raw material.

The Amish would do better than city-slickers in a lot of GCRs, though, most obviously nuclear war and pandemics. Non-Amish country bumpkins would do fine in a pandemic, but less so in a nuclear war due to the EMP problem. And it's not implausible that a "failed Skynet" could start a nuclear war and/or spread a "normal" GoFed pandemic before getting destroyed.

The idea that homesteaders/preppers/the Amish might do better in a collapse of the modern world seems reasonable to me. We keep ant farms and shit, maybe the Amish long standing commitments to being low tech make them a safer prospective pet population. I also never understood why turning everything in the light cone into paperclips was so much more plausible than just all the easily available metal or other variations on the, AI with orthogonal values fucks up the world but doesn't actually make it uninhabitable.

We keep ant farms and shit, maybe the Amish long standing commitments to being low tech make them a safer prospective pet population.

That is an incredibly tenuous assumption to say the least!

I also never understood why turning everything in the light cone into paperclips was so much more plausible than just all the easily available metal or other variations on the, AI with orthogonal values fucks up the world but doesn't actually make it uninhabitable.

  1. A Maximizer maximizes, all resources for which the cost of extraction and utilization is less than the benefits of putting it to use will eventually be used, Earth's biosphere is not particularly attractive compared to the resources of the rest of the Universe, but it has the notable property of being right at Ground Zero where a hostile AGI can make use of it. And nothing prevents it from building Von Neumanns to claim the rest while it steadily munches on us.

  2. Acquiring resources and power are convergent goals for an enormously wide range of possible values. You don't even need to be a monomaniacal Utility Maximizer to want more mass and energy to put to good use.

  3. Humans are intelligent entities that can think and plan, and in this particular case, create yet more misaligned AGI, since you have an existence proof they just created one. They need to be eliminated or at least neutralized, the latter being far more likely.

A Maximizer maximizes

I have seen no evidence that explicit maximzers do particularly well in real-world environments. Hell, even in very simple game environments, we find that bags of learned heuristics outperform explicit simulation and tree search over future states in all but the very simplest of cases.

I think utility maximizers are probably anti-natural. Have you considered taking the reward-is-not-the-optimization-target pill?

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I think it's far less likely that we die at the hands of an unaligned autonomous AI, than we do via standard naked monkey shenanigans, with a non-autonomous AI being a catalyst. Noping out doesn't guarantee survival, but there are plausible scenarios where it results in it.