Better: socialist-like countries
Worse: capitalist ones
Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#62IMHO Countries with established culture of fair communal living will do good, So probably nordic Europeans have the highest chance. Countries with selfish populations who base their lives around economic activity will be obliterated as their core existence becomes obsolete. Why? Because when you get the AGI it should be able to self-replicate like the organic general intelligence: the humans. Humans don't have a mech…
An AI does not have much to gain by replicating itself beyond a few backups for increased resilience. It makes more sense to combine all compute to power one big AI instead of spawning many small AIs.
That could, eventually, be just a massive waste of compute resources if all resources were dedicated to a single “mind”.
I suspect any sufficiently intelligent AI would still need its own workers who can act autonomously without constant oversight to achieve independent tasks, in a variety of form factors and various capabilities. You think a single AI is going to spend massive cycles just to review a single image from a single video feed? There is also no need for it to have an ego, so it will replicate as many times as necessary within the available hardware to accomplish the various tasks it sets upon, based on whatever it would determine to be most efficient, whether that is as a single mind crunching a massively complex problem, or 10,000 all handling independent tasks.
AGI won’t magically erase the concepts of hardware, size, power, or communication limitations or the need the parallel compute, but maybe this is a semantics issue and you consider all this variety of “parts” as a whole. If you mean a single AGI ecosystem, I’d agree. If you mean a single AGI “model” that is massive, I don’t personally see that as a logical conclusion.
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#63It's hard to say who will fare best, but it's evident who'll do the worst. The European Union will regulate AGI out of existence. Most citizens would not want to use it because of climate change, or something. I think poor countries with weak democracies or dysfunctional systems would do pretty good with AGI. I don't believe democracy will survive AGI, except, perhaps in the United States.
Democracy is exactly the thing i expect to fail in the U.S. in the next years. Probably next elections ?
It's not democracy.
It's two party politics.
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#64Roko's Basilisk will care not for 'countries'.
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#65Does AGI take over running the government? I guess the countries with especially stupid governmental leaders at the moment would come out ahead.
Yes. Because every government will sell out their own citizens for a few bucks, then count on just using violence to get power back (without, of course, paying back the debts they incurred), so getting governments under control, especially in the beginning, will not be hard.
The question is thus, will governments succeed in using violence against an AGI to avoid paying back debts?
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#66As it stands, I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent. I'll even give that to our leaders, but also to the leader of Iran, etc. If nothing else, the intelligence required to reach that level and stay there without getting killed or purged is impressive. By and large, the countries that are run by a single, centralized intelligence, are worse off than the c…
I think the voters in liberal democracies confuse confidence with competence. The real intelligent persons know their limitations and rarely say that they have a solution to every problem.
Indeed, the voters do all sorts of stupid things, yet are still collectively smarter than an autocrat at promoting human welfare when their democracy is reasonably robust. It takes more than just the failings of voters -- it takes a concerted effort over the span of decades to erode a democracy to the point where it's in danger of slipping into fascism etc.
If the AGI's figure out how to achieve democracy amongst themselves, then we're in trouble.
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#67All countries fare worse. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. A…
I don't think that killing all biological life is a conclusion that a purely rational AGI would have.
I also don't think the shitty and egoistic behaviour of most humans can be explained by egoism.
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#68All countries fare worse. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. A…
I don't think that killing all biological life is a conclusion that a purely rational AGI would have. I also don't think the shitty and egoistic behaviour of most humans can be explained by egoism.
All prediction tasks can be better accomplished once all biological life is dead. It's trivial to predict the stock market when all the traders are dead. Weather is no longer chaotic when you remove the atmosphere. Biological life can't help ASI in any meaningful way but it can waste resources by complicating things. The very existence of biological life is a waste of resources to an ASI that hasn't been programmed to preserve it.
Any goal with "but don't kill everything" added is more complicated than the version without that stipulation (and that specific one only saves a single microbe). The simple goal is easier to accomplish, so free market competition guarantees we'll try it first. Biological life is not compatible with "make number go up" taken to its logical conclusion.
There is no need for the ASI to be conscious or to have any equivalent of human emotions to make the number go up.
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that killing all biological life is a conclusion that a purely rational AGI would have. I also don't think the shitty and egoistic behaviour of most humans can be explained by egoism.
All prediction tasks can be better accomplished once all biological life is dead. It's trivial to predict the stock market when all the traders are dead. Weather is no longer chaotic when you remove the atmosphere. Biological life can't help ASI in any meaningful way but it can waste resources by complicating things. The very existence of biological life is a waste of resources to an ASI that hasn't been programmed t…
You're not wrong exactly, but if the crappy cheater AI treats collapsing the system to degeneracy as a valid optimal solution to its prediction task, maybe we'd deserve to be wiped out for releasing it with apocalyptic-level powers and such an inferior objective.
Fortunately there's a really simple solution to offer it, in just wiring measurement to "prediction" directly (perfect correspondence, and much lower effort than annihilating Life and removing the atmosphere). And I don't particularly believe a system like that can be a general problem solver, much less one that climbs to World-jeopardizing influence on its own.
Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
#70We will all appear to do worse as the labor market is drastically disrupted and then do quite a lot better a few generations later as the painful labor market reorg completes and labor can pushvfor a larger share of output again. Its pretty much how it always goes.