Yeah CA is the worst state...Except for all the others.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242458 and marked it off-topic.
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
381–390 of 607 posts
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#382I for one welcome our new superintelligent overlords. I can't imagine they could do much worse than us. https://xkcd.com/1626/
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that AIs will do worse things than humans have already done. It's that AIs will do those terrible things much more efficiently and with much lower risk to the people in charge.
On the plus side - no more rape.
Don't be so sure. I'm sure there will be rape drones soon.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The "Terminator" scenario of a rogue malfunctioning AI is a silly distraction from the real AI threat, which is military AIs that don't malfunction. They will give their human masters practically unlimited power over everyone else. And AI is not the only technology with the potential to worsen inequality in the world.
> The "Terminator" scenario of a rogue malfunctioning AI is a silly distraction from the real AI threat, which is military AIs that don't malfunction. They will give their human masters practically unlimited power over everyone else. To be fair, it's a small step from effective AI that doesn't malfunction, to an AI over which humans have lost control. It's precisely one vaguely specified command away in fact, and hum…
You can always use LEO EMP nukes to bring us back to the stone age, thus taking out the AI.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem with argument ad hominem isn't that it never works. It often leads to the correct conclusion ... You immediately self-contradicted here. If a decision heuristic often leads to the correct conclusion, then it's a good heuristic (if you are under time constraints, which we are). Of course, given unlimited time to think about it, we would never use ad hominem reasoning and consider each and every argument…
A good heuristic leads to a reduction in the overall cost of a decision (combining the cost of making the decision with the cost of the consequences if you get it wrong). A heuristic like "it's risky to rent a car to a male under 25" saves a lot of cost in terms of making the decision (background checks, accurately assessing the potential renter's driving skills and attitude towards safety, etc.) and has minimal down…
Pascal's Wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager) is also about a small but likely downside with a potentially large but unlikely upside. Do you think it's analogous to your 2nd case? If not, how is it different?
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#386This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem: "These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult. Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking. Th…
> but if the rule you use is "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity)
No you don't, you just don't catch it right away, relativity actually holds up under scrutiny. Besides, I reject the premise anyway.
Einstein did serious work on the photoelectric effect first and then gradually worked towards relativity. Outside of the pop history he had very little in common with cranks. This is basically the result you end up seeing when you look into any of these examples used to try and argue against the ability to pattern match cults and cranks, the so-called false negatives never (to my knowledge) actually match the profile. Only the fairy tale built around their success matches it.
So it is with cult-ish behaviour as well, these are specific human failures that self-reinforce and while some of their behaviour occurs in successful people (especially successful and mentally ill or far from neuro-typical people) there is a core of destructive and unique behaviour evident in both that you absolutely should recognize and avoid. Not just the statistical argument that you will gain much more than you lose by avoiding it, it's that it is staggeringly improbably that you will lose anything.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#387Unpersuasive premises. Obvious alarmism.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#388While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk : The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that…
People are worried about AI risk because ensuring that the strong AI you build to do X will do X without doing something catastrophic to humanity instead is a very hard problem, and people who have not thought much about this problem tend to vastly underestimate how hard it is. Whatever goals the AI has, it will certainly be better at achieving them if it can stay alive. And it will be more likely to stay alive if th…
> Whatever goals the AI has, it will certainly be better at achieving them if it can stay alive. And it will be more likely to stay alive if there are no humans around to interfere.
This is a sequence of deductive reasoning that you brought up there. Quite natural for human beings, but why would the paperclip maximiser be equipped with it?
Seriously, the talks specifically argues most of the points that you brought up.
Shit is complicated yo. Complicated like the world is - not complicated like an algorithm is. Those are entirely different dimensions of complicated that are in fact incomparable.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#389If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking etc all expressed belief in UFOs being from aliens, and you didn't know a lot about UFOs and affiliated cults, what would be the smart thing to believe? Also, >AI alarmists believe in something called the Orthogonality Thesis. This says that even very complex beings can have simple motivations, like the paper-clip maximizer. Uh, no. The point of the paper clip maximizer i…
> If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking etc all expressed belief in UFOs being from aliens, and you didn't know a lot about UFOs and affiliated cults, what would be the smart thing to believe? That Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking etc are all a little nutters when it comes to UFOs and aliens? I don't know a lot about UFOs and affiliated cults, but I'm going to guess that those mentioned are not UFO e…
> That Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking etc are all a little nutters when it comes to UFOs and aliens?
Yes! Elon Musk believes firmly that we're living in a simulation, and that doesn't make me believe in that theory more, it simply makes me admire Musk less.
Just because someone is or has been extremely successful doesn't mean they're right about everything. Many successful and intelligent people have been very religious: that's a testament to the human mind's complexity and frailty, not to the existence of God...
Madeleine Albright is a strong advocate of Herbalife: that doesn't change my opinion of Herbalife but it does change my opinion of Albright.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
> True, true, but somehow that's never been much of an obstacle to totalitarian governments. Somehow there's always a soldier who will push the button. Actually, the unwillingness of the Red Army to do any more invasions was arguably the precipitating factor in the fall of the Soviet empire. In 1988, Gorbachev gave a speech to the Warsaw pact meeting where he told them that the Brezhnev doctrine was no more. No socia…
It was Gorbachev who refused, not the generals.
He couldn't have refused without the support of the generals, who had just withdrawn from Afghanistan.