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Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#51

Post by dodobirdlord »

pdonis wrote: post #45
einpoklum wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are literally the something-extra over a "group of actors working together".

No, they aren't. Corporations don't magically do things that the group of actors working together don't do.

They literally do. Plenty of legal and regulatory constructs apply only to corporations. Limited liability is a thing that is available by forming a corporation, as is carrying out an SEC filing and selling stock. A corporation can also survive, as a legal construct, the deaths of all founding members.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#52

Post by choward »

jariel wrote: post #38
einpoklum wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are literally the something-extra over a "group of actors working together".

I should have added 'with a charter' - and then, corporations are literally just that - formalised groups working together with some ostensibly stated purpose. The legal enfranchisement of such organisations is something contextual to the establishment of broader legal frameworks, which happened later in civilisation (i.e. Modern Era), but even then, one could apply the same ideal to Noble Houses, which derived their…

> formalised groups working together with some ostensibly stated purpose

Increasing shareholder value. There is no other goal that any corporation has unless corruption is involved.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#53

Post by Barrin92 »

jengleton wrote: post #26
zaphar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.

That's fair. I interpreted the comparison as being between "AI implemented as a property of human organizations" and "AI implemented as a powerful search algorithm". While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" (and even if they did, they'd have a hard time doing it). A suffic…

>its intelligence is fundamentally limited, and therefore so is the risk

collective intelligences such as nation states are capable of producing tools such as nuclear arms or biological weapons whose impact on society may be civilisation ending.

It doesn't follow at all that a limit on intelligence implies a limit on risk. Collective intelligence is already high enough to produce threats that could wipe us off the planet without a problem. This is because most risks, once let loose on the world by someone intelligent enough, don't need to be intelligent in themselves to destroy humans. Viruses aren't intelligent at all.

Or for a more mundane example, we're already in the process of slow-cooking the planet for some stock-market gains

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#54

Post by flir »

zaphar wrote: post #9
jengleton wrote: post #5

Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its d…

I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.

Ok, but in that case, isn't there a better analogy with a plague, rather than an AI?

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#55

Post by Nursie »

Stierlitz wrote: post #50
ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

@ALittleLight: “.. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity ..” Your consciousness uploaded and then downloaded into a synthetic human like body isn't ever going to be you. As the man said “transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy”.

If we're firmly in the realm of sci-fi (which we are) I find the idea of a neuron-by-neuron replacement of the human brain by nano-sized computational units that function exactly the same way as those neurons, to be a more interesting proposition.

Can it be done in a way that doesn't imply the death of the subject?

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#56

Post by Apocryphon »

bawolff wrote: post #12

> Nobody in 2007 was expecting a Nazi revival in 2017, right? Is that actually true? I seem to remember people predicting that usa has been edging towards facism for a while now, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. For example here is an article from 2003 predicting usa is heading towards fasicism https://secularhumanism.org/2003/03/fascism-anyone/

They expected that American fascism would be based upon Evangelical Christianity and neoconservative foreign interventionism, not racially-focused and xenophobic nationalism and paleoconservative isolationism.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#57

Post by loa_in_ »

autokad wrote: post #10

>"Science fiction is written by people embedded within a society with expectations and political assumptions that bias us towards looking at the shiny surface of new technologies rather than asking how human beings will use them, and to taking narratives of progress at face value rather than asking what hidden agenda they serve." And be prepared for the most agenda ridden text you have read in a long time.

That's absolutely not what I associate science fiction with. Stanisław Lem for example couldn't be further from taking shiny technology at face value

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#58

Post by jengleton »

zaphar wrote: post #47
jengleton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree. My original post was bringing up what I thought was an interesting comparison between hypothetical software AI and the corporations-as-AI metaphor presented in the talk. Corporations _are_ acting as misaligned optimizers. Solving that problem is hugely important. However, the "AI" comparison breaks down somewhat when you start thinking about how we might actually fix the problem. With corporations, we…

I don't know that we won't have tools, albeit different ones, to regulate a bad AI. AI need more than just intelligence and agency. They also need effective ways to interact and affect their environment. That boundary is where we are likely to develop tools to limit and regulate them. If they are truly general AI then it's likely that their reaction to that limitation and regulation will be not dissimilar to a person…

Sure! I don't see any reason why it would be impossible either, but the (hypothetical) problems are very interesting. Starting with the most basic problem of all: how do we even specify what we want the AI to do? The whole field of AI safety is trying to figure out a way to write rules that an agent wouldn't instantly try to circumvent, and to find some way to provide basic guarantees about the behavior of a system that is incentivized to do bad things (just like corporations are incentivized to find loopholes in the law, hide their misdeeds, and maximize profits at the expense of the common good).

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#59

Post by Stierlitz »

Nursie wrote: post #55
Stierlitz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@ALittleLight: “.. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity ..” Your consciousness uploaded and then downloaded into a synthetic human like body isn't ever going to be you. As the man said “transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy”.

If we're firmly in the realm of sci-fi (which we are) I find the idea of a neuron-by-neuron replacement of the human brain by nano-sized computational units that function exactly the same way as those neurons, to be a more interesting proposition. Can it be done in a way that doesn't imply the death of the subject?

> .. Can it be done in a way that doesn't imply the death of the subject?

The key word is replacement. Can this replacement vote or inherit property? What happens if there is a clerical error and they make two replacements. Which one is the real you?

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#60

Post by nekopa »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #24
zaphar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.

I think AS (Artificial Stupidity) will get us first.

Just NO. Artificial Stupidity (AS) will never be able to perform at the level of Actually Seen Stupidity (ASS). No matter how much you try to improve AS, God will always create a better ASS. You will always be limited by priors to create an AS, but ASS will evolve naturally, plus if God ever decides to use science and apply a Directed Acyclic Tangent (DAT) well, DAT ASS would be unbeatable.
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