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Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#131

Post by JulianMorrison »

Apocryphon wrote: post #56
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.

Well, I mean it sure borrows clothes from Evangelical Christianity, even if they aren't holding the reins.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#132

Post by antepodius »

Barrin92 wrote: post #53
jengleton wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

But still, a greater intelligence brings greater risk.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#133

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

ben_w wrote: post #129
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" I'm assuming this is satire, since that's apparently exactly the goal of corporations.

They might want 1.99e33 USD [0], but I doubt they want to literally have it in the form of “no sun, nowhere to live, no body”. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass%20of%20solar%20sys...

I know it's inconvenient not to have a body, but we've a responsibility to our share-holders.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#135

Post by uep »

hnick wrote: post #91

For anyone with some hours to burn, there is an idle game that lets you play the role of a paperclip maximiser. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html I find idle games odd. My rational mind knows they are traps, but I still want to see what is next. They tap into some kind of need for exploration, progression, and learning. This one at least explores a few ideas and has a set endpoint so I enjoyed go…

I greatly enjoyed this game because of its relationship to the thought experiment. Last time I tried playing it, it had a terrible memory leak on Firefox though. Eventually consuming over 15GB, when I decided I had to kill it.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#136

Post by ithkuil »

ben_w wrote: post #129
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" I'm assuming this is satire, since that's apparently exactly the goal of corporations.

They might want 1.99e33 USD [0], but I doubt they want to literally have it in the form of “no sun, nowhere to live, no body”. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass%20of%20solar%20sys...

Just print a bill of a higher denomination and make your shareholders happy without destroying the solar system!

It's not the goal, it's the consequences of the rules of the game used to reach the goal.

If our economy was based on writing poetry and corporations would compete to write the most soul enticing profound poetry or art in general, the side effect wouldn't entail the depletion of resources and ruining of the ecosystem. Surely we'd find other ways to make our fellow human life miserable, perhaps all this art will make many suffer untold pains as the meaningfullness of our existence is unraveled, or whatever.

The rules of the game are the framework. The incentives are the driving force to push things down the gradient. The consequences are hard to predict. That works for wide range of rules and incentives

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#137

Post by strken »

One of the biggest problems with thought experiments designed as an introduction to an entire class of problems, is that they get misinterpreted as a complete statement of the problem.

Charlie Stross is quite dismissive of paperclip maximisers: Elon Musk "has an obsessive fear" of them, and "isn't paying enough attention" because Tesla does the same thing. He refers to a "pure paperclip maximiser" and discusses the "naive vision of a paperclip maximiser".

This is quite insulting, because the paperclip maximiser is a thought experiment designed to introduce the consequences of intelligences which have fundamentally different values to human beings, in an accessible way. What he's doing is like reading a kids' book on counting and then writing an article contrasting naive apple-based addition with his brilliant new idea of generic fruit-based counting.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#138

Post by WJW »

the8472 wrote: post #130
ben_w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t need to be super to do that — even bacteria are a type of von-Neuman machine that can turn us into more of themselves. An ASI could convince you that turning yourself into a paperclip is a fun and exciting new opportunity to liberate you from $PERSONAL_PAIN and finally allow you freedom to engage in $PERSONAL_FANTASY.

Bacteria are self-limiting. Their offspring compete and they don't reshape their environment to be more friendly to their existence. They don't plan for space colonization either. They're a bit of a toy model for a maximizer, not the real threat of an intelligent, self-modifying maximizer.

The only argument that seems to be brought forward every time is "if a superintelligent being wants to do stuff, we can't do anything about it because the axiom is that superintelligence means omnipotence". This is not so different from any other religious argument since it's impossible to falsify and therefore meaningless in any scientific sense.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#139

Post by photonemitter »

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…

If we break AI apart and look at it; Artificial - human made. (As opposed to something emerging from nature) Intelligence - ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, (oriented agency modulated by prior experience or observations)

Slightly tongue in cheeky; in most countries it seems corporations gained the right to vote before many minorities (or even majorities) [citation needed?]. If we assert that voting is the measure by which one affects political power

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#140

Post by antepodius »

WJW wrote: post #138
the8472 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacteria are self-limiting. Their offspring compete and they don't reshape their environment to be more friendly to their existence. They don't plan for space colonization either. They're a bit of a toy model for a maximizer, not the real threat of an intelligent, self-modifying maximizer.

The only argument that seems to be brought forward every time is "if a superintelligent being wants to do stuff, we can't do anything about it because the axiom is that superintelligence means omnipotence". This is not so different from any other religious argument since it's impossible to falsify and therefore meaningless in any scientific sense.

Superintelligence doesn't mean omnipotence. The thing is bound to physics. It's just smarter than you, to some greater or lesser (usually imagined as greater) degree.
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