101–110 of 329 posts
I was not aware that there is an Atlas Shrugged-length Harry Potter fanfiction about rationality. Learn something new every day!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Apocalypse cults are always wrong, AI safety is an apocalypse cult, therefore it is (probably) wrong" is an argument which really only betrays the ignorance of the speaker regarding the specifics of the AI doomer argument. Why are apocalypse cults always wrong? Do the same specific reasons apply to the doomers here?
> Why are apocalypse cults always wrong? because we are still here
This is not an argument, it is a tautology powered by the anthropic principle.
Some of that is just typical cult behavior. Scientology and Ayn Rand followers have had similar problems. Drugs usually make it worse. AI safety is a real issue, but look at what it looks like so far. - "Machines should think, people should work". That's Marshall Brain's "Manna". It's also working at an an Amazon fulfillment center, where the computers tell the humans what to do. - "Paperclip maximizer". A corporatio…
>- "Paperclip maximizer". A corporation is a paperclip maximizer. If you take Milton Friedman seriously, that's what a corporation is supposed to do. As I point out occasionally, most of the ethical problems foreseen for AIs are known ethical problems with corporations. Corporations are not capable of having the "fast takeoff" which is an integral part of the doomer narrative here. Furthermore, a corporation being a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about a future where only energy and resources are important leads you to think we’ll have less inequality? Brains are the only thing that don’t flow to the wealthy right now
Human nature. If you're a part of the common tribe, people are actually pretty good. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit on the size of the tribe (although some people just wanna hate somebody). You can also look at it this way. The only real objection against socialist societies was that people are lazy, and don't care enough about producing stuff or resolving economic inefficiencies. But with AI, this objection…
[0]: i.e. the system in the US and western Europe that prevailed over the USSR at the end of the cold war, technically not "real" capitalism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety, at least in what they publish online. If they talked about all possible threats to humanity and how to solve them, from AI, to climate change, to nuclear bombs, to asteroids, to disease, they would be an interesting and important group. They don't. They hardly talk about anything else except AI. From the outside it looks a lot like a…
>The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety. That's really not true. There's a huge overlap in these groups, but the top EA charities are not shoveling all their money at AI alignment orgs... even if one can argue that they should.
Because I don't consider myself sufficiently educated in these matters, I default to using GiveWell and their mosquito net recommendations as an effective low-effort approach to making monthly contributions to charity.
Overall, is there anything about this approach which is objectionable? How do philosophers go from something like GiveWell to something like fending off the AI apocalypse? Is this ideological expansion inevitable?
Some of that is just typical cult behavior. Scientology and Ayn Rand followers have had similar problems. Drugs usually make it worse. AI safety is a real issue, but look at what it looks like so far. - "Machines should think, people should work". That's Marshall Brain's "Manna". It's also working at an an Amazon fulfillment center, where the computers tell the humans what to do. - "Paperclip maximizer". A corporatio…
>- "Paperclip maximizer". A corporation is a paperclip maximizer. If you take Milton Friedman seriously, that's what a corporation is supposed to do. As I point out occasionally, most of the ethical problems foreseen for AIs are known ethical problems with corporations. Corporations are not capable of having the "fast takeoff" which is an integral part of the doomer narrative here. Furthermore, a corporation being a…
Isn't Nick Bostrom also a longtermist? It's probably the reason for the focus on AI. Also wasn't he one of the founders of Longtermism?
AI safety is an apocalypse cult and we should recognize that everyone who has ever been in an apocalypse cult thinks that "no, this time it's really the end of the world". Everyone who believes crazy shit thinks they're being reasonable, so just because we're super sure we're being reasonable doesn't mean what we believe isn't crazy. Do we believe that we alone, of all people who have believed in the coming end, have…
There have been people for a long time who think the world is going to end. We can use your argument to dismiss anyone who fears any existential risk like asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, AI, etc... And since the world exists every group will be wrong except one. I think the risk of human extermination is much lower than many in this group believe because I think AI is much more compute bound than algorithm bo…
Any reason to believe this? The human brain runs on 20 watts (!). Obviously biological hardware is not directly comparable to silicon, perhaps silicon is intrinsically less efficient by some factor such that in order to obtain 20W of human brain compute we need to expend K times more in silicon. But is that factor really so large that we are compute-bound? How big would K have to be for us to be compute-bound anyway? If you could have Einstein for 200kW (i.e. silicon is intrinsically 1000x less efficient than brains) would that be compute-bound? It seems much more likely that we are algorithm-bound and simply not using our available compute efficiently.