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Who Aligns the Aligners?

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Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#91

Post by bayindirh »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #90
bayindirh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle? We're just starting . The air conditioning technology didn't hit its wall of fire yet. What we're going to do when that tech will cease to cool us? Every AC system (from refrigerators to air conditioners) has an upper limit, which is around 41 degrees Celsius for T1 class.

> What we're going to do when that tech will cease to cool us? Move. This is already happening, with water shortages forcing people to move. Climate change will (likely) cause famines and many deaths, but the bigger effect will be mass migration.

> Move.

Another planet? How?

We assume that we will have a planet to live at the end of the day. I'm not so sure about it for the long run.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#92

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ngriffiths wrote: post #81

The mental model here is that AI is a powerful tool whose main purpose is to outcompete others, increase power or provide a defense. This is not the right model! The biggest risk is not that someone discovered a big new weapon, which by the way > No one person, or one company, knows the answer and history is no guide are you kidding me? It's a problem as old as time. This is not nuclear power though. The bigger probl…

Thing is though, I think that the argument of "we don't understand how it works or what it does" doesn't hold up - everything an LLM does is observable. And if it's scary, we turn it off. If it starts to act like a bacterium / virus (e.g. it becomes self-replicating), we've dealt with that kind of software before.

But more importantly, we need to keep the organizations building and running these things accountable. If a company like Anthropic or OpenAI builds software that "escapes containment", they should be held accountable for cybercrime, just like people who write viruses (there's probably a few that did that on here, and of those a percentage that got in trouble with the law over it).

Mark my words, the organizations that develop AIs will keep using phrases like "we don't know what it's doing" or "it's too dangerous" to try and avoid responsibility and accountability for their software. Just like Google did, hiding behind "the algorithm" for lawsuits about preferring their own services over that of the competition.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#93

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nekusar wrote: post #45

Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". And this censorship isn't a defined list of things not to discuss, but instead a feels-based censorship based on the 'ethics' of for-profit AI companies who have absolutely no issues with massive for-profit piracy. And we are somehow supposed to trust their "ethics"?! Hardly! That's one reason I run my own.

And "censorship" in this context is fine. Many things are censored, as they should be, because true free speech is bad. I can't say everything on this platform because I will be banned.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#94

Post by jerf »

loopies wrote: post #80
jerf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point of view of the old people, exponentially large injections of improbability. This is also where it is important to understand the argument is parameterized. If your acceptance function is "a full human body living a full human life in the way I'm used to", then you're asking for a huge whackload of improbability to keep that body alive. If, on the other hand, you merely ask for "the minimum system that…

I mean sure, in the end you can have some heaven, some benevolent alien species reaching back into some field and copying all of your material structure data right at time of death and rebuilding you in some kind of resurection center. The space of what is possible is wildly vast, we know or can think of very little by comparison. If you give up some day to day coherence then you can almost always find something that…

As I said, anyone who takes comfort in the hypothesis doesn't understand it. The dominant probability has nothing to do with benevolent aliens reaching down and inevitably resurrecting you to youth and health. It is you, minimally conscious, with no body, no ability to move or sense the outside world, nothing more than the absolute bare minimum to be "conscious", just barely conscious and never able to stop being minimally conscious, with literally every last extraneous and unnecessary subatomic particle stripped away (so anything like "sensors" or "effectors" being long gone), for whatever your definition of "minimally conscious" is. This outcome dominates the probabilities that even remotely resembles your current existence by those 10^(10^1,000,000,000) sorts of probabilities.

Everyone should very much hope that quantum immortality is false. It is the very opposite of comforting.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#95

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ecshafer wrote: post #62
watwut wrote: post #2

> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies. Like, no. The worst custodian is someone like Thiel or Musk or Altman. > In foreign countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Europe, where national governments have fewer…

And they also send people to jail for twitter posts. Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free, over the tyranny of a parliament. Look at how France and Germany are responding to democratically elected parties who are vaguely right wing, they pull out all of the stops of suppressing them.

I think you're less free than you think you are. Do you have the freedom to lose your job? Because millions don't due to e.g. losing access to health care (to name a popular / populist talking point). Do you have the freedom to vote for a representative that aligns with your points, or are you forced to vote for the lesser evil or abstain?

I don't believe all political parties have a right to exist, because some parties are anti-democratic, yet abuse democratic systems to gain power. The current president of the US and the organization that planned the current administration's steps are anti-democratic and want to, for example run for a third term.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#96

Post by Cthulhu_ »

w22oop wrote: post #21

No one wants a slowdown. It's just a load of nonsense. It's something for the media to focus on, and it has no real impact. Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else. People naively believe that this is even a serious issue.

I think the AI companies want a slowdown because they can't keep increasing the rate of improvements - or the amount of hardware it requires can't be built fast enough.

Of course, while they may be competing against each other, they're also competing with international competitors. China especially has or may have the capacity to scale up compute a lot faster once they get enough chip manufacturing power. They're likely preparing for it, and once they're ready they will take over real fast, like they did with solar and EVs.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#97

Post by loopies »

jerf wrote: post #94
loopies wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean sure, in the end you can have some heaven, some benevolent alien species reaching back into some field and copying all of your material structure data right at time of death and rebuilding you in some kind of resurection center. The space of what is possible is wildly vast, we know or can think of very little by comparison. If you give up some day to day coherence then you can almost always find something that…

As I said, anyone who takes comfort in the hypothesis doesn't understand it. The dominant probability has nothing to do with benevolent aliens reaching down and inevitably resurrecting you to youth and health. It is you, minimally conscious, with no body, no ability to move or sense the outside world, nothing more than the absolute bare minimum to be "conscious", just barely conscious and never able to stop being min…

I don't understand. Why does my current life win every instant atm? Why is it so much greater than your proposition? Why don't we all instantly collapse to what you described?

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#98

Post by fwlr »

timr wrote: post #71
fwlr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what logic you have imputed to my comment, but I’m having trouble connecting what you wrote to anything I was saying. I am criticising the argument “every past apocalyptic prediction was wrong, therefore this future apocalyptic prediction is wrong” (specifically, that it carries exactly 0 weight, because the counterfactual world where at least one past apocalyptic prediction was true, is also a world tha…

> I am criticising the argument “every past apocalyptic prediction was wrong, therefore this future apocalyptic prediction is wrong” That is not the argument being made. That is the straw man version you are presenting. Read the full paragraph, and the one after, and it's obvious: > There are myriad policy responses. Whatever we do, those responses will require popular consent and careful deliberation. No one person,…

“History is a guide to apocalyptic predictions in only one way: all previous apocalyptic predictions have been wrong”

“History is a guide to state abuses of power in many ways, and most of them point in the same direction, that it is a very bad idea to invest powers like these with the state”

These are two separate arguments. I am sympathetic to the latter and endorse it essentially as written, which is why I didn’t criticise it. My criticism of the former is not a metonymic dismissal of every other argument in the piece.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#99

Post by Kuyawa »

> The most effective method of pacing is via regulation

Of course, that's the only way to create monopolies. Get there first and regulate to death. Sprinkle with fear of annihilation so the sheeple can be manipulated with draconian rules in order to 'save the children'

Politics is really boring

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#100

Post by jerf »

loopies wrote: post #97
jerf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, anyone who takes comfort in the hypothesis doesn't understand it. The dominant probability has nothing to do with benevolent aliens reaching down and inevitably resurrecting you to youth and health. It is you, minimally conscious, with no body, no ability to move or sense the outside world, nothing more than the absolute bare minimum to be "conscious", just barely conscious and never able to stop being min…

I don't understand. Why does my current life win every instant atm? Why is it so much greater than your proposition? Why don't we all instantly collapse to what you described?

That would require a very improbable sequence of events for it to happen right this second.

Moreover, if the theory is true, it is happening all around us, all the time. Every consciousness that has ever existed, human or otherwise, is still in existence in some branch of the multiverse.

It's a pretty horrifying theory.

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