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The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

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Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#11

Post by Joker_vD »

MostlyStable wrote: post #8

It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action. "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept. It is not irrational or incoherent to believe that even something as serious as extinction does not justify arbitrary action. Someone _may_ decide that it does, but it is not a necessary conc…

> "The ends don't justify the means"

Eh. The ends do justify the means, but only inasmuch as those means actually do help to achieve the ends — astonishingly often, they don't (and rarer, but also often, actually bring you in the opposite direction from those end goals), and so remain unjustified.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#12

Post by jmull »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.

No you wouldn't.

Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.

It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#13

Post by [deleted] »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #7

I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance. The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress…

[deleted]

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#15

Post by tcoff91 »

I have a different perspective on this given that I view climate change as the biggest threat we face as a species.

I feel like robotics is the only hope we have to be able to scale action against climate change. It's clear that emissions reduction is just not going to happen, and catastrophic warming is inevitable. Therefore we will have to do an extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to save civilization from sea level rise and to be able to repair damages caused by natural disasters. There just aren't enough humans to do everything that is going to need to be done.

It sure would have been nice to have 100 thousand firefighting robots battling the fires in Los Angeles last year.

Given that we need better AI in order to make these robots happen, I view AI as a critical technology that we need to maintain civilization.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#16

Post by PaulHoule »

jmull wrote: post #12
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.

No you wouldn't. Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large. It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether y…

I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be.

If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something.

---

If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people.

For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS)

https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi...

(A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...)

In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#17

Post by derektank »

tcoff91 wrote: post #15

I have a different perspective on this given that I view climate change as the biggest threat we face as a species. I feel like robotics is the only hope we have to be able to scale action against climate change. It's clear that emissions reduction is just not going to happen, and catastrophic warming is inevitable. Therefore we will have to do an extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to sa…

Wouldn’t geoengineering through stratospheric aerosol engineering (likely with sulfates) be both cheaper and less technically challenging than changing the built environment? If we’re accepting massive climate changes anyways, it seems like taking the risk with solar radiation modifications would be the next step

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#18

Post by graemep »

tcoff91 wrote: post #15

I have a different perspective on this given that I view climate change as the biggest threat we face as a species. I feel like robotics is the only hope we have to be able to scale action against climate change. It's clear that emissions reduction is just not going to happen, and catastrophic warming is inevitable. Therefore we will have to do an extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to sa…

That is interesting, and I think you are right that emissions reductions will not happen any time soon (eventually, but it will take a while).

I am not convinced we need robots. A lot of it is not all that hard to do. For example, better forestry management to prevent forest fires. A lot of cities rebuild big chunks of their infrastructure over a century or so anyway. The problem is more social and political - you get worse forest management because you can blame climate change when it happens.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#19

Post by irishcoffee »

tcoff91 wrote: post #15

I have a different perspective on this given that I view climate change as the biggest threat we face as a species. I feel like robotics is the only hope we have to be able to scale action against climate change. It's clear that emissions reduction is just not going to happen, and catastrophic warming is inevitable. Therefore we will have to do an extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to sa…

https://www.howeandhowe.com/civil/thermite

The firefighting robots of which you speak already exist.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#20

Post by throwaway27448 »

jmull wrote: post #12
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.

No you wouldn't. Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large. It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether y…

Obviously, ineffective action will be counterproductive. I recommend effective action.
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