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The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

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Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#21

Post by dpark »

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…

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

Yes, but also 100k firefighting robots is kind of a lot. How many firefighting robots should exist in the world? And how many seawall-building robots for the rising sea level? And how many other robots? At what point does the environmental cost of all these robots offset their benefits?

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#22

Post by arduanika »

This has been decades in the making. We had premonitions of the violence that would come, for example with the Zizians. Get ready for what happens when a million blogposts worth of bad philosophy, bad analogies, and anti-institutionalist hubris are deeply indoctrinated into a vast, decentralized network of highly capable engineering minds who lack common sense and normal restraints.

They hate the framing that LLMs are just stochastic parrots, which is ironic, because Yudkowsky's many parrots are (latent, until now) stochastic terrorists.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#23

Post by hax0ron3 »

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…

>casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.

I think the majority of the population at large either doesn't care about what happened or wish that the guy had actually managed to kill Altman. Not even necessarily because Altman is involved with AI, but just because he is extremely rich. I don't imagine any increased resistance from the population at large - the population at large either doesn't mind when rich people are killed or loves it. The exceptions would be people like entertainers who develop a parasocial relationship with the public and provide direct joy to people, but AI company leaders don't fall into that category.

That said, it is true that killing Altman would almost certainly achieve nothing. See my other post in this thread.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#24

Post by kelseyfrog »

War is a mere continuation of policy by other means[1]. When policy through legislation is empirically impotent[2], calls to continue attempts at a failed strategy are indistinguishable from being told, "continue losing."

There is a real, undeniable, build up of political tension. When it fails to be released in the legislative arena, it doesn't dissapate. When we point out that, "the quality of life right now is the best it's ever been," it doesn't dissapate. When we try to crush it, it doesn't dissapate. The last remaining pressure release is violence however condemnable it may be. Perhaps we should, you know, fix participatory democracy rather than pontificating on a natural outcome of machine we created yet refuse to fix. If fixing it continues to be more difficult than eliminating violence we should continue to expect violence.

1. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics...

2. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#25

Post by morningsam »

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…

Yudkowsky himself also posted a rebuttal today: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#26

Post by squigz »

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…

> I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.

Can't you? Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament? What about biological weapons? Even anti-personnel mines, I think?

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#27

Post by hax0ron3 »

squigz wrote: post #26
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…

> I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies. Can't you? Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament? What about biological weapons? Even anti-personnel mines, I think?

Those weapons are still all being developed and would be brought out in any actually existential war where they seemed useful. The agreements would last only as long as the wars were not existential, or as long as the various countries involved believed that use of them, and the resulting retaliation in kind, would be more destructive than not using them. But one way or another, countries still develop them.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#28

Post by dpark »

derektank wrote: post #17
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

Ah, yes. Let us spray more sulfates into the air. Let’s fight global warming by poisoning all the waterways and oceans with more acid rain.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#29

Post by tcoff91 »

derektank wrote: post #17
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

That would require global consensus and could ignite wars if there isn't global consensus. Seems very likely that this could have unanticipated consequences that could be worse, but admittedly this is an area I don't really know much about.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#30

Post by eemax »

> The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence

No it isn't. The most prominent "doomer" has a strong grasp and deep, wholehearted appreciation for the the principles of liberalism and the rule of law:

https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866

Which the author of this piece of slop appears to lack.

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