2rafa
26d ago
the AI itself still counts as being an alien civilisation for Fermi Paradox purposes.
Only if we assume that AI not only shares the broad goals of human civilization (expansion, growth, conquest of space) but executes them effectively. Smart humans still makes mistakes. Smart ASI is still likely to make mistakes, and even if it does so much less frequently those mistakes are likely to be far greater in consequence.
Imagine a global benevolent ASI designed to achieve human flourishing that accidentally exterminates the human race. This sounds ridiculous but is perfectly possible and perhaps even likely on a long enough timeframe because of the extreme power such an ASI might possess. This is a closed loop solution to the Fermi paradox. An ASI might even develop a moribund or nihilistic tendency that leads to the above with no desire for recovery (by eg. cloning or remaking human civilization).
2rafa
26d ago
Superhuman AI is probably an inevitable consequence of the evolution of intelligence. There is a good chance the solution to the FERMI thing is staring us in the face / we’re about to find out.
2rafa
26d ago
I’m more sanguine about this stuff now, and not because it’s wrong. It’s because there are essentially an infinity of ways for super intelligent ASI to wipe out the human race - these are just the ways we can think of, and it’s going to be much smarter than us. If it happens, it’ll happen anyway, any safeguards will be redundant. It’s like trusting a bear with the possibility space for killing a fox or something - it can come up with a method (and a feasible one), but it’s one of a thousand ways a smart human could come up with.
2rafa
26d ago
I’m very flawed, in that I’m often arrogant, prone to making things up, dismissive. But I like to think that when the evidence is there, I can adapt, change my view. The evidence is here - even a simpleton can extrapolate. It’s easy to be scared but, when I am, I think of all the scientists and philosophers and inventors who one day imagined a moment like this, but who never got to see it. That is also a privilege, even if the outcome is a poor one.
2rafa
27d ago
I like my job, but I think it’s all about not living through it. I take solace in the things that I hope will still matter to me no matter what.
2rafa
27d ago
I'd either go for a run or play some vidya.
Running I can understand, but games? Even the best can put me to sleep if I’m actually tired.
2rafa
27d ago
Not that the advice of a random internet stranger should mean anything, but I think you should take the camper trip with your dog.
2rafa
27d ago
Governments (like all organizations) find it difficult to contextualize and manage risk. Politicians considered that it would present a major threat to their legitimacy if the public were to experience huge widespread deaths, bodies in the street, hospitals overflowing with corpses and unusable for normal functions and deaths in many or most families. This wasn’t even a problem of democracy or relative lack of control of the media, since the CCP made the same judgment.
There were undoubtedly many politicians (Boris Johnson was one) who were at least initially comfortable with letting the cards fall where they would and staying open. But politicians are naturally neurotic, and if you’re the only country that does this (Swedes ostensibly tried but they still had soft lockdown for WFH and in many other parts of the economy too) then you risk your people blaming you for every excess death. In addition, old people vote, and their middle aged children also vote more than the young. Even in China, when sporadic protests happen, they’re disproportionately middle aged and above. In March 2020 the entire global press was begging for lockdowns, and so even were many people in this very community who subsequently changed their minds.
Humans are extraordinarily adaptive and quick to accept radical change in their lives, living standards and identities (as the lifetimes of many people in eg. 20th century Europe show). Most would have been fine either way. The lockdowns were a mistake, but they were probably inevitable given the circumstances.
2rafa
27d ago
Should I continue to behave as though I expect society to persist into the next century and thus be very concerned about e.g. birth rates, pollution, government's fiscal policies, and/or Or does none of this matter in 10-15 years, and thus I should just do the bare minimum to keep things running but hey, let the kids do what they want in the meantime. The AI can fix the mess later.
I have the same doubts. It’s hard not to care, because for now the problems still exist. It will take solving them to end those concerns.
As for the rest of life, we brought some things forward and are probably living a little faster. There are things I want to do and experience, but most are regular life milestones. Going full hedonist and spending all the money / becoming a drug / sex / gambling / food addict doesn’t seem to make the people who do it happy, end of the world or not.
2rafa
28d ago
It’s my theory that there is a psychosexual component to male envy. In any case I know I’ll just get flatly disagreed with if I make the case here, and I lack unfalsifiable / objectively compelling and comprehensive evidence. I’ve just always believed it.
2rafa
28d ago
It is crazy to me that most people alive today will be around to see how this - this journey of civilization, this grand process of technological development - ends, or at least moves far, far beyond us. There is a millenarian tension in the air. Paradise or extinction (at least for most people), it seems increasingly clear it will be one or the other.
The politics of male envy are interesting. Everyone knows how women act around sexual competition, around women more beautiful, younger, more skilled at seduction. It’s a meme, a joke, a retold story, a familiar motif. Men are more private about their envy, they redirect it, channel it in different and sometimes more subtle ways; they are more embarrassed of it, more shameful of it. One of the most interesting things you can see is a man interact with a man who has fucked his girlfriend or wife, or even with any man who has fucked more than him. There are things men yearn for but can never admit. I will refrain from further judgment, given the demographics of this forum, but I find it fascinating.
I very much enjoyed the Rivals show on Hulu (Disney+ in the UK). They advertised it very heavily here, but it did very well; everybody was talking about it.
2rafa
28d ago
There are also pretty well founded arguments that periods in the Roman Empire had - especially in Rome proper - relatively free markets for many goods and to some extent land. Market capitalism in various forms has existed for at least a couple of thousand years.
2rafa
28d ago
There was that famous post that GPT-2 would have been possible with early 2000s and possibly even late 90s supercomputer compute with the right optimizations, so it language models surely count as one of these inventions.
2rafa
30d ago
The situation in the Belgian Congo was poorly documented and almost none of the survivors had their stories documented.
Colonial ethnic violence in general took many forms, some are closer to the Holodomor than the Holocaust, for example. It’s disingenuous to suggest that King Leopold wanted all the Congolese Bantus (primary victims; the pygmies were considered too small to work for the most part and had already been genocided by the Bantus during the great migration) dead or expelled. The transatlantic slave trade was brutal and cruel, but it likewise wasn’t a ‘genocide’.
2rafa
1mo ago
I don’t think eternal guilt is viable, but Turks could behave a little more like - say - principled British Empire defenders and admit the atrocities but say by and large it was a proud history in their opinion.
All large scale population transfers (ie ethnic cleansing) involve great suffering and usually many civilian casualties. Nevertheless, in the case of the Armenians the death toll and much of the historic narrative suggests at least some genocidal behavior, many outright mass killings of civilians in huge numbers and so on, and the death toll speaks to that (because as a percentage of Armenians at that time, it was an order of magnitude if not more greater than the casualties of the Greek-Turkish population transfers for example).
2rafa
1mo ago
I suspect there are plenty of men who would rather date Keira in her prime (say Love, Actually / POTC era) than the swimsuit model, though. A great face is even rarer than great tits.
2rafa
1mo ago
This kind of ‘holding frame’ game seems pretty exhausting, I really don’t think most women don’t care if a man says fuck it just got cold, as long as he isn’t whining about it for the rest of the day and just goes into a store to buy a sweater.
2rafa
1mo ago
The bike cuck meme is kind of a brain worm in that while that example is egregious, there are plenty of ways in which reframing a loss as at least helping someone else or something else can by psychologically beneficial. I didn’t get the promotion, my friend did, framing that in your own mind as ‘well, at least I’m happy for them’ is better than stewing in resentment.
2rafa
1mo ago
As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations. Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing, the adult equivalent of signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!
In a wider way, this is a bigger problem with the modern justice system. A hundred years ago, a lot of low-level justice was dispensed by police directly. Some youths being annoying just got the shit beaten out of them with truncheons, and they learned their lesson. Today the cops aren't allowed to do that any more, and the justice system is incapable of anything like that kind of rapid, effective lesson.
2rafa
1mo ago
The veneration of Churchill does not sprout from just winning 'a war' but what war, against who and for what cause.
No, not really. The British popular narrative of WW2 does not and has never centered the Holocaust. It's almost all about Dunkirk, the Blitz, and D-Day. Hitler is a villain, sure, but the real villains were 'the Germans', who 'we' beat twice in both world wars, many of which are often conflated by less intelligent people anyway. His veneration has a number of causes, mainly that he was an idosyncratic and peculiar figure who was immediately identifiable even at that time, and because he was in charge when the country came the closest it came to being fully conquered by military invasion in 400 or perhaps 900 (depending on how you see it) years.
2rafa
1mo ago
Not really. Murray’s ideology is the status quo as of the late 2000s / early 2010s. As polling suggests, in the UK among his generation that includes the extremely mainstream and almost universally accepted viewpoint (outside of the radical left and Indians) that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest Britons of all time because he ‘won’ the last major war that the country was involved in - and really there is no deeper complexity to that perception.
Murray’s ideology makes him a small-c conservative in some ways (he basically wants Britain as it existed in like 2007 to exist forever and for it to be filled with people who accept the major tenets of liberalism forever) and a classical liberal imperialist in others. The latter (liberal imperialism) isn’t an oxymoron, by the way, it has a long tradition in British politics going back at least 180 years.
It’s hard to hate Murray because, like Harris, he’s actually pretty open about what he believes and he openly acknowledges that this is mainly based on his perception of his own self-interest. He’s a gay man who wants to export liberal western culture, by force, onto the whole world and prevent mass immigration of people who hate him. You can disagree with him, but he is ideologically consistent.
Only if the all powerful malevolent AI specifically wants to conquer the universe and therefore expands forever (or until it encounters resistance). What if it has other goals (programmed or organic), like some kind of anti-pollution or even conservation-type instincts where it doesn’t want to fill up the universe with mechanical metal garbage for no real reason other than maximizing energy production to make more energy? If you’re smart enough to relatively accurately simulate reality, you no longer need to explore and expand in the same way. A smart enough paperclip maximizer might simulate the paperclips and consider that sufficient.
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