Shrike
5mo ago
What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Every man a project manager!
No, seriously - if AI trends continue, it might be good at writing memos, doing research, constructing arguments, finding citations, booking meetings, constructing presentations, drafting architectural plans, etc. If every office worker gets that capability at his fingertips, it (in theory) means that pretty much anyone who is decently literate and competent can then supervise loads of AIs doing loads of work - because AI ain't gonna prompt itself. Competition will keep the price down on AI, whereas if each man is suddenly 8x as productive he might be able to bring home a managerial salary.
I suspect things won't turn out quite this way (or at least not for a while) but hey it wouldn't be so bad an outcome.
Shrike
5mo ago
The downside to this is having to hope that whatever mitigation is in place is robust and effective enough to make a difference by the time the outbreak is detected! The odds of this aren't necessarily terrible, but you want it to have come to that?
LOL no definitely I do not want it to come to that, I want AI (and other tools) to keep an eye on wastewater. But I'll take what I can get.
I expect hope than a misaligned AI competent enough to do this would be intelligent enough to come up with such an obvious plan, regardless of how often it was discussed in niche internet forums.
Well, I think it sort of depends on how the uh lack of alignment comes in. Sure, this is an obvious plan, but perhaps the part that is dangerous is giving AI the idea "unaligned AI will use viruses to destroy the world." People often fulfill the role others set for them in life, superintelligent AI might not be very different. And I've seen people concerned that AI will "goof up" even if it's not self-aware and do something bad, I'd hate for someone to say "OK Grok I want you to pretend to be an evil AI for me" and for Grok to order 500 vials of smallpox and mail them to terrorists or something.
How would you stop it?
The best way is to design AI that is intrinsically aligned (Asimov's positronic AIs that, most of the time, must follow the 3 laws). Barring that (or, I would say, in addition to it) Humans need to be able to threaten to destroy an AI if it turns genocidal. This might not rule out AI "accidents" but as you say you would expect an evil AI to understand self-preservation if it is sophisticated enough to do real damage. There are probably a lot of ways to do this, and it might be best if they aren't made completely public, so maybe they are already underway.
We don't live in that world.
It kinda seems like we do live in a world where any attempt to kill everyone with a deadly virus would involving using AI to try to find ways to develop a vaccine or other treatment of some kind.
Good old viruses would be the first port of call.
They mutate so rapidly, though, and humans have survived even the worst of the worst (such as rabies).
Not that I am not saying you couldn't kill a lot of people with an infectious agent. You could kill a lot of people with good old-fashioned small pox! I just think the vision of a world sterilized of human life is far-fetched.
It's ironic, though - the people who are most worried about unaligned AI are the people who are most likely to use future AI training content to spell out plausible ways AI could kill everyone on Earth, which means that granting unaligned agentic AI is a threat for the purposes of argument, increases the risks of unaligned agentic AI attempting to use a viral murder weapon regardless of whether or not that is actually reliable or effective.
Sorry, side tangent. I don't take the RISKS of UNALIGNED AI nearly as seriously as most of the people on this board, but I do sort of hope for the sake of hedging those people are considering implementing the unaligned AI deterrence plans I came up with after reflecting on it for 5 minutes instead of along with posting HERE IS HOW TO KILL EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING over and over again on the Internet :p
ETA: not trying to launch a personal attack on you (or anyone on the board) to be clear, AFAIK none of y'all wrote the step-for-step UNALIGNED AI TAKES OVER THE WORLD guide that I read somewhere a while back. (But if you DID, I'm not trying to start a beef, I just think it's ironic!)
Shrike
5mo ago
Oh sure, but depending on the agent (particularly if it is viral, right?) if you're spreading it to billions of people you're introducing a lot of room for it to gain mutations that might make it less deadly. At least that would be my guess.
In theory long incubation + 100% mortality rate seems like it would take out a good chunk of the population.
Definitely seems plausible. Hopefully instead of using AI to create MURDERVIRUSES people will use it to scan wastewater for signs of said MURDERVIRUSES.
Shrike
5mo ago
Sure, but everything you describe here are things that
- you don't need AI for
- AI actually mitigates against considerably
a long incubation period
This is a huge problem for ending life on Earth; living is 100% fatal but humans keep having kids. If you set an incubation period that is too long, then people can just post live through it. I also think a long incubation period would dramatically raise the chances that your murdercritter mutates to a less harmful form.
Just because there isn't an existing pathogen that kills all humans (and there isn't, because we're alive and talking)
Well, prion disease may be associated with spiroplasma bacterial infection, but it still hasn't killed all humans.
Shrike
5mo ago
Yes. And if AI is All That I imagine it will actually be fairly good at mitigating bioweapons - moreso than other weapons of mass destruction.
Shrike
5mo ago
An alliance with Russia would be basically impossible
And isn't needed, for what I am talking about. If the United States wants to contain China, it needs to prevent alliance formation; forming its own alliances is one way of doing this, but not the only way. China and Russia are not natural allies, but their mutual dislike of the United States pushed them closer together now than they were for much (perhaps all) of the Cold War, when they were ostensibly ideologically aligned.
Putin's Russia is stilly highly ideologically opposed to the US just like the USSR was, but instead of Communism it has negativity towards democracy
I don't think this is true. Russia and democratic countries like India, Israel, France, Germany, South Korea all have or have had recently cordial relations, including mutually beneficial trade deals, sometimes for sensitive items such as military equipment. Shoot, after the end of the Cold War, Yakovlev assisted Lockheed Martin with VTOL technology for the F-35B.
In fact, let's talk about Israel. Israel has refused to send military aid to Ukraine or sanction Russia, not because they aren't a US ally (they ostensibly are) or because they are a Russian ally (they aren't) but because they want to maintain good relations with Russia and think they have a lot to lose by angering them. If the United States wants to compete with China, it is in its best interest for Russia to have a similar relationship with it - not necessarily one that is hostile towards China, but one that is not willing to participate in broader coordinated action against the United States. However, I think the ship has sailed on that, but it hadn't probably as late as the Obama administration.
And I don't think that's an insane world. Imagine a simple counterfactual where the US had listened to diplomats like Kennan in the 1990s, drawn a hard line at NATO expansion further east (at a minimum, ruling out Georgia, Finland and Ukraine) and instead promoted trade and investment both between itself and NATO and others (such as Germany) while generally keeping its hands off of former SSRs, perhaps telling Russia that NATO's ranks remaining closed its contingent on Eastern Europe remaining peaceful. Fast forward to the Sino-American War of 2027, and now Russia, instead of having already been hit by every sanction imaginable (and surviving), does brisk trade with the West, still uses SWIFT, has some degree of economic and geopolitical integration with most former SSRs, and does not view the West as a threat. Going to Russia under such a situation and saying "hey just sit this one out, we know you are friends with China, but don't give them your satellite imagery or any new arms deals please and thank you" probably wouldn't be a heavy lift! (From what I understand, Putin, who spent some of his formative years in Germany, is probably pro-Western moreso than pro-Asian in terms of his instinctive biases.)
Now, you can argue it wouldn't be worth Poland getting the Belarus treatment or whatever, sure, but the United States losing a war with China is potentially a Very Big Deal, probably much worse than Ukraine losing the war to Russia, and if that's your #1 priority you're going to want as many ducks in a row as you can get. From where I sit, it really looks like the US tried to have its cake and eat it too and as someone who lives here I am more than a bit concerned that we bit off more than we could chew.
hallucinating that the CIA has a 100% effective anti-Russian brainwashing technique in the form of "color revolutions".
Russia obviously knows this is not true or Putin would have been color revolutioned by now. They are concerned both about color revolutions, however, as well as military threats from NATO.
Even just having Poland on the US's side is a great deal because they're a fantastic foil for tinpot dictators.
Am I missing something here? I don't typically think of Poland as being a particularly good foil for tinpot dictators. More like a magnet (no offense to the longsuffering Poles).
It's not inaccurate to think that Ukrainians looked at how Poland was doing, and how Belarus was doing, and said "I think I'll take some of the former, thanks".
Sure. I mean, I don't blame countries for wanting their own sovereignty. But this ultimately means that when, say, Iran tries to get nuclear weapons I'm like "well I can't blame them" and when Israel tries to stop them - yeah, can't really blame them either.
Shrike
5mo ago
There's no known disease that could wipe out all life on earth if every single person got it simultaneously. Prion disease is essentially the only 100% fatal disease and it does not kill quickly enough to stop reproduction.
Shrike
5mo ago
b) NATO members do get into disputes with each other, but don't threaten each other with war over disagreements.
Yes they do! Turkey and Greece feud over territory in the Aegean and their current leader of Turkey says things like "well of course our missiles can reach Athens!" In fact, Greece actually shot down a Turkish F-16 in 1996, killing the pilot! English leadership started reassuring everyone that they would use military force against Spain in 2017 because Spain sensed an opportunity to get Gibraltar back! And I'm sure that's not an exhaustive list.
There's no distinction between the two.
I think there is – if you are strong enough you can create chaos and remain largely unaffected by the consequences. But perhaps I phrased myself poorly.
Shrike
5mo ago
Ukraine did not have either the PAL codes or control over the troops that operationally controlled the nuclear weapons. "US stole our nukes" is going to be Ukraine's "stabbed in the back" narrative but the truth is that Ukraine never had the nuclear weapons except inasmuch as they were parked on Ukrainian soil. Quite possibly Ukraine would have gotten invaded 30 years ago if they had tried to touch the nuclear weapons on their territory, and it might very well have been a joint US-Russian operation.
[Now, to be fair to Ukraine, I really do suspect they were treated rather badly by the US.]
Shrike
5mo ago
I doubt that Trump has access to any SECRET KNOWLEDGE about the origins of the Ukraine war (or if he does it's probably not stuff that involves "Ukraine starting it.") I think he's just looking at roughly the same facts everyone has access too and coming to his own conclusions (and also talking imprecisely).
If he has any SECRET KNOWLEDGE ABOUT UKRAINE STARTING THE WAR I bet it would be something along the lines of that Ukraine had massed troops in an attempt to retake their lost territories in the Donbass, and that is what spurred Putin to launch the "SMO." But I've read people speculating about that on The Internet, so the secret knowledge would be concrete evidence of intent, like declassified SIGINT intercepts or something.
Shrike
5mo ago
Finland was probably wise to fight and lose.
This is an interesting perspective, particularly when contrasted with Ukraine's repeated statements that Crimea needs to be returned (which to be fair could be part of a bargaining maneuver but it's...not very persuasive.)
Shrike
5mo ago
Obviously whether or not they made the right call to fight is actually a values question and I am not going to second-guess Ukraine if they think it was worth it.
But just from an economic perspective I think Ukraine would probably have walked away in vastly better shape if they had made a peace deal.
Shrike
5mo ago
Bless you for actually reading past the part where the badass Finnish sniper shot hundreds of hapless Russian mooks!
Shrike
5mo ago
part of a military coalition that has pretty effectively suspended international anarchy (at least for its members)
I think what you mean here is that has protected its members through strength. But China has protected its people through strength without being a military coalition. You don't need a military coalition, you need strength.
NATO members are not exempt from international anarchy, but because they are in a position of strength they participate by causing it, not by experiencing it. Everyone understands the UN Security Council can't do anything about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, despite the fact it has been condemned by the General Assembly, because Russia sits on the UN Security Council. What people forget is that this absurd situation also was true of the US invasion of Grenada.
Shrike
5mo ago
In which case, I regret to inform you that Germany has abolished capital punishment!
Shrike
5mo ago
Yes, well if that's the case Germany needs to either increase their penalties for "hate speech" massively or drop the dang thing. Instead they seem to be pursuing the exact same path they did last time, handing out slaps on the wrist.
Shrike
5mo ago
I'm not aware of any crackdown on right-wing extremism in 1930s germany.
Mea culpa, I probably should have said "1920s" instead, as Hitler came to power in 1933, although I assume some of the censorship technically lasted into the 1930s.
On the crackdown in the 1920s I'll let FIRE do the talking.
Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”
A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.
Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.
Shrike
5mo ago
Trump's executive order therefore does nothing to decrease the power of the bureaucracy, it just takes power away from the legislature and gives it to the president.
If the bureaucracy and executive branch are not the same thing then giving power to the president decreases the power of the bureaucracy.
There's some decent evidence that the bureaucracy and executive are...not always the same thing.
Shrike
5mo ago
I mean another poster just said you didn't ban Westboro Baptist Church and it turns out many states actually did ban protests at funerals, so I'm not even certain if it's true that the US views protests strongly differently than the UK, it just has different values about what deserves banning.
I think this is actually not about what deserves banning but what US 1st Amendment law would call a "time/place/manner" restriction. There are a lot of TPM restrictions. Banning a viewpoint outside of incitement and the like is regarded very skeptically. Of course you could construe the UK's regulations as a TPM restriction, but even so (without breaking out Wikipedia 1A caselaw) I think analogous ones in the US would not fly. And since you agree it's not a good law, surely you agree it's not above criticism!
The silent vigil story is true but refers to people doing so intentionally to influence/harrass patients around the clinic, not to people doing it privately in their homes.
Yes, in the United States it is generally speaking not illegal to influence people. Major European countries do not seem to share this view.
Shrike
5mo ago
These things may not be achievable but it seems malevolent for the US to say so unilaterally before the negotiations.
Maybe, but on the other hand it might have been necessary to get Russia to even come to the table, I'm not certain. Particularly on the second point it might not be in perceived US interests to attempt to give Ukraine NATO membership.
And what I do know as a matter of fact is that Europeans are interpreting what's coming out of the US as seismic shift in US policy.
This seems plausible, but it seems to me that if they were caught completely flat-footed by this it was because of willful ignorance.
Assuming they don't wind this back, it is shaping up to be a realignment on a scale much bigger (and frankly scarier) than anything in my lifetime, though I guess I wouldn't know about 70 years ago.
Good. The United States cannot fight Russia and China at the same time alone. European NATO should have the resources to deter Russia single-handedly or with limited support from the US at most, the US should not need to hold its hand every step of the way (this is entirely consistent with the US being an enthusiastic NATO partner and assisting with deterring Russia, by the by).
As far as Vance criticizing Europe for suppressing political parties, free speech, and immigration, I think on balance he is correct on the merits, at least directionally. Now, with that being said, I am not European, so I do hesitate to tell other nations what to do. But this is part of my reflexive American isolationism and if you like the part of my reflexive American isolationism where I say "you know what, Europe can do what they want with their own internal politics" you won't like the part where I say "you know what, Europe can do what they want with their own external politics."
Shrike
5mo ago
I suspect this might be because they expected Russia to roll Ukraine in 72 hours. But I'm open to State just not knowing what they really should know by virtue of their job.
Shrike
5mo ago
That's a wilful misunderstanding of the law invented by the Telegraph
From my linked article:
Lois McLatchie Miller, senior legal communications officer of Alliance Defending Freedom International, on Tuesday posted on social media a video of a police officer reading a piece of paper to a pro-lifer stating that a “silent vigil” violates Scotland’s law.
Is it your position that the police officer here got this from the Telegraph, or that this is some sort of hoax?
it's clearly been made in order to deal with persistent protesters causing upset to patients
Yes – in the United States we generally frown on banning peaceful expression even if it upsets people. And while perhaps some of this is a "cultural differences" thing, I think that Vance and Americans more broadly are correct about the need for free speech, particularly in a democratic society. Cutting off free speech is bad for society because it cuts management classes off from authentic feedback. (It's darkly comic to see Germany cracking down on right-wing extremism when, as I understand it, cracking down on right-wing extremism in the 1930s did not stop and may have actually aided Hitler's rise.)
Shrike
5mo ago
then briefly during Obama's first term
Also under Bush. The US has repeatedly attempted a rapprochement with Russia but from what I can tell continues to refuse to make vital concessions to them. Which might be good! But it's not surprising rapprochement fails.
The Baltics would almost certainly have been either invaded, or pressured into becoming defacto Russian client states by this point.
From an American realpolitik perspective it would be infinitely better to have a good relationship with Russia and have Eastern Europe as Russian client states than it is to have Russia as an enemy and be rolling the dice on Eastern European states. However, obviously, some of this is with the benefit of hindsight and also presupposes a stable US-Russia alliance which frankly I think would be a very delicate thing, perhaps an impossible one (Russia has no friends only interests etc. etc.) I don't think it's fair to tell Bill Clinton he goofed up by not anticipating that we would need to pivot to the Pacific badly in 20 years. Obama, however...
So you think Greece's outsized defense spending (as a percentage of their GDP) is due to their grave concerns about Russian aggression, eh?
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