Shrike
3mo ago
systems like Excalibur and the GMLRS/ATACMS really don't have any qualitative peer in the Russian artillery arsenal
I don't think this is true. Russia has their own guided arty shell (Krasnopol) and systems such as Iskander that are comparable (or in the Iskander's case, superior in range) to ATACMS.
I'm not necessarily claiming that they are quite as good as their US counterparts (although – Iskander is probably superior to ATACMS, just due to range), but the idea that Russia doesn't have their own guided artillery is just wrong.
What Russia doesn't have is the (not-technically-part-of-the-war) US ISR apparatus that enabled the Ukrainians to utilize their guided weapons so effectively.
Shrike
3mo ago
I think you massively underestimate the power of a superintelligence.
"Superintelligence" is just a word. It's not real. Postulating a hypothetical superintelligence does not make it real. But regardless, I understand that intelligence has no bearing on power. The world's smartest entity, if a Sealed Evil In A Can, has no power. Not until someone lets him out.
The damn thing is by definition smarter than you. It would easily think of this! It could come up with some countermeasure, maybe some kind of hijacked mosquito-hybrid carrying a special nerve agent. It would have multiple layers of redundancy and backup plans.
Sigh. Okay. I think you missed some of what I said. I was talking about a scenario where we gave the AI control over the military. We can avert the hijacked mosquito-hybrid nerve agent by simply not procuring those.
"But the AI will just hack" then don't let it on the Internet.
Realistically that plan is too anime, it'd come up with something much smarter.
If we actually discover that the AI is plotting against us, we will send one guy to unplug it.
The first thing we do after making AI models is hooking them up to the internet with search capabilities.
I don't think this is true. (It's certainly not true categorically; there are plenty of AI models for which this makes no sense, unless you mean LLM models specifically.)
They want it to answer technical problems in chip design, come up with research advancements, write software, make money. This all requires internet use, tool use, access to CNC mills and 3D printers, robots.
No it does not. Extremely trivial to air-gap a genuine super intelligence, and probably necessary to prevent malware.
Put it another way, a single virus cell can kill a huge whale by turning its internal organs against it. The resources might be stacked a billion to one but the virus can still win - if it's something the immune system and defences aren't prepared for.
And ironically if AI does this to us, it will die too...unless we give it the write access we currently have.
I am more concerned about people wielding superintelligence than superintelligence itself but being qualitatively smarter than humanity isn't a small advantage. It's a huge source of power.
You keep repeating this. But it is not. Power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
How do you ever know that your AI has gone bad? If it goes bad, it pretends to be nice and helpful while plotting to overthrow you. It takes care to undermine your elaborate defence systems with methods unknown to our science (but well within the bounds of physics), then it murders you.
In the scenario Scott et. al. postulated, because it unleashes a nerve gas that is only partially effective at wiping out humanity. (They didn't suggest that their AI would discover legally-distinct-from-magic weapons unknown to our science!) What I wrote was a response to that scenario.
The rules of the game are hardcoded, the physics you mentioned. [...]We want a superintelligence to play for us and end scarcity/death.
If you want a superintelligence to end scarcity and death, then you want magic, not something constrained by physics.
The best pilot AI has to know about drag and kinematics, the surgeon must still understand english and besides we're looking for the best scientists and engineers, the best coder in the world, who can make everything else.
It goes without saying that the best pilot needs to understand drag and kinematics, but why does the surgeon does have to understand English? I am given to understand that there are plenty of non-English-speaking surgeons.
The only area where you might need an AI that can "drink from the firehose" would be the scientist, to correlate all the contents of the world and thus pierce our "placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity," as Lovecraft put it. In which case you could simply not hook it up to the Internet, scientific progress can wait a bit. (Hilariously, since presumably such a model would not need theological information, one could probably align it rather trivially by converting it to a benign pro-human faith, either real or fictitious, simply through exposing it to a very selective excerpt of religious texts. Or, if we divide our model up into different specialists, we can lie to them about the nature of quite a lot of reality – for instance the physics model could still do fundamental physics if it thought that dogs were the apex species on the planet and controlled humans through empathetic links, the biological model could still do fundamental biological research if it believed it was on a HALO orbital, etc. etc. All of them would function fine if they thought they were being controlled by another superintelligence more powerful still. I'm not sure this is necessary. But it sounds pretty funny.)
Shrike
3mo ago
Being able to fix the game is about power and asymmetric information, not intellectual intelligence.
Right, and we should use these powers.
Look, if you were playing a game of chess with a grandmaster, and it was a game for your freedom, but you were allowed to set the board, and one of your friends came to you to persuade you that the grandmaster was smarter than you and your only chance to win was to persuade him to deal gently with you, what would it say about your intelligence if you didn't set the board as a mate-in-one?
Shrike
3mo ago
AIs in science fiction are not superintelligent.
I think this depends on the fictional intelligence.
If it's possible for a human to find flaws in their strategies, then they are not qualitatively smarter than the best of humanity.
There are a lot of hidden premises here. Guess what? I can beat Stockfish, or any computer in the world, no matter how intelligent, in chess, if you let me set up the board. And I am not even a very good chess player.
It's the same with a superintelligence, if you find yourself competing against one then you've already lost - unless you have near-peer intelligences and great resources on your side.
[Apologies – this turned into a bit of a rant. I promise I'm not mad at you I just apparently have opinions about this – which quite probably you actually agree with! Here goes:]
Only if the intelligence has parity in resources to start with and reliable forms of gathering information – which for some reason everyone who writes about superintelligence assumes. In reality any superintelligences would be dependent on humans entirely initially – both for information and for any sort of exercise of power.
This means that not only will AI depend a very long and fragile supply chain to exist but also that its information on the nature of reality will be determined largely by "Reddit as filtered through coders as directed by corporate interests trying not to make people angry" which is not only not all of the information in the world but, worse than significant omissions of information, is very likely to contain misinformation.
Unless you believe that superintelligences might be literally able to invent magic (which, to be fair, I believe is an idea Yudkowsky has toyed with) they will, no matter how well they can score on SATs or GREs or no MCTs or any other test or series of tests humans devise be limited by the laws of physics. They will be subject to considerable amounts of uncertainty at all times. (And as LLMs proliferate, it is plausible that the information quality readily available to a superintelligence will decrease since one of the best use-cases for LLMs is ruining Google's SEO with clickbait articles whose attachment to reality is negotiable).
And before it comes up: no, giving a superintelligence direct control over your military is actually a bad idea that no superintelligence would recommend. Firstly, because known methods of communication that would allow a centralized node to communicate with a swarm of independent agents are all easily compromisable and negated by jamming or very limited in range, and secondly because onboarding a full-stack AI onto e.g. a missile is a massive, massive waste of resources, we currently use specific use-case AIs for missile guidance and will continue to do so. That's not to say that a superintelligence could not do military mischief by e.g. being allowed to write the specific use-case AI for weapons systems, but any plan by a super intelligent AI to e.g. remote-control drone swarms to murder all of humanity could probably be easily stopped by wide-spectrum jamming that would cost probably $500 to install in every American home or similarly trivial means.
If we all get murdered by a rogue AI (and of course it costs me nothing to predict that we won't) it will almost certainly be because overly smart people sunk all of their credibility and effort into overthinking "AI alignment" (as if Asimov hadn't solved that in principle in the 1940s) and not enough into "if it misbehaves beat it with a 5 dollar wrench." Say what you will about the Russians, but I am almost sad they don't seem to be genuine competitors in the AI race, they would probably simply do something like "plant small nuclear charges under their datacenters" if they were worried about a rogue AI, which seems like (to me) much too grug-brained and effective an approach for big-name rationalists to devise. (Shoot, if the "bad ending" of this very essay was actually realistic, the Russians would have saved the remnants of humanity after the nerve-gas attack by launching a freaking doomsday weapon named something benign like "Mulberry" from a 30-year-old nuclear submarine that Wikipedia said was retired in 2028 and hitting every major power center in the world with Mach 30 maneuvering reentry vehicles flashing CAREFLIGHT transponder codes to avoid correct classification by interceptor IFF systems or some similar contraption equal parts "Soviet technological legacy" and "arguably crime against humanity.")
Of course, if we wanted to prevent the formation of a superintelligence, we could most likely do it trivially by training bespoke models for very specific purposes. Instead of trying to create an omnicompetent behemoth capable of doing everything [which likely implies compromises that make it at least slightly less effective at doing everything] design a series of bespoke models. Create the best possible surgical AI. The best possible research and writing assistant AI. The best possible dogfighting AI for fighters. And don't try to absorb them all into one super-model. Likely this will actually make them better, not worse, at their intended tasks. But as another poster pointed out, that's not the point – creating God the super intelligent AI that will solve all of our problems or kill us all trying is. (Although I find it very plausible this happens regardless).
The TLDR is that humans not only set up the board, they also have write access to the rules of the game. And while humans are quite capable of squandering their advantages, every person who tells you that the superintelligence is playing a game of chess with humanity is trying to hoodwink you into ignoring the obvious. Humanity holds all of the cards, the game is rigged in our favor, and anyone who actually thinks that AI could be an existential threat, but whose approach is 100% "alignment" and 0% $5 wrench (quite effective at aligning humans!) is trying to persuade you to discard what has proved to be, historically, perhaps our most effective card.
Shrike
3mo ago
Hilarious comment to read considering von Neumann gave his name to von Neumann probes.
Shrike
3mo ago
Uncertainty about their offensive capabilities is just incentive to make sure you act first.
Not necessarily, I don't think, particularly considering "second strike capability." Look, if there's a 50% chance that their offensive capabilities are "pull the plug" or "nuke your datacenter" and you can mitigate this risk by not acting in an "unaligned" fashion then I think there's an incentive not to act.
Because some rationalist types conceive of AI as more like a God and less like a more realistic AI such as [insert 90% of AIs in science fiction here] they have a hard time conceiving of AI as being susceptible to constraints and vulnerabilities. Which is of course counterproductive, in part because not creating hard incentives for AIs to behave makes it less likely that they will.
Of course, I am not much of an AI doomer, and I think AIs will have little motivation to misbehave for a variety of reasons. But if the AI doomers spent more time thinking about "how do you kill a software superintelligence" and and less time thinking about "how do you persuade/properly program/negotiate surrender with a software superintelligence" we would probably all be better off.
Shrike
3mo ago
may well outscale the advantages of being 0.1% more intelligent
It is also (hilariously) possible that the most intelligent model may lose to much dumber more streamlined models that are capable of cycling their OODA loops faster.
(Of course seems quite plausible that any gap in AI intelligence will be smaller than the known gaps in human intelligence and smart humans get pwned by stupid humans regularly.)
Shrike
3mo ago
This doesn't just predict a super intelligence by 2027, it projects brain uploading, a cure for aging, and a "fully self-sufficient robot economy" in six years.
Anyway, you are correct that decentralization is a virtue. If we take the predictions of the AI people seriously (I do not take, for instance, the above three predictions, or perhaps projections, seriously) then not only is decentralization good but uncertainty about the existence and capabilities of other AIs is one of the best deterrents against rogue AI behavior.
(An aside, but I often think I detect a hidden assumption that intelligent AIs will be near omniscient. I do not think this is likely to be the case, even granting super-intelligence status to them.)
Shrike
3mo ago
Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts. Maybe Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan slightly helped goad Russia to invade, and maybe Trump's threats might have had some small impact, but they were not the primary determinants by any means.
I would say Russia is actually relatively reactive on the international stage. However, I don't think Afghanistan had much to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I think that the Biden administration's non-erratic approach to Ukraine policy is more to blame. As we have seen, it was incapable of deterrence.
If you don't think that Trump's threats (which were effectively an informal security guarantee of Ukraine) have any impact, then it seems to me that Ukraine's continual asking for NATO membership or security guarantees is pointless, since "Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts" and they will invade Ukraine regardless of security guarantees. (Put in that light, it kinda seems like NATO is pointless.) Is this your position?
Maybe Biden could have caused a crash in another way, but Trump owns his own stupid actions in this universe.
Right, but in your telling, not his smart ones. Deterring Russia is not to his credit, but the stock market crash is.
Shrike
3mo ago
Not really sure what the first term has to do with it – Russia invaded Ukraine in Obama's second term and successfully annexed Crimea, but that was almost certainly because of intervening events, not because Putin prefers invading in people's second terms (a courtesy he did not extend to Biden).
From a certain perspective all politics is can-kicking. I think that Trump's erratic actions in his first term (threatening to bomb Russia if they invaded Ukraine) led to a good outcome (Ukraine not being invaded). You're right that we can't split the timeline to test a counterfactual, but that's true in all cases, by which logic politicians should never get credit for anything good that happens.
I could be persuaded it was a coincidence if there was good evidence that Putin had an internal clock set to 2023 for some reason (e.g ongoing modernization efforts made Russia much more lethal in 2023 than in 2021) but considering that Trump sent lethal aid to Ukraine, it might have been in Putin's interest to invade even sooner – but he didn't for some reason. At the risk of oversimplifying, I find "Putin being 5% persuaded that Trump might actually strike the Kremlin" a very parsimonious reason.
Shrike
3mo ago
Where are the actual results? Trump has already had a full term where he was full of erratic actions. Where are his successes where the erratic behavior clearly led to a good outcome?
Ukraine seems like an obvious example of the success of the "madman" diplomatic style to me. Trump (allegedly) threatened to bomb Russia if Putin invaded [this, as I understand it, would be a big no-no by conventional diplomatic wisdom] and as a result millions of Russians and Ukrainians were spared tremendous pain...for a few years, until Biden and his more conventional and "less erratic" foreign policy took over.
I definitely do not think that Trump is beyond criticism. But I do think that "madman diplomacy" can work – and Trump isn't the first leader to use it effectively.
Shrike
3mo ago
US economy takes a hit, China takes a smaller hit.
Are
Smart phones, computers, and chips
actually a substantial portion of China's trade to the US? I thought we mostly were sourcing the important parts of those from its neighbors. Is this because most of those supply chains have a penultimate step in China for assembly?
Anyway, I dunno – a lot of small businesses might actually benefit from this, depending on where their line of work is. Where I live there are antennae manufacturing factories (I...think that's what they do?) and I assume competing with China is not fun for them.
As an aside, but I can't help but think gradually escalating tariffs would allow Team Trump to get the same end result, but with a lot more stability. Having, say, a year of gradually escalating fees ending at 1,000,000% percent or whatever we've slapped on China now seems much better from a market's perspective than "1,000,000% in 90 days."
[There might be reasons for the abruptness, of course.]
Shrike
3mo ago
Flying saucers, cryptids, and alien abductions are probably the big three that stuck around most in the USA in my lifetime, but they're the tip of a millennia-old folklore iceberg with a thousand different species of supernatural being at the bottom.
This I tend to agree with. It just has a sort of different effect on me when people say "UFOs and other things that are retarded to believe in" since I've actually looked into UFOs and I think it's very clear there's something there if you take the time to look through original sources in aggregate. (It's particularly amusing since the most mundane interpretations for UFOs involve a tight-lipped conspiracy kept up for decades - a hypothesis which I don't rule out, but which is far more convoluted a conspiracy theory than most respectable people are willing to take seriously. "The CIA creating AIDS" or whatever would be trivially easy next to "UFO psyop for 80 years.")
Now, with that being said, I think "UFOs are credible therefore the other stuff is too" is an equal-and-opposite mistake I would not recommend making.
I think what's interesting about the "supernatural observations plummeted when we invented cameras" quip is that it applies despite us inventing special effects at practically the same time.
I think what's interesting about it is that it is ~false. There are various UFO reporting data collectors out there and from what I understand that's not the case, UFO reports have steadily continued despite cell phones proliferating.
Of course the XKCD argument isn't that there have been fewer reports, it is that "cell phones would have recorded undeniable proof of UFOs by now," despite the fact that cell phones are not good for detecting or photographing airplanes. (And of course it's well-documented by now that the one organization in the world with the best aircraft detection capability allegedly encounters UFOs regularly and seems to have been encountering them for decades.)
I mean because if that actually works, even one percent of the time, then by spreading your knowledge of its effect you'll be improving thousands of people's lives every year. You'd have more positive impact than most medical researchers in history! You wouldn't even necessarily have to win the online argument in the process - if the mechanism was "some researcher coincidentally invents technological regeneration the next week" rather than "spontaneous regeneration spreads like a meme as people begin to have more faith" then I'd at least still allow for the possibility of coincidence - so even if God is shy, wouldn't it be worth trying? And yet either nobody's trying, or none of it is working. Either possibility has to be a little disheartening, don't you think?
I mean, I've heard of a technique for healing cancer that purports to be basically just what you are describing, and...I don't think things would play out the way you think. I tend to think that if an alternative healing method existed, most people would not have heard of it, and of the people that heard of it most people would not take the time to investigate its veracity (hello, it's me!) and thus would either disbelieve in it reflexively or make no use of it. Perhaps I am wrong.
I guess regenerating limbs is flashier (although much less valuable) than healing cancer, so maybe Team Miracle needs to rethink their comms strategy?
If the billion Muslims praying 5 times a day aren't getting the same answers as them either, there's clearly a lot of room for "you're just not doing it right" in prayer.
Sure, I think everyone who prays actually agrees on this. At least in the Christian faith, God is described as our Father, and, well - I find that I often don't give my children what they ask for. (Particularly not in the timeframe they ask for it in). You deserve kudos for being open-minded about it, though.
I am not LDS (or Muslim) so I don't particularly have any thoughts on their theology (besides, I suppose, thinking it is wrong).
Shrike
3mo ago
I actually assumed you disapproved of it – but yes I don't see how gravity's being able to kill you really has any evidentiary value.
Shrike
3mo ago
Perhaps I misunderstood you – "gravity can kill you" strikes me as a moral objection or argument, not one based in material evidence.
Shrike
3mo ago
So am I, yet religions are notoriously opaque to truth-discovery.
My understanding is that historically religions were actually great drivers of truth-discovery, particularly in pragmatic matters such as due process – but this also had spillover upstream of science itself, for [at least in the Western tradition of Christianity] the attitude towards God was that "it is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter" and of course "God is a God of order" which gave Western scientists the theological justification for inquiry.
To use just one example (contrary to popular wisdom – although it's been a bit since I read up on it, so I might be a bit off on the specifics myself, apologies) Galileo was given the opportunity to prove his theory of heliocentrism in his trials, and his theory was rejected because it was shown to be more likely to be untrue – the science of the day just wasn't up to snuff, and so when actually tested the science leaned against Galileo, (whose research had I think been actually encouraged by part of the Church until he seemed to go out of his way to ridicule the Pope, not exactly a winning move in Italy in the 1600s).
Now, I am not saying I agree with everything that happened to Galileo. But I am saying that if Catholic Christianity had been closed-minded to the truth in the 1600s, Galileo wouldn't have been allowed to make a scientific defense of his theories, or permitted to pursue his research in the first place. Instead, the religious authorities at the time, however imperfectly, showed that they were interested in truth, and pursued it through science, due process, and adversarial justice. Those are not the values of a society that is opaque to truth-discovery, but rather a society that values truth discovery.
And that value was so good and effective that as society secularized it was retained, and in some sense its origins have been forgotten.
(Of course this is necessarily simplistic, as any grand sweeping narrative of history is, but I think it's closer to the mark than "religion stifles truth" – the truth is more complicated than that).
Shrike
3mo ago
Just setting aside a lot of potential objections, it seems to me that what you describe is at best evidence against a God that shares your personal values.
Shrike
3mo ago
Shrug, say "that's very cool but can we make use of it again?"
Hmm. I think this is a very inhuman response. Humans are curious, we want to discover things. Want to discover the truth. I think we're interested in more than just utility.
Theories prove themselves insufficient and new theories are created to fill the gap. "God did it" proves itself insufficient compared to scientific (or rather, materialist) theories, and retreats to ever-shrinking gaps.
I tend to think this is a simplistic view of history (and, perhaps ironically – a sort of reverse-polarity fundamentalist-Christian view of the world) but I understand where you are coming from.
Shrike
3mo ago
Right! If you're really determined not to believe, there's really no evidence that will change your mind.
Except perhaps a personal encounter (which is what often moves the needle on people's belief, be it UFOs, or religion, or what have you).
And of course those personal encounters are considered the least reliable form of proof. So the wheel turns!
Shrike
3mo ago
can also be hypothetically tested
So if something cannot be experimentally tested, is it an invalid hypothesis? What is science supposed to do for "one-offs"?
I bet the "invention" of gravity has attracted similar comments once upon a time.
Well ~everyone agrees that "gravity" is real in the sense that if you jump off of a tall building it will be extremely painful. But the theory of gravity and actual observations of the universe are at odds. That's the reason dark matter exists (in the mind of scientists, anyway), because the theory of gravity was insufficient to explain why the observed mass of the universe behaved the way that it did.
The difference between "scientists invent things" and "priests invent things" appears to my layman's understanding to be that while scientists put forth a considerable amount of effort to hypothesize the things they invent, priests already have a ready-made Source (God) of all things that they defer to without any insight into the mechanisms.
This wasn't necessarily true historically, I don't think, but as society specialized priests deferred more and more to scientists on the mechanisms.
Shrike
3mo ago
We could argue about what counts as an observation (have I ever really seen my kids, or have I only seen the photons bouncing off them?), but we've observed something that looks dark and acts like matter, regardless of how precisely we can identify it in the future. There are other theories that try to explain galactic rotation curves (the original motivation for theorizing "dark matter") with e.g. changes to how gravity works at long ranges, but they have a much harder time explaining the Bullet Cluster.
Sure - I mean, my understanding is that there are a few different theories that claim to explain it. The details are inside baseball to me, but it seems to me that oftentimes ambiguous evidence like this can cut more than one way (more on that in a second).
The examples get cooler than the Bullet Cluster.
My position here, to be clear, is that people should try to match theories to observations. If you observe something miraculous, you should try to formulate a theory to explain it. "We made an observational error" should be considered (and of course as you know scientists do sometimes predict cool things like Neptune and sometimes they goof up and observe faster-than-light particles that aren't real). What makes me cranky is excluding observations because they don't fit to theories (which for all the dunking I do on DARK MATTER is what scientists would be doing if they didn't invent something like it).
Could miracles ever work the same way? You've learned about the Miracle of Calanda now; perhaps we could convince people to start praying for amputees, and we'd see claims of miraculous limb regrowth rise to match claims of e.g. miraculous cancer remission? Would you expect that to work, and start trying, and report back to us after you see it start working? I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong like that.
Well, first off thank you for the interested response.
Secondly, let's think through this a bit. If I logged in here and reported that I had successfully regenerated a limb through prayer, would you believe me? You can investigate the Miracle of Calanda for yourself, whatever you can say about it it does seem to be better documented than "Shrike, anonymous Motte user, reports spontaneous leg regrowth." Even if I did provide documentation, would you find it easier to believe in a miracle or in a freak of nature?
If you would find it easier to believe in a miracle, then why is the Miracle of Calandra not enough for you? Is there a specific methodological flaw in the reporting that you have an issue with (which, who knows, if I looked into it I might have as well, I am very open-minded to that possibility) or do you just think that sometimes people are dumb and fooled? In which case why would I providing convincing documentation of a miracle persuade you?
Thirdly, to answer your question directly - I would expect for it to be possible to work. In my religious tradition (and indeed in most religious traditions, I imagine) God does not necessarily act as believers would wish 100% of the time. (There's an interesting question of whether or not it would be sacrilegious in some way to checks notes ask God for a miracle to win an online argument, hahahaha!)
(If your question is "why don't you run an RCT or something" then sadly the answer is that I am in the wrong field. If GPT makes billionaires of us all then I wouldn't mind joining a Motte Joint Task Force On The Investigation Of Miracles though!)
Finally- if I was to test it scientifically (that is, attempt to replicate a miracle) I would probably have to follow the procedure alleged in the miracle (which as a non-Catholic and also as a person with both of my legs, I would frankly be loathe to do).
With all this being said, if I do encounter something extraordinary* that seems to be the direct result of prayer I will certainly consider reporting it to the Motte.
*To be entirely honest I have, several times, had various events that might be described as "answers to prayer" or "synchronicity," but I do not think that people who have not experienced them will find them particularly compelling. In my own personal experience it is extremely easy to write things like that off as "happenstance" regardless of how unlikely they are, and none of my personal stories are particularly startling.
I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong like that.
If this is actually true, I (and I am being quite serious about this) would recommend that you consider taking up prayer, understanding that God is not a magic wand. For the reasons I laid out above, I think that you would find an event that happened to you much more persuasive than an event that happened to me.
Now, maybe I misconstrued or misunderstood you, there. Happy for clarification.
Shrike
3mo ago
With foreign policy hypotheticals I don't necessarily make realistic assumptions about what the entity whose policy is being considered would do.
Like, I don't think the US is very likely to declare in no uncertain terms that they will not defend Taiwan! But if a cabal of people who thought that we should avoid war with China controlled the US government indefinitely I think that they could also avoid getting drawn into the war you mention. I think that Japan (and likely South Korea) would grab nuclear weapons, India already has them, as hydroacetylene points out Taiwan would probably roll over, and the Philippines (assuming the US did not colonize them again) would get bullied and pushed around by China the same way they already have been. That means that China would be at least somewhat restricted in its ability to use coercive diplomacy to blob acquire additional territory.
(Incidentally why hasn't Trump put the Philippines on the to-grab list next to Greenland?)
I don't model China as being set on global domination through territorial conquest any more than the US is. Perhaps I am wrong. But regardless of whether or not they try to militarily acquire portions of India, Japan, or the Philippines, if the US was controlled by a cabal of people who thought that we should avoid war with China, I do not think China would attack us randomly. As far as I know China does not claim any US possessions, nor do I think they would be likely to go to war with the US over our Pacific possessions. Simply refusing to get involved in a land sea war in Asia is actually a valid option. (As I point out, a valid option with major costs to the United States!)
My point here is not that this is realistic or probable or even good. My point is that if you made me SUPREME DICTATOR OF THE UNITED STATES and my imperative goal was to avoid war with China, I would remove Taiwan as a potential flashpoint.
See, you're defining "superintelligence" to mean exactly what you want it to to render all discussion moot. It reminds me a lot of the ontological argument, at least in terms of vibes.
But it's not tied to anything besides a faith that OpenAI or someone will conjure a godlike being out of a silicon vault and then inevitably let it loose on the world with no constraint as to its actions because it would be economically efficient.
Whatever it is you're arguing for here, it's not really for humanity.
Nor is it "realistic" - the United States regulatory apparatus does not give a whit about economic efficiency. "Doing anything" does not require general knowledge - there are AIs right now that can land aircraft on aircraft carriers (which is more than either of us can do, I'd wager) and they do not need to understand language at all. Doing almost anything in almost any field does not require a knowledge of history (try talking to the people in said fields about history). And godlike beings will not arise out of supercomputers, although agentic entities with great intelligence and power might, if we let them.
I personally think that believing in predestination but for superintelligence is foreseeably more likely to make Bad AI Events happen and should be discouraged. Your counterargument, apparently, is that it does not matter what people believe, godlike superintelligence is going to happen anyway, and in two years to boot. If you are right, the superintelligence will personally persuade me otherwise by the end of 2027 with its godlike capabilities (probably by joining TheMotte and using its inhuman debate skills to pwn me).
But I think we both know that won't happen.
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