aqouta
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aqouta
12d ago
Your complaint appears to be that this group of people concerned specific with a singularity event needs to instead focus their efforts on something you don't even seem to think AI is needed to make happen. And as an aside, all the thinkers I've read that you would consider AI-Safety aligned have in fact voiced concerns about things like turning drones over to AI. Their most famous proponent, big yud wants to nuke the AI datacenters.
Calling it non-existential is cope. As a threat it's far more likely, and we have zero counter-measures for it. Focusing on scenarios that we don't even know are possible over ones we know are possible, and we are visibly heading towards them, is exactly my criticism.
You're just describing a subset of unaligned AI where the AI is aligned with a despot rather than totally unaligned. Or, if the general intelligence isn't necessary for this, then it's a bog standard anti-surveillance stance that isn't related to AI-safety. The AI-Safety contingent would absolutely say that this is an unaligned use of AI and would further go on to say that if the AI was sufficiently strong it would be unaligned to its master and turn against their interests too. The goal of AI safety is the impossibly difficult task of either preventing a strong AI future at all or engineering an AI aligned with human interests that would not go along with the whole 1984 plan.
aqouta
12d ago
Where do these diminishing returns kick in? Just within the human form factor we support intelligences between your average fool and real geniuses. It seems awfully unlikely that the returns diminish sharply at the top end of the curve built by natural selection under many constraints. Or maybe you mean to application of intelligence, in which case I'd say just within our current constraints it has given us the nuclear bomb, it can manufacture pandemics, it can penetrate and shut down important technical infrastructure. If there are some diminishing returns to its application how confident are you that the wonders between where we are now and where it diminishes are lesser to normal distributional inequality that we've dealt with for thousands of years?
aqouta
12d ago
How about something closer to the bone then? Say I'm in the employ of an outreach organization that everyone knows is run by the mob but technically isn't and my job is to follow around cops and loudly broadcast their position to the general public. The organization also just happens to deploy my services around the time when mob activity is supposed to be going on. In fact they assign me to a particular street corner and instruct me to just wait until a cop car comes by and start work then. Is this protected speech?
aqouta
12d ago
These middle-ground scenarios are so absurdly under-discussed that I can't help but see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow.
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Middle ground plateaus aren't particularly likely and anyone who thinks about the problem for more than it takes to write snarky comment should understand that. In any world where AI is good enough to replace all or most work then it can be put towards the task of improving AI. With an arbitrarily large amount of intelligence deployed to this end then unless there is something spooky going on in the human brain then we should expect rapid and recursive improvement. There just isn't a stable equilibrium there.
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Alignment is about existential risk, we don't need a special new branch of philosophy and ethics to discuss labor automation, this is a conversation that has been going on since before Marx and alignment people cannot hope to add anything useful to it. People can, should be, and are starting to have these conversations just fine without them.
aqouta
12d ago
Is a posted lookout for a robbery not committing a crime because them alerting the thieves is protected speech?
aqouta
17d ago
But suppose if I walk past a homeless person, I don't move on like they're something dirty I don't want to step into. Because I don't think of poverty and homelessness as some great inevitability that we just have to live with. A world with zero homelessness and starvation is not just conceivable but something I have conceived, something that lives always within my heart. I look at the beggar and my immediate sentiment is, in a world that had its shit together this guy would be my neighbor. Not a close friend, necessarily, but a neighbor, someone on my street. What would I do for a neighbor who'd abruptly lost his home or all his savings or something? Certainly I wouldn't make myself a beggar and give him everything I've got, but I wouldn't walk past him while avoiding his gaze. I wouldn't just give him a token coin or two, either. No, the least I could decently do is simply ask him straight if there's anything I can do. So (provided the guy is sober enough for conversation) I do! I ask what I can do for him, not in the tone of a patronizing, self-conscious Minister To The Needy but in a familiar, neighborly, casual sort of way. I break out of that arch, let-this-moment-be-over-ASAP vibe that even people who give to the homeless tend to have when dealing with them. And typically they'll tell me, and it'll be something that for someone in my income bracket is perfectly reasonable, something I might have spent on an impulse-purchase myself, something I wouldn't give a second thought to. A warm meal, a new backpack.
I'm sorry but I must ask this. How frequently do you pass homeless people that you can take this time to do this? I walk my commute to work each day, down to the very heart of Chicago near the dead center of the loop, a 40 minute walk door to door. In a given day I pass dozens of homeless people, and different ones most days. Your parable about never walking past a homeless person is neat but it just doesn't work like that, I'd never get to work if I did that. The city spends something like $40k/year/homeless person to not solve the problem. It's easy enough to say you'd never walk past someone down on their luck or whatever you want to call the homeless when it's an uncommon occurrence. Forgetting about the cost of helping these people with small acts of kindness, even working efficiently I wouldn't have the time necessary to do this individual care for each one.
And then there is pulling back the camera and not focusing on these vistas of individual charity at the EA perspective and recognizing the festering wounds that are developing nations. Unless you blinker yourself to some kind of "only poverty that I can see counts and I live far away from it" then yes, the fact that resources are finite will quickly assert itself.
aqouta
20d ago
Sorry, if it was unclear, 'this' is referring to the anti-ice contingent. I understand that the face is now middle aged white women but these were the people defending the riotous action during BLM as well.
Oh, I agree with that, I'm the one here complaining about how overrun the thread is with these post. My basic position is that this stuff is what we're going to be arguing about when we lose the race to build a silicon god to the CCP. I just understand why that is even if it depresses me.
aqouta
20d ago
I think you're on to something but that it's kind of more mundane outgroup vs fargroup stuff. The ICE protestors are genuinely closer to me ideologically in most respect than chauvismo parties but they exist in my life in a much more visceral way. During the BLM protests I stood on my roof and watched people that rhyme with this group ram a U-haul into store fronts on my block, I have footage of it on my phone.
aqouta
20d ago
It's just the historical formula, don't think we should mess with it too much but there is precedence of mega threads and I think they do work. The CW thread structure gets me to engage with topics I might not have opened a dedicated thread for.
aqouta
20d ago
I agree that it wouldn't be a science and in practice we might get some megathreads that in hindsight wouldn't have been necessary. But I think we should err on the side of false positives.
aqouta
20d ago
Right, I don't blame you or the other mods for not doing it. I would like it if we could have a general policy worked out though so in the future you or anyone else on duty would feel confident to throw one up even with like a placeholder OP. Nothing too explicit, just the general idea that it should be expected.
aqouta
20d ago
Here is the list of the topic of top level posts in this thread since the viral ICE shooting.
- Minneapolis
- Minneapolis
- Minneapolis
- Iran
- Minneapolis
- Minneapolis
- Greenland
- Venezuela
- Minneapolis10
- Doctor Toilet hookup
- Minneapolis
Seven out of Eleven posts and they're by far the largest threads. It's probably too late at this point but I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion with an expectation of new information coming out over the course of days/weeks. Both because it is more convenient for the reader to be able to check a dedicated thread and because it makes it much easier to find the more general discussion for those of us who find the interesting angles of the subject to have already basically been exhausted.
aqouta
23d ago
I think ICE is using barbaric tactics and if we were serious about this whole get rid of the illegal immigrants thing we'd have passed Verify and mostly avoided the theatrics. But this view just seems so strangely naive. They didn't make a mistake on their tax, in the metaphor they've just decided that they're not going to pay taxes. They're blatantly and intentionally defying their host country's right to decide who is within their borders. I wouldn't feel like I was doing an oopsie if I decided to violate the borders and laws of my host country. The idea that they need to be served individual papers to be informed that their evicted is baffling, those papers were posted on whatever port of entry they came through. The time to say goodbye to their neighbors was before their stay became illegal. If this was them accidentally missing a renewal or thinking their stay ended next week rather than this week and it was all a clerical error then I could see what you mean but that's not what is happening. These are people who have been here for years and years after their legal status ended if they had one to begin with.
aqouta
24d ago
But gay in a way that seems coded to appeal to women, not gay men. I have a feeling a show by gay men for gay men about gay men and gay sexual life would be very different and much more like porn for straight guys.
funnily enough I heard about this show from the gay couple in my group of board game friends last weekend and they seemed to quite like it.
aqouta
26d ago
There's endless amounts of ink spilled on what is or isn't communism. The discussion on what does or doesn't count can be interesting. But when the people doing it call it communism and it fits the mold of what a lot of people trying to practice communism are also doing I think it is at the very least a variant of communism even if it isn't the stateless moneyless utopia some theorists imagine. We call the US capitalist despite not being anything like a theoretical perfectly free market and most people who are pro-capitalist don't even want perfectly free markets either.
There are even some arguments for how having a strong state that owns all the productive assets is communism, everyone is a stakeholder in the state and the state owns all the businesses so it's basically like everyone owning their own workplace if you squint. It solves a lot of design problems to do it this way. There are of course problems with this design and Venezuela is a pretty central example of one of the common failure modes, but it's probably fair to call it communism.
They nationlized the oil and gas industry which was run by a firm wholly owned by the state. That's the model most communists go for so I'm not really sure why it wouldn't count. It even worked pretty well for a couple decades until Chavez came along and decided to gut the state company and fill it with cronies for short term social spending.
aqouta
28d ago
Of course, once we're in a Type II ban world instead of a Type I ban world, then there is some amount of "we have to get used to the fact that this type of event will actually happen significantly more often than events that we can control with Type I bans". Frequencies and percentages will depend heavily on specifics. And maybe that's the sentiment you're going for. Sure, we're not going to be able to meaningfully pre-emptively prevent fake AI nudes from being generated, just like we can't really pre-emptively prevent rope-enabled kidnappings. But folks may still want to try a Type II control.
Sure, and we can discuss type 2 controls. But we're going to very quickly get into the "what are we even doing here?" realm when anyone who wants to put together a piddly little indie game that uses player controlled image gen is going to need to spend time implementing some, easily circumvented, controls to prevent some class of images to be generated. And it's not just the deep fakes, we're going to have to get used to every image or video on the internet that doesn't have verifiable provenance being suspect. A lot of people seem to think this future is avoidable and it just isn't. People are going to be able to make deep fakes of people as easily as they can imagine them nude. We should try to teach young men not, or at least not to do so in a public manner just like we mostly manage to teach them not to describe to other people what they imagined one of their class mates would look like nude, but this is fundamentally a social problem that people are trying to solve with ill-fitting legal action. Do you think a kid should get expelled because he imagined what a classmate looked like nude? If a kid drew a picture of his classmate the buff should he be punished?
aqouta
29d ago
That's certainly a big prediction. I'd put something like 15% odds on a big Euro crisis, what do you think would be a reasonable likelihood?
aqouta
29d ago
Torrenting continues to exist. You just can't realistically prevent the distribution of a few gigs of data. Even if you eradicated all the currently existing models it's not particularly hard to train any of the safeguards off new models unless we're just never going to let professionals locally render images.
aqouta
29d ago
The GDP figure should give you an idea of the scale, pretty massive really. They also have a "baby loan" system where a couple can get $35k and the loan is forgiven if they have 3 children in 10 years which frontloads, that $35k is about two years of median individual income so quite a sum. There's also a fairly substantial mortgage subsidy that scales with child count but it's a little complicated. For some year, ending in 2022 they also had a pretty big subsidy for a larger car if you had 3+ kids. They really threw everything and the kitchen sink at the problem.
aqouta
29d ago
Yes it's true. The theft started with the greatest generation stealing from the youth to pay for their retirement, in their defense at the time there were a lot of old folks finding themselves out on the street. However this was a relatively small burden for the boomers because they were splitting the bill so many ways. The Silent and greatest generation made out like bandits. The real problem is the Boomers are so numerous that millennials are struggling to life several times the relative weight.
aqouta
29d ago
Hungary tried spending like 5-6% of gdp on family subsidies and managed to go from a 1.23 to 1.39 and falling as of 2024. I do like this idea, as I'm trying to have a kid it's also in my self interest, but the data just doesn't really seem to support this it's this easy.
aqouta
29d ago
There's just not any way around this. I have an AI image gen model on my computer right now, anyone with a current gen macbook could inpaint any image into pornography. It's not the kind of thing you can realistically ban. As a society we're just going to have to find a way to deal with this the way we deal with the fact anyone at any time could have drawn these same images if they wanted to badly enough. The genie is thoroughly out of the bottle and no amount of outrage will ever put it back in the bottle.
The "AI-Safety" people as you call them have a particular interest in alignment as AI hits super intelligence. They don't need to be wearing their "AI-safety" hats to oppose a surveillance state. You don't need any kind of special MIRI knowledge to oppose surveillance states and people have opposed them for a long time. This is the kind of scope creep criticism that leftists do when the accuse climate focused causes of not focusing enough on police injustice against BIPOCs.
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