aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1mo ago
This also means that the US will be able to safely stop developing AI well before reaching the area where AI is dangerous, since it can simply decide to retard the progress of hostile AIs using its considerable AI capability advantage in such a way as to leave its own AI capabilities considerably more powerful.
This doesn't make any sense. America has stayed ahead in ai development by just developing it faster, this does not in any way imply the ability to flick an off switch. They'd need to be at the point over being able to overthrow the CCP to do this. It's just another form of one world government.
aqouta
1mo ago
Sure it does. AI, as currently constituted, is more vulnerable to MAD than governmental bodies, not less.
This isn't true. MAD works because of second strike capabilities, there is no AI second strike.
There's a difference between dominance in nuclear weapons and more powerful nuclear weapons.
Dominance in nuclear doesn't scale the way dominance in AI scales. You don't get better at world dominance by developing much stronger or numerous nuclear weapons than it takes to obliterate your rivals. AI capabilities continuously enable dominance of your rivals. If your AI is smarter it can defeat your rivals cybersecurity, build more efficient weapons and design better contingencies. A sufficient power gap in AI capabilities could make a conflict look as one sided as Britain with the maxim gun vs natives armed with wooden spears.
aqouta
1mo ago
Mutually assured destruction doesn't hold for AI, and recently in the nuclear doctrine there have been escalation in defense tech that indeed indicate states would like to have dominance in the area.
aqouta
1mo ago
AI is useful for intergovernmental conflict. More powerful AI is more useful for intergovernmental conflict.
aqouta
1mo ago
Is this a one world government? Because the race scenario is super likely for pushing AGI forward.
aqouta
1mo ago
Did a notably finite number of very smart people produce nuclear bombs yes or no? Can a notably finite number of very smart people almost certainly produce a super pandemic yes or no? And these are the absolutely mundane appliations of intelligence.
It seems to me that there is a long tradition of smart people coming together an inventing new and not distantly in the past foreseen weapons and technologies. The very nature of these advancements not being seen far before they came about makes conjuring up specific predictions impossible. You can always call anything specific science fiction, but nuclear was science fiction at one point. And there is of course just the more mundane issue of a sufficiently advanced AI that is merely willing to give cranks the already known ability to manufacture super weapons could be existential.
aqouta
1mo ago
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.
aqouta
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
Is a posted lookout for a robbery not committing a crime because them alerting the thieves is protected speech?
aqouta
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
you prevent an edge from turning into an overwhelming power imbalance by developing your own capabilities. Which means your theory that they might develop AI just up until the point where it can control the population and no further cannot occur in any multi-state system.
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