naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
22hr ago
This Inevitable Ruin, the seventh book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I blasted through the first four books but it has been a bit of a slog ever since, despite some fun "high points" in each entry. At this point I feel sufficiently invested, and the high points sufficiently high, to continue through the books when I have time, but very few authors seem to be able to keep up with their younger selves.
I also wonder how the author feels about the fact that his anarcho-communist hero/worldbuilding is literally sustained by Deus ex Machina. I haven't bothered to dig into the fandom so I have no idea whether the author has commented on this, but I assume the readers have! The sci-fi trope of "preach communism but (accidentally?) notice that it's only genuinely sustainable in a world of magically unlimited resources" is one I've been contemplating for decades now, thanks to Star Trek. It feels like such a self-own except that I imagine most readers don't see it that way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
What do you think of all this? Do you think these people should stick to writing science fiction?
I don't like the "writing science fiction" characterization because it reads as inappropriately dismissive. We're not talking about holodecks or matter assemblers; we're talking about a technology that already exists. The only speculation involved is how much better it can actually get. You could in principle train and RLHF and RAG and whatever a personally-aligned model today, you probably just don't have the resources.
Gwern is 100% correct (and far from the first person to notice) that the current business model for AI is the same as every other tech business model in the information age: to take de facto and de jure control of as much of commerce and governance as possible and then rent it back to people in perpetuity. The open source software movement was a reaction to this decades ago. The main difference at present is that AI development is a lot more difficult to do at home (though of course not impossible!), especially while the current players have a hard lock on the anticipated production runs of all the necessary hardware. Memory and storage prices have quadrupled or more; for the first time in my life, desktop computers more than 3 years old have actually appreciated in value.
I agree with the "Guardian Angel" mission as stated. It's the only real effort I've seen from anyone to align AIs properly: with individual humans, rather than with corporate or government values. But I am not optimistic about their chances.
CW topics are explicitly allowed in Small Question Sunday!
I'm basically with you. I practice something like communism with my family. I think it can probably be successfully done in a collective of many dozens to perhaps even a few hundred humans, but at some point the scale tips and competition for scarce resources has to be managed through something less personal than familial love. Today abundance and prosperity is predominantly the result of trade, which is itself driven by scarcity (no point trading for what I already have). A world with Star Trek replicators and functionally infinite energy would be super cool, but we don't live there now and certainly won't get there by pretending that we do.
More options
Context Copy link