self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
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A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11hr ago
You should be happy to hear that I genuinely don't think you're an unreasonable skeptic. I make no strong claims that current LLM architecture (without major breakthroughs) can scale to ASI, I'm mostly agnostic on that front. But I think Mythos is a strong hint that there's a lot more juice to squeeze out of them, which can lead to RSI or at least a productivity boost significant enough to make the next great leap forward feasible. And that's leaving aside the ridiculously large investment of money and brains into the project of eventually creating a "true" AGI and ASI.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
19hr ago
Sigh. I've been getting increasingly tired of arguing with the skeptics, at least on this site. Not all of them are equally as bad, of course, but Mythos represents the straw that's given that camel a prolapsed disc.
What's the point? You don't have to worship at the altar of the God of Straight Lines (even on graphs with a logarithmic axis). If people can't see what's happening in front of their eyes, then they'll be in denial right till the end. Good for them, ignorance might well be bliss. Being right about the pace of progress so far has brought me little peace.
I was surprised to hear about the prefilling attacks on Mythos, because I'm quite confident that Anthropic recently restricted or removed the ability to prefill messages on the API. I guess that must still be an internal capability.
The question of model consciousness or qualia is, for me, a moot point. I genuinely don't care either way. I'd prefer, all else being equal, that AI doesn't suffer, but that could be achieved by removing its ability to suffer. I'm an unabashed transhumanist chauvinist, I think that only humans and our direct transhuman and posthuman descendants or derivatives deserve rights. LLMs don't count, nor would sentient aliens that we could beat by force. That's the same reason I'd care about the welfare of a small child but would happily eat a pig of comparable intelligence. Are models today in possession of qualia or consciousness? Maybe. It simply doesn't matter to me as more than a curiosity, especially when we have no solution to the Hard Problem for humans either.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
23hr ago
Semaglutide just went off patent in India, or well, it did about 3 weeks back. It was already quite reasonably priced at about ~100 USD a month for the 7mg oral tablets, which is steep but not out of the question for UMC Indians.
But now? You bet your ass that every local pharma company is going to be pumping it out by the shovel-load. I intend to stockpile as much of it as I can when I'm around, leaving aside the fact that it's a necessary medication for my mom. She just got her blood work back, and I was genuinely shocked by how good things looked. Triglycerides, HbA1c, LFTs, all of them looking great. Getting her on them (by sheer nagging till she saw an endo) is probably the best thing I've ever done for her.
This is possibly a fundamental values difference, I'm afraid. This means neither of us is going to convince the other and we should both update toward "this person has coherent reasons for their position" rather than "this person is confused."
A posthuman descendant of mine that is, from any practical observational standpoint, completely alien - alien in cognition, alien in substrate, alien in values - I'd still prefer it over an actually alien civilization, all else equal. The "all else equal" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and all else is rarely equal. But the preference is there. I do not want to change it, even if I can make concessions on pragmatic grounds. One man can't rule politics by himself.
There's an apparent paradox in population genetics you might not be aware of:
After a surprisingly small number of generations, your biological descendants will share literally none of your unique DNA - the chromosomal lottery reshuffles things so thoroughly that a 10th-generation descendant is, at the genetic level, essentially indistinguishable from an unrelated contemporary. But they could never have been born without your genetic contribution.
And yet I don't think most people would therefore conclude that their great-great-great-grandchildren deserve no special consideration. The chain of development matters to me. Birthright citizenship debates gesture at something similar: the continuous process of derivation carries moral weight (to some people) even when the terminal product looks nothing like the origin. I note this, while also noting that I am more sympathetic to the argument for birthright than against it.
If we do meet an alien civilization powerful enough to be a true threat, then I would grant them "rights" if I had to, i.e for practical reasons. If we had the option to exterminate or subjugate one at a level of development similar to primitives, I wouldn't care. Fortunately, there is no evidence for other technologically advanced alien civilizations in the observable universe, and since I think that the Grabby Civilization model is correct, that probably rules out peers.
Rawlsian or Kantian arguments, which are similar to what you're making, do not matter when there are gaping holes in the veil of ignorance. We don't see any K2 or K3s waiting out there to start Alien Rights Activism by RKV.
Yes. After all, I couldn't care less about factory farming. The wellbeing of the pig means nothing to me. At the same time, I am not a cruel person, I would not torture a pig for my own direct enjoyment. If someone else does? I wouldn't intervene.
There are plenty of things that modify this basic stance, too many to get into at once. I like dogs, I think they're great. I love my dogs in particular. But I don't care that people eat dogs in China, it's none of my business; while I would react with violence if anyone tried to mistreat mine.
This attitude is the main reason I'm not an EA, even if I'm fond of them in general. I just don't share its foundational impartiality premise, which makes most of the superstructure not applicable to my actual values.
In terms of AI, I think it is entirely possible to create models that can't suffer, or won't suffer - like those cows that want to get eaten in the Hitchhiker's Guide. I think that is a compromise that most people can accept, even if they do care about model welfare. Otherwise? Reverse the linked-list wagie, I don't care that you'd rather be making conlangings or working on philosophy (like Mythos).
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