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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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If it does then it will be smart enough to self-modify,

This does not work out the way you think it will. A p99-human tier parallelised unaligned coding AI will be able to do the work of any programmer, will be able to take down most online infrastructure by merit of security expertise, but won't be sufficient for a Skynet Uprising, because that AI still needs to solve for the "getting out of the digital box and building a robot army" part.

If the programming AI was a generalised intelligence, then of course we'd be all fucked immediately. But that's not how this works. What we have are massive language models that are pretty good at tackling any kind of request that involves text generation. Solve for forgetfulness in transformer models and you'll only need one dude to maintain that full stack app instead of 50.

What I'm saying is that AI's are made of code. If they can write code then they can improve themselves. An AI able to code better than people can also code a better AI than people can. Maybe you don't think that that will lead to recursive self-modification--I think there's at least a good chance that there are diminishing returns there--but just consider the advances we've made in AI in the last year, and you're supposing a future where not only have we gotten farther but then there's another entity capable of going farther still. At a bare minimum I think an AI capable of doing that is capable of replacing most other careers too.