This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
SMBC gets this close.
I've been thinking about the Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox recently. From the Wiki, it
That is, if everyone is already essentially omniscient, then there's no real payoff to investing in information. I was even already thinking about AI and warfare. The classical theory is that, in order to have war, one must have both a substantive disagreement and a bargaining friction. SMBC invokes two such bargaining frictions, both in terms of limited information - uncertainty involved in a power rising and the intentional concealment of strength.
Of course, SMBC does not seem to properly embrace the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient. This is somewhat of a side prediction of the main prediction that it will be a nearly perfectly efficient executor. The typical analogy given for how perfectly efficient it will be as an executor, especially in comparison to humans, is to think about chess engines playing against Magnus Carlsen. The former is just so unthinkably better than the latter that it is effectively hopeless; the AI is effectively a perfect executor compared to us.
As such, there can be no such thing as a "rising power" that the AI does not understand. There can be no such thing as a human country concealing its strength from the AI. Even if we tried to implement a system that created fog of war chess, the perfect AI will simply hack the program and steal the information, if it is so valuable. Certainly, there is nothing we can do to prevent it from getting the valuable information it desires.
So maybe, some people might think, it will be omniscient AIs vs omniscient AIs. But, uh, we can just look at the Top Chess Engine Competition. They intentionally choose only starting positions that are biased enough toward one side or the other in order to get some decisive results, rather than having essentially all draws. Humans aren't going to be able to do that. The omniscient AIs will be able to plan everything out so far, so perfectly, that they will simply know what the result will be. Not necessarily all draws, but they'll know the expected outcome of war. And they'll know the costs. And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.
Isn't the inevitable conclusion that we've got ourselves a good ol' fashioned paradox? Omniscient AI sure seems like it will, indeed, end war.
If you pit two top engines against each other, you won't have any idea who will win. You know it'll be a coin toss but you won't know who will win.
Time to read the three body problem again. It's fiction but it conceptualizes the idea of wallfacers who will deceive the enemy AI which can be everywhere in the world all at once.
Even if an AI can simulate the world with such accuracy that it becomes essentially a game, the opponent's moves are still unknown. Playing a game well is one thing, but solving a game (determining if a player can force a win) is entirely harder. Checkers, tic-tac-toe, and connect four are solved, while chess is not.
With current technology, nobody knows the outcome of a very lopsided chess game. The underdog AI still has a chance, and that's why people are still interested in watching.
Emphasis added. I don't need to know in order for the AI to tell me that the best outcome is a negotiated settlement within certain parameters.
Agreed, but sort of irrelevant. The chess engine is still executing perfectly, even though it doesn't actually know what moves the opponent will ultimately make.
I think the answer here is again that it is ultimately irrelevant. We didn't need to solve chess or diplomacy to have an engine become a nearly perfect executor or to narrow the range of outcomes significantly (>90% draws unless you extremely bias the starting positions, for example).
You are being nonsensical in your handwaving of complexity. Chess has 32 total pieces each with an extremely contrained potential action across only 64 positions. You can't just handwave knowability there into the real world. There's no reason to believe enough computational power exists to be able to have 'omniscient level' understanding of the world. You are just speaking pure, unfounded fiction.
For the record, you don't have a problem with me. You have a problem with the people who hold the position that we are approaching an AI singularity and that doom is inevitable because the AI will have all these incredible characteristics. I don't actually hold that position; I'm just investigating it.
In any event, I again don't think it needs to be actually omniscient. It just needs to be able to reduce error bounds enough to eliminate the bargaining friction. Since war is very costly, it certainly doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to get the error bars down enough. Think of it as a continuum. As the ability to gather information, model, and predict accurately goes up, the likelihood of war goes down, since the bargaining frictions due to uncertainty are reduced. Yes yes, it may be only when we take the limit that the likelihood of war goes down to precisely zero. I'm not even quite sure of that, because since war is so costly, we can probably still tolerate a fair amount of uncertainty and still remain in a region where settlements can be negotiated.
The AI singularity/doom people think that, for all intents and purposes, we're headed for that limit. They may be wrong. But if one believes their premise, then I think the conclusion would be that war goes to zero.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link