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The future of AI will be dumber than we can imagine
Recently Scott and some others put out this snazzy website showing their forecast of the future: https://ai-2027.com/
In essence, Scott and the others predict an AI race between 'OpenBrain' and 'Deepcent' where OpenAI stays about 3 months ahead of Deepseek up until superintelligence is achieved in mid-2027. The race dynamics mean they have a pivotal choice in late 2027 of whether to accelerate and obliterate humanity. Or they can do the right thing, slow down and make sure they're in control, then humanity enters a golden age.
It's all very much trad-AI alignment rhetoric, we've seen it all before. Decelerate or die. However, I note that one of the authors has an impressive track record, foreseeing roughly the innovations we've seen today back in 2021: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like
Back to AI-2027! Reading between the lines, the moral of the story is for the President to centralize all compute in a single project as quickly as he can. That's the easiest path to beat China! That's the only way China can keep up with the US in compute, they centralize first! In their narrative, OpenAI stays only a little ahead because there are other US companies who all have their own compute and are busy replicating OpenAI's secret tricks albeit 6 months behind.
I think there are a number of holes in the story, primarily where they explain away the human members of the Supreme AI Oversight Committee launching a coup to secure world hegemony. If you want to secure hegemony, this is the committee to be on - you'll ensure you're on it! The upper echelons of government and big tech are full of power-hungry people. They will fight tooth and nail to get into a position of power that makes even the intelligence apparatus drool with envy.
But surely the most gaping hole in the story is expecting rational, statesmanlike leadership from the US government. It's not just a Trump thing - gain of function research was still happening under Biden. While all the AI people worry about machines helping terrorists create bioweapons, the Experts are creating bioweapons with all the labs and grants given to them by leading universities, NGOs and governments. We aren't living in a mature, well-administrated society in the West generally, it's not just a US thing.
But under Trump the US government behaves in a chaotic, openly grasping way. The article came out just as Trump unleashed his tariffs on the world so the writers couldn't have predicted it. There are as yet unconfirmed reports people were insider-trading on tariff relief announcements. The silliness of the whole situation (blanket tariffs on every country save Belarus, Russia, North Korea and total trade war with China... then trade war on China with electronics excepted) is incredible.
I agree with the general premise of superintelligence by 2027. There were significant and noticeable improvements from Sonnet 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 IMO. Supposedly new Gemini is even better. Progress isn't slowing down.
But do we really want superintelligence to be centralized by the most powerhungry figures of an unusually erratic administration in an innately dysfunctional government? Do we want no alternative to these people running the show? Superintelligence policy made by whoever can snag Trump's ear, whiplashing between extremes when dumb decisions are made and unmade? Or the never-Trump brigade deep in the institutions running their own AI policy behind the president's back, wars of cloak and dagger in the dark? OpenAI already had one corporate coup attempt, the danger is clear.
This is a recipe for the disempowerment of humanity. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people are already corrupted.
Instead of worrying 95% about the machine being misaligned and brushing off human misalignment in a few paragraphs, much more care needs to be focused on human misalignment. Decentralization is a virtue here. The most positive realistic scenario I can think of involves steady, gradual progression to superintelligence - widely distributed. Google, OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek might be ahead but not that far ahead of Qwen, Anthropic and Mistral (Meta looks NGMI at this point). A superintelligence achieved today could eat the world but by 2027, it would only be first among equals. Lesser AIs working for different people in alliances with countries could create an equilibrium where no single actor can monopolize the world. Even if OpenAI has the best AI, the others could form a coalition to stop them scaling too fast. And if Trump does something stupid then the damage is limited.
But this requires many strong competitors capable of mutual deterrence, not a single centralized operation with a huge lead. All we have to do is ensure that OpenAI doesn't get 40% of global AI compute or something huge like that. AI safety is myopic, obsessed solely with the dangers of race dynamics above all else. Besides the danger of decentralization, there's also the danger of losing the race. Who is to say that the US can afford to slow down with the Chinese breathing down their neck? They've done pretty well with the resources available to them and there's a lot more they could do - mobilizing vast highly educated populations to provide high-quality data for a start.
Eleizer Yudkowsky was credited by Altman for getting people interested in AGI and superintelligence, despite OpenAI and the AI race being the one thing he didn't want to happen. Really there needs to be more self-awareness in preventing this kind of massive self-own happening again. Urging the US to centralize AI (which happens in the 'good' timeline of AI-2027 and would ensure a comfortable lead and resolution of all danger if it happened earlier) is dangerous.
Edit: US secretary of education thinks AI is 'A1': https://x.com/JoshConstine/status/1910895176224215207
Yes. This is part of what I meant when I was talking about the utter failure of the Rationalist movement with @self_made_human recently. The Rats invested essentially 100% of their credibility in a single issue, trying to position themselves as experts in "safety", and not only do they come up with the most ridiculous scenario for risk, they ignore the most obvious ones, and even promote their acceleration!
This is blasphemy to the Rationalist. It's not even a question of whether the AI will be safe when decentralized or not, for them the whole point of achieving AGI is achieving total control of humanity's minds and souls.
Have any examples of a rationalist expressing this opinion?
I'd need to reread the thing, but I believe Meditations on Moloch had a bit about elevating AI to godhood, so that it can cultivate """human""" values. And there's also Samsara, a "hee hee, just kidding" story about mindfucking the last guy on the planet that dares to have a different opinion.
I found the section of Moloch and my impression is that it's more of a hypothetical used as rhetorical device for showing the magnitude of the problem of "traps" than a seriously proposed solution:
Perhaps Scott genuinely believes human-aligned ASI is the least-bad solution to Moloch and solving Moloch is a sufficient motivation to risk mis-aligned ASI, but if "the whole point of achieving AGI is achieving total control of humanity's minds and souls," the question of alignment wouldn't make much sense; the ASI could be assumed to be better aligned to transhumanist terminal goals than transhumanists, due to being definitionally superior.
"Samsara" is a terrific example of Scott's fiction, but I think it being a friendly joke from a comedic short fiction author who's fond of Buddhism is a much better interpretation than it revealing a latent desire to control the minds of those who disagree with him - if it were the latter, what latent desire would Current Affairs’ “Some Puzzles For Libertarians”, Treated As Writing Prompts For Short Stories reveal?
I think there is a genuine spiritual vision to 'Moloch' - it's the same one in 'The Goddess of Everything Else' and even to an extent in 'Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones'. It's a vision that sees nature as cruel, ruthless, and arbitrary, and which exalts rather in its replacement by conscious organisation in the interests of consciousness. Or at least, in the interests of intelligence, since I think the rationalists have a very minimal (I would say impoverished) definition of consciousness as such. There was a tagline on an old rationalist blog - was it Ozy's? - that I felt summed up this religion well: "The gradual replacement of the natural with the good".
AI-god naturally fits very well into that vision. It is a constructed super-agent that, unlike the messy products of evolution, might be trusted to align with the vision itself. It is a technological avatar of rationalist values - there's a reason why 'alignment' is such a central word in rationalist AI discourse. It's an elevated means by which reality may conform to our vision, which obliterates resistance or friction to it.
(This should be for another post, but I have thoughts about the importance of resistance or friction in a good life...)
'Samsara', on the other hand, is a one-off joke, though for me I think the deepest joke it tells is actually one on Scott. 'Samsara' to me reads fairly typically of rationalist understanding of Buddhism, which is intensely surface level. I know that it's a joke so I'm not going to jump on it for the world full of people in orange robes reciting clichéd koans, but it reminds me a lot of Daniel Ingram's book, and in that way, why neither Scott nor Ingram have a clue about Buddhism. What I mean is that their approach to Buddhism is fundamentally subtractive - it's about removing millennia of tradition to try to crystallise a single fundamental insight. The premise of 'Samsara' is:
Again, not all the paraphernalia should be taken literally (obviously lotuses and robes and pagodas and things aren't hard-coded into enlightenment), but what it does express is the idea that, if it's possible, you can boil Buddhism down to a single essence which can be mastered by a sufficiently determined or intelligent person pretty quickly. See also: PNSE, and those articles Scott writes about jhanas.
But - the thing is, Buddhism is not in fact like that. You cannot reduce Buddhism to One Weird Trick. (Rakshasas HATE him!) You'd think there might be something to learn from the fact that actual Buddhists have been doing this for thousands of years and might have made some discoveries in all that time. Maybe not all the accretion is cruft. In fact for most practicing Buddhists, even very devout ones, enlightenment is understood to be a project that will take multiple lifetimes. And in fact what enlightenment is may have a bit more to it than they think.
Yes, meditation is something that Buddhists do, and it's important to them, but Buddhism is not just about meditating yourself into a weird insight or into an ecstatic state of mind. One of the insights of Zen is that people get those insights or ecstasies all the time, and by itself it doesn't mean much. Buddhism's substantive metaphysical doctrines go considerably beyond impermanence, its ethical doctrines are extremely rich, and its practices merit some attention as well.
Again, I realise that 'Samsara' is a joke, and as a joke I think it's funny. "What if it were possible to boil Buddhism down to a weekend? This is, of course, ridiculous, but wouldn't it be funny?" Yes, it is. But read in the context of Scott's other writings on Buddhism, I think there is a failure to encounter the tradition beyond the small handful of elements that he and writers like Ingram have picked out as 'core' and fixated on.
"Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones seems to come to the opposite conclusion:
"The gradual replacement of the natural with the good" seems open to interpretation, out of context - I might guess that was a pretentious neo-Hobbesian appeal, which isn't outside rationalists' overton window.
Can you elaborate on this? Scott's writings on Jhanas include raising the question of why people who reach them don't try to spend more time in what is, at face value, a purely positive state, so this is interesting.
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