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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Daniel Kokotajlo and the rest of the AI 2027 team are doing an AMA right now on ACX, in case any of you want to ask something. Ends half an hour from now.

NB: If you just want to yell "you're wrong" I'd recommend saying that at another time; the questions are coming in fast so I'm not sure they'll be able to answer everything.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ama-with-ai-futures-project-team

My opinion of Scott Alexander continues to crater. I don’t know how much of this story is his or the collaborators, but there is a shocking level of naïveté about everything other than AI technical progress. Even there, I don’t know enough about AI to comment.

My favorite part is the end where Chinese AI sells out China, assists a grassroots Chinese pro-democracy group affect a coup, democratic elections are carried out and everyone lives happily after.

You're talking about this passage?

Sometime around 2030, there are surprisingly widespread pro-democracy protests in China, and the CCP’s efforts to suppress them are sabotaged by its AI systems. The CCP’s worst fear has materialized: DeepCent-2 must have sold them out!

The protests cascade into a magnificently orchestrated, bloodless, and drone-assisted coup followed by democratic elections. The superintelligences on both sides of the Pacific had been planning this for years. Similar events play out in other countries, and more generally, geopolitical conflicts seem to die down or get resolved in favor of the US. Countries join a highly-federalized world government under United Nations branding but obvious US control.

What's your objection? I think this paragraph makes clear that this isn't really an organic phenomenon; it's humans being memetically hacked by AI systems. We're long past the the point in the story where they "are superhuman at everything, including persuasion, and have been integrated into their military and are giving advice to the government." And the Chinese AGI had been fully co-opted by the US AGI at that point, so it was serving US interests (as the paragraph above again makes clear).

I'd also flag that you're probably not the only (or even the main) audience for the story - it's aimed in large part at policy wonks in the US administration, and they care a lot about geopolitics and security issues. "Unaligned AGIs can sell out the country to foreign powers" is (perversely) a much easier sell to that audience than "Unaligned AGIs will kill everyone."

It's just dumb, and displays a gross ignorance/lack of understanding of algorithmic behavior.

And the efficacy of 'memetic hacking.'

Propaganda has been a tool for millennia. Tailored systemic propaganda has been a state practice for centuries. It still has yet to demonstrate the level of social/political control that advocates predict or require for other predictions.

This may, indeed, be an argument tailored to certain bureaucratic political interests... but a key lesson of the last decade of politics has been the increasingly clear limits of political propaganda in changing positions as opposed to encouraging pre-existing biases. And in the US in particular, many of the policy makers most convinced in the value of systemic propaganda are also in the process of being replaced by the previous targets of systemic propaganda campaigns.

I feel like it's another one of those midwit bell-curve memes. The low information take is that if you're going to peddle propoganda/bullshit, at least make it a Studio Ghibli meme. The "midwit" take is that as very serious people thinking seriously about serious topics you (the public) need to take our ideas very seriously. Meanwhile, the the high info take is that engaging seriously with propoganda/bullshit is a waste of time but Studio Ghibli memes are fun.

If, as doglatine suggests, this is all propaganda targeted at US admin officials who, in exchange for backing the policies the AI doomers want implemented, want to hear that the USA will win out in the end over the dirty Commies, then it makes a lot more sense than naive "of course democracy will blossom and even the Chinese AI will push it" fairytale ending.

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