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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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In AI safely news, the "big, beautiful bill" Republicans are pushing through includes 10 year ban on states regulating AI. Seems pretty reckless, who could even imagine what AI could do in 10 years.

I'd much rather see different states experiment with different forms of regulation, but it's good news for regulatory clarity and therefore the standing of the US in this domain.

At least China won't automatically win the race from the West kneecapping itself.

AI has a lesser problem of enabling dictatorship and a greater problem of rogue AI. In foot-race terms, the lesser problem is that there are other competitors, and the greater problem is that the finish line has landmines under it strong enough to blow up the whole track. As such, until and unless the mines are removed, "sprint harder" is not a solution; if the landmines are set off, you're still dead regardless of who did it.

I don't agree with your premise. I think the opposite is true. Therefore accelerate.

The premise of "rogue AI could potentially kill us all", or the premise of "we are currently on track to build rogue AI"?

The premise that rogue AI is a coherent concept distinguishable from an industrial accident. I don't believe machines have wills and there has been absolutely no reason to change my mind on that point.

Though both of these also have very large problems if you concede that point. People underestimate how extremely difficult "kill all humans" is as a task. And we have basically no idea what we're building and why it works at this stage so speculation on the terminal direction of the technology is bound to be nonsense.

Claude 4 and o3 will take action to avoid being shut down. If you leave aside the literally-unknowable "do machines have qualia" point, they sure seem to be best modelled as capable of agency.

People underestimate how extremely difficult "kill all humans" is as a task.

I'm one of the people saying this. Preppers and other forms of resilience nullify a great many X-risks; another Chicxulub would kill most humans but not humanity (not sure about another Siberian Traps). But there is one specific category of X-risks where that kind of resilience is useless, and that's the "non-human enemy wins a war against us" set (the three risks in this category are the three sorts of possible non-human hostiles - "AI", "aliens" and "God"). Bunkers are no help against those, because if they defeat us they aren't ever going away, and can deliberately break open the bunkers; it might take them a few years to mop up all the preppers (though I imagine God would get everybody in the first pass, and aliens plausibly could), but that doesn't save humanity.

they sure seem to be best modelled as capable of agency.

I disagree. For the same reason that I disagree that it was best to model Eliza as having agency.

You're training a statistical model to do something, and it does that thing. To model it as having agency would imply the thing starting to do things on its own that aren't just emergent properties of what you're making it do.

If you don't want unintended effects, don't train the thing on the whole of a culture you don't control. Calling it "rogue" is like calling a hammer evil because it hurt when you're hitting yourself with it. Stop hitting yourself.

bunkers

More like uncontacted tribes.

Realistic X-risk is mostly down to physical conditions making our biosphere unable to sustain the critical mass of human life, like somebody lobbing a big rock at Earth or some invasive lifeform eating all the oxygen in the atmosphere. And even those are somewhat survivable. Losing a war to a recognizable enemy doesn't even register.

Hence why I think the main mitigating factor is any kind of extra-planetary backup.

If you don't want unintended effects, don't train the thing on the whole of a culture you don't control. Calling it "rogue" is like calling a hammer evil because it hurt when you're hitting yourself with it. Stop hitting yourself.

I love this explanation, it's a great way to put it in perspective. I would also say that this -

To model it as having agency would imply the thing starting to do things on its own that aren't just emergent properties of what you're making it do.

Rules most people out of the agentic category. And that's why I say please and thanks to deepseek anyway.

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