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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19595 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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What does materialism or lack thereof have to do with being effectively agentic? If the AI is going to kill all of us the last thing I care about is whether it had free will or a light inside its mind.

The truth matters in a practical sense because bad models make bad predictions. People who anthropomorphize AI are taking an intellectual shortcut that leads them to absurd conclusions instead of wrestling with the reality of what we have created, and that's bad because it'll lead to bad policy, bad legislation, bad judicial precedent and bad morality.

Philosophy is important.

Language and mathematics has no agency, you're pressing the buttons, you're responsible. Passing the blame on the tool is unserious.

If your only concern is that I'm saying "AI might kill us" rathen than "people who instantiated a particularly unpredictable AI that has 'might kill us' as a possible emergent function might kill us", I'm glad to oblige, but it doesn't really change any argument. There's no AI that might kill us right now, therefore the people who would create it are to blame whether it's """truly""" agentic or not.

The comment that started this chain has this claim:

AI has a lesser problem of enabling dictatorship and a greater problem of rogue AI.

All my answers are informed by this context.

I care that the blame is laid at the feet of the humans that are misusing technology and not misdirected towards some nebulous scifi concept.

AI is not doing anything, people are, and it's people I'm afraid of, therefore I want access to the same weapons they have. Therefore accelerate, open source everything, etc.

I'm sympathetic to luddism, but it's a losing strategy in a world where the technology you want to slow down gives a strategic advantage.

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