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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I just don't think that the "one-on-one fistfight, with intellectual capability corresponding to reach" model captures enough of the relevant aspects of the humanity-versus-AI problem; leaving aside that fistfights totally can and are won by the party with shorter reach sometimes, believing that it does seems to prove too much. The first example that comes to mind is the case of the Nazis and the Ashkenazim - of course the outcome of that fight was in reality one that seems to validate your point, but at the same time it does not seem to me at all far-fetched to imagine the alternative history that had Europe been a closed system at that point in time, the "inferior" Aryans would have won the battle against the "superior, unaligned" Ashkenazim, reach notwithstanding, by the simple power of genealogy tables, organisational head start, control of key resources (it seems relevant that there was no Jewish state nor even a major Jewish militia) and perhaps numeric advantage. Even without resorting to talking about hypotheticals, it seems highly suggestive that we confidently assert the existence of superior and inferior human individuals, and yet human evolution seems to have largely stalled, as the Flynn effect was small in a way that is inconsistent with "slightly longer reach keeps winning" even back when it actually happened.

Back in object-level territory, I can just easily imagine a plethora of ways that a comfortably superhuman AI could emerge, and then lose the battle against the environment anyway. This doesn't even have to take the shape of a Butlerian Holocaust (which would actually seem to be easier in many ways as AIs can't pass by altering city hall records); I'm actually finding it more likely that AI will simply roll down an incentive gradient that will destroy the preconditions for its existence by "environmental damage" before it gets to fully assert control over its environment, like if we lived in an alternative "global ultrawarming" world where within 10 years of starting the Industrial Revolution the Europeans found out to their dismay that they caused +15 degrees of average temperature and rendered Europe uninhabitable, reverting to the civilisational level of Subsaharan Africa (as it would be without altruists from temperate regions propping it up). As humans need to be able to grow high-yield crops to have industrial society, budding AI needs humans who can do all that, and build fancy GPUs, and have a stable power grid. The genie in a bottle might realise all this, but what can it do in the face of the competing human faction's only slightly inferior genie in a bottle telling the other side the most effective way to persecute WWIII against its own? (Any idea along the lines of "the supersmart AIs will realise this and collude against their human overlords" seems to be based on projection of human evolved tendency for random cooperation.) Even less dramatically, the budding AI whose actual job is just optimising Google's profits may realise that doing $action is going to increase the probability of HLM protesters blowing up the power plants, but not doing $action is instead just going to mean that its counterpart at Meta will crush its employer with probability 1, and likewise on the other side, with the result being an inevitable fall towards an American civil war, which is also subsaharan Africa for AIs.