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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35807 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Two Tweets from OpenAI's Sam Altman: "eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else. certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc." "it is possible at some point he will deserve the nobel peace prize for this--I continue to think short timelines and slow takeoff is likely the safest quadrant of the short/long timelines and slow/fast takeoff matrix."

Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks that the rapid development of AGI will likely kill us and he has devoted his life to trying to stop this from happening, and Sam Altman almost certainly knows this. My personal guess is that quantum immortality means regardless of who is right, some branches of the multiverse will survive AGI, and the survivors will have enough computational power to know what percentage of the branches survived, and consequently whether Altman or Yudkowsky were right.

Edit: Eliezer's response Tweet, which I don't understand.

Doesn't quantum immortality mean that we're likely to spend eternity in pain on our death beds, seemingly close to death but miraculously surviving? If AGI tries to wipe us out, aren't we likely to suffer in pain forever from a miraculously survived murder attempt, maybe lying as a blind and deaf quadriplegic with third degree burns buried in a garbage dump?

On average no, if what you consider "you" includes people with the exact same brain who live in different parts/branches of the multiverse.

Why not?

The odds of you dying on your death bed goes up exponentially with time so the measure of use that has somehow survived 1 million years on your death bed will be much, much less than the measure of you that is in a branch of the multiverse where someone cured death. Plus, in a big enough universe new yous keep being born.

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