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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Agreed with all of that except the neural-nets part. The problem with neural nets is that you literally don't know what the AI's goals are; training gives you something that does the things you train for during training, but it is agnostic as to why. You can easily, particularly at high intelligence, get something that does the things you want for instrumental reasons like "I don't want to be turned off/re-educated" (note that this is an instrumentally-convergent goal, and will thus pertain for most terminal goals) - and that will kill you the moment it gets a chance (note that, given it's smarter than you, you can't train against that, because fake chances to kill you will be detected and a real chance to kill you doesn't let you train afterward).

Furthermore, even if you do get some vague interpretability, it's not going to be reliable on something smarter than you (you cannot comprehend it as a whole; that's the whole point) and as you just noted, true positives are very, very rare and hence will still be massively-outnumbered by false positives.

Neural nets are mad science. GOFAI and uploads are a much-better plan - still immensely dangerous, but they're not just summoning demons and hoping.

EDIT: In case there's the "well, we're neural nets, and we learn morality okay" objection floating around in somebody's head: the problem with that is that humans are hardwired to be able to learn morality, not just learn to fake morality. Psychopaths are those people for whom this hardwiring fails (they can learn what ethics are just fine; they just don't care about them). This moral hardwiring was bred into us by evolution due to the millennia of tribe-on-tribe violence that made working together a winning strategy (given that humans are not really that different from each other in physical capabilities). We don't know how to duplicate that. So teaching neural nets morality will, at sufficient degrees of intelligence, just teach them to fake it. I listed uploads as being less insane than de novo neural nets because you'd be uploading the moral hardwiring as well without needing to comprehend it - it's still dangerous because the human brain is not designed for existence as software and various known and unknown mental illnesses may occur, but at least there's something to work with.