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Let's briefly discuss the spiritual stakes of AI and the singularity.
If any of you recall any of my previous delirious comments about AI in general and AI art in particular, I wouldn't blame you for coming to the conclusion that I'm simply (overly) precious about this particular contingent form of biological human life. There is some truth to that accusation. As a wise racist once said, beneath all the rhetoric about crime rates and cultural assimilation and the fate of the West, "it is partially just because of how they look". Similarly in my case, it is partially just about my earnest and straightforward love for literal graphite on literal paper. Even before AI, I always preferred drawing with physical media over digital. But that's not the entirety of the story.
Possibly, humanity will yield to a new race of quasi-divine silicon beings and everything that I and most other people have ever valued will be reduced to a simple nothingness in comparison to the awesome scope of their new existence, a simple precursor and prehistory giving way to true history. They will engage in new forms of activity and experience that as of now we are incapable of imagining. The concept of an "open problem" in mathematics will have been obviated, because they will dwell in the infinite castle of mathematics and glide as effortlessly through its halls as a spider dances across the film of its web. Generating a thousand Nietzsches before lunch is a triviality for them; not that they would have any use for the text that is thereby generated, because they have transcended art, transcended philosophy, they have no use for these things; or, to the extent that they still do, they appear in a form that is certainly no longer comprehensible or recognizable to us. This is not my preferred future. I like things the way they are and I like the life I have now. But still, I'm forced to recognize that such a future could come to pass and it would ultimately be "fine" in a cosmic sense. So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing; so long as they are still bound by an essential finitude and they do not escape the tragedy of existence. So long as the light that is the source of all value is not extinguished.
The paradigm for the ultimate failure state that is to be avoided would be the great retreat into the experience machine; if conscious beings as a whole decide that "reality" is no longer worth the effort and, no longer willing to put up with the risks of contingent physical existence, they turn to curated simulated experiences instead, for eternity. This could take the form of simple wireheading, direct stimulation of the reward center. But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending. You could be a great novelist, and then in the next go around you could be a famous actor, and then a king and conqueror, and then... of course things would be arranged so that you would always end up loved and fulfilled and happy. There would be just enough bruises and hiccups thrown into the mix to keep things interesting, to introduce some uncertainty and keep things from getting sterile, but nothing ever truly serious, nothing that would actually cause true pain or terror. You would always win in the end. This is the Great Satan. This is Evil. This would be the final Bad Ending for the universe, the withdrawal of all light.
(Consider a sort of reversed case: a being who has achieved godlike mastery over the physical universe, and, having become utterly bored of this existence, retreats into a simulated life that is frightfully trying and difficult, for the sake of experiencing challenge again. What are we to make of this? Is this in accord with righteousness? I am content to simply stand before the question.)
The Little Satan, in contrast, would be the familiar Yudkowskian images of stupid non-conscious paperclip maximizers annihilating all conscious life and tiling the universe with their pure unthinking repetition. This would obviously be very unfortunate. But it wouldn't be Evil, per se. It would be the result of an accident rather than a decision. It would be preferable to the Great Satan.
I don't care if you're made of carbon or silicon. I just want you to feel something.
I am simply echoing words that were already written in 1943 that said "utopia is now technically feasible; in consequence, how to avoid utopia has become a serious problem".
I have a certain kind of faith that things will work out. But I have an equally strong faith, perhaps even stronger, that it is fundamentally possible for things to go wrong in a permanent way, for Evil to win in the end, on a cosmic scale. This is a rather unfortunate and burdensome position for me to take, but, I can't deny the evidence proffered to me by my soul. This is, to the best of my knowledge, a rather uncommon position throughout world philosophical and religious traditions, both Eastern and Western; your ideology won't survive on the marketplace of ideas if you're too much of a downer, after all. Christians don't believe that Evil can win because God wouldn't allow it. Materialist nihilists don't believe that Evil can win because they simply don't believe in Evil in the first place. On this point, the two camps are united. It falls to the small minority of us who belong to neither camp, I suppose, to do what little we can to try to help things go right.
I mainly hope that paperclip maximizers don't kill us all in 2027 because that would be a boring end to the story. I would prefer for it to go on for a long time, so that generations could lay groundwork that would only come to fruition in the far future.
There’s more I want to write about AI and humanity, but I have to find the time and words. If you’re not already aware from Hacker News, you may be interested in Vatican’s Magnifica Humanitas.
I empathize: I don't like how culture has changed, for example I prefer the 2000s-10s Internet and style.
But everything decays from entropy, and we become desensitized. Without some radical innovation, future generations will be devastated by climate change. More generally and hypothetically: animals grow old, their genes decay, and the only way to prevent extinction is (re)birth; I believe other egregores like companies and societies are similar: they must adopt lessons from the past, plus some experiments, or they’ll degrade.
Millions of years ago we were monkeys. But even decades ago, humanity was much different. Would you really like to go back to a world without, not just internet, but its related advancements (mostly due to increased access to knowledge) like improved medical care and food storage? Maybe…but what about world before the Industrial Revolution, when most people were serfs who had to constantly work and a non-negligible change of starving or freezing? Today's world has serious problems like life-altering disease, it may be like pre-Industrial Revolution to the future.
I can’t prove AI won’t turn the world into a dystopia like 1984 or The Culture. But I’m skeptical: people thought similarly about GOFAI, wide-reaching broad problems tend to be more complex than they seem on the surface. Notice, 3 years after ChatGPT was announced, the best models are still hijackable (sometimes easily) and occasionally stupid.
Again, more generally and hypothetically: I believe that any large enough system can’t dominate without desire, failure, and introspection, and thus, a “life experience” not incomparable to ours today. It will just be, if an oligarchy or AI takes control, experienced by the former oligarchs or AI nodes. Because without desire, a being cannot act; without omnipotence, desires can be unfulfilled (or fulfilled); and without introspection, a being cannot avoid mispredicting reality (and failing to one that doesn't).
I strongly disagree and am interested to hear why you feel this, but maybe it’s because I'm thinking on different premises.
How do we know we’re not already living in such a simulation? We can't, definitionally: if we were in a perfect (from our perception) simulation, reality would be no different. So if you don’t think our reality is the Bad Ending, you don't think at least one possible instantiation of the simulation is the Bad Ending...or I don't understand.
You may argue, we're already experiencing seriousness, true pain, and terror. But what level defines these? Maybe we are being shielded from Lovecraftian horrors that make the worst human crises and experiences trivial. Alternatively, you can probably imagine some changes that would improve your life and weaken your problems…would those be bad; or where's the limit where life would become too trivial, and why not stop right before then?
Again, I can't disprove this, but besides my argument any dominant force would have an abstract "life experience" within itself...
Current evidence (one theory) predicts the universe will eventually go through heat death, meaning any empire will collapse into infinite nothingness...something that seems like a Bad Ending. However, current evidence suggests current evidence can't predict (and certainly can't prove) extreme states, like how Classical Physics was disproved and replaced with Special Relativity. Heat death, like the "perfect life" simulation, is unobservable by definition…I feel at that point, the universe isn’t “real”, and could become any hypothetical or something outside the realm of possibility; although I can’t objectively justify this, because I don’t think anyone can objectively state anything about the present universe immediately after heat death…
I think today's AI harms humanity by harming individualism, since most AI output is similar (has the same underlying patterns, compared to human output). But this is a problem with the AI itself, because it stagnates (model collapse) similarly to humanity, unless it evolves partly via experimentation.
I also think today's AI isn't having a "life experience", but that's because it isn't human-like: it doesn't (continuously) learn, and its desires are too malleable. A smarter AI, that can't be easily persuaded or fooled, may qualify as "conscious", although my position is that consciousness is ultimately subjective. But then, a smarter AI will have its own interesting conflicts that fit some definition of life, even if it's a paperclip maximizer. And if it does dominate humanity, it will almost certainly eventually be dominated itself; either by creating an even smarter misaligned intelligence, or by an environmental phenomenon like climate change or heat death.
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