This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
AI 2040: Plan A
The AI 2027 authors published a follow-up. Scott Alexander also wrote a separate blogpost and although not in the author list contributed.
It's a very speculative and optimistic timeline of AI's future evolution. It presents five ways or "plans" the US government will intervene. Unsurprisingly, the ASI-pilled authors favor strong, global regulation to ensure alignment. Summaries:
Plan A (recommended): the US makes an international treaty with China, pauses AI training (not inference, i.e. no new models but we keep using existing ones), enforces full transparency of future research, then when alignment research advances enough carefully resumes
Plan S: the US makes an international treaty with China and pauses AI training for as long as possible
Plan B: the US regulates AI at home and demands China also regulate, but doesn't negotiate with them, probably leading to a war
Plan C: the US regulates AI and ignores China, so they overtake it and reach ASI first
Plan D: the US doesn't regulate AI, we get ASI in early 2031 and it probably kills everyone
Personally, I just don't share the optimism of these guys in either direction.
I think politicians will prioritize culture war and the failing economy over AI regulation, and at most pass some executive orders suggesting companies be more careful. But I also doubt we'll have ASI that can solve the abstract problems "take over the world" or even "keep existing world leaders in power" (they're getting old and increasingly unpopular, their parties may remain in power but only if their policies significantly shift).
What I expect from AI:
Basically solve legacy code by rewriting entire codebases, applying very niche domain knowledge, and actually finding and handling edge-cases better than humans
Greatly speedup research, leading to new discoveries and inventions. Important but background things like food preservation and medicine will improve from AI-assisted discoveries. Major advancements in math and theoretical physics
Much better and cheaper education, therapy, initial medical/legal appointments, personal repairs...maybe reducing but not eliminating human jobs, because human experts will offer these services "premium"
Won't replace human artists. Some advertisements and infographics will be AI but even some will still be human. At best it will assist them in a way where the human still fully controls the output, e.g. by generating code leading to new and improved software tools to learn, practice, and create art
Used by the vast majority as a personal assistant, but doesn't replace human relations
I think it's worse than that. They had, what, a decade of a head start on this subject? Two? Did they come up with a single actually applicable benchmark that can be used to judge a model's progress to "ASI"? Did they come up with a single benchmark to judge alignment?
I'm struggling to understand why I should listen to a single word they are saying.
Well for the last 4 years we've been burning through benchmarks at great speed. We're onto ARC-AGI 3 now, SWE-Pro is just now out... What benchmark were they supposed to make 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago? How would that benchmark help with anything? We can already see a clear trend in rapid capability growth. Just the other day OpenAI's entry trounced a bunch of people at the AtCoder world programming contest. In that sense it's 'superhuman'. Not in all senses but in some, certainly.
These were the guys who are worried about recursive self improvement and then we have Anthropic nerfing Fable's ML skills so it doesn't help competitors making AI, we have OpenAI guys on twitter saying 'GPT5.6 Sol did the post-training on GPT5.6 Luna'.
That seems pretty self-improving to me? Doesn't seem like ASI is too far distant.
Has the legal system come up with a benchmark for aligning humans in the last 5000 years? Not really, that's not something we can do. We can tell between more or less trustworthy people though, set up incentives and checks and scrutiny. Same with AIs. There are a tonne of benchmarks for safety, just like there are tonnes of checks put on people working in intelligence agencies. Do they actually work, would they work on something inhuman and super smart? Who knows! That's the whole point!
It's an innately tough problem. How do you tell if your subordinate is planning to betray you? This issue is older than human civilization and has certainly not been benchmarked!
There are lots of other reasons to be skeptical about their assumptions. Them not producing a tonne of benchmarks should not be one of them. Their desire seems to be pretty good, it's just an innately hard problem.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link