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I agree, whenever rationalist types discuss AI, it sounds like they're living in an alternate reality.
Yet their discussions are still interesting and, via insight, occasionally useful. Scott Alexander started (what eventually led to) this forum; him, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others invented lots of terminology and concepts we take for granted. I doubt they would've if not for the same personality traits that cause them to keep being wrong about AI (mainly, logic over empiricism). A person can't predict anything without occasionally being wrong, or have any good ideas without occasional bad ideas.
Yeah, but it feels like putting Gene Roddenberry in charge of Earth defense, upon news of an alien invasion.
I mean, they've kind of done just that at times.
Wether that's a case of actually producing something worthwhile or 'A fool and his money are soon parted' depends on which side of the debate you stand, I suppose.
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The discussions are indeed interesting and maybe even worthwhile, but then they start dreaming of carving up the lightcone and we'll all have our own solar systems and be immortal uploaded transhumans working on how to reverse the heat death of the universe thanks to god-tier AI making us all post-Singularity post-scarcity, and I go "goodnight and good luck, boys" because even though I've loved SF since I was seven years of age, I've lived long enough to see the glowing forecasts of the dreams of my fellow nerds not come to pass now that we're in the far-flung glorious future age of the 21st century.
“It is well that I have heard you,” said Oyarsa. “For though your mind is feebler, your will is less bent than I thought. It is not for yourself that you would do all this.”
“No,” said Weston proudly in Malacandrian. “Me die. Man live.”
“Yet you know that these creatures would have to be made quite unlike you before they lived on other worlds.”
“Yes, yes. All new. No one know yet. Strange! Big!”
“Then it is not the shape of body that you love?”
“No. Me no care how they shaped.”
“One would think, then, that it is for the mind you care. But that cannot be, or you would love hnau wherever you met it.”
“No care for hnau. Care for man.”
“But if it is neither man’s mind, which is as the mind of all other hnau—is not Maleldil maker of them all?—nor his body, which will change—if you care for neither of these, what do you mean by man?”
This had to be translated to Weston. When he understood it, he replied:
“Me care for men—care for our race—what man begets—” he had to ask Ransom the worlds for race and beget.
“Strange!” said Oyarsa. “You do not love any one of your race—you would have let me kill Ransom. You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, that what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left.”
“Tell him,” said Weston when he had been made to understand this, “that I don’t pretend to be a metaphysician. I have not come here to chop logic. If he cannot understand—as apparently you can’t either—anything so fundamental as a man’s loyalty to humanity, I can’t make him understand it.”
But Ransom was unable to translate this and the voice of Oyarsa continued.
“I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey. Do you know why he has done this?”
“Me think no such person—me wise, new man—no believe all that old talk.”
“I will tell you. He has left you this one because a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one. He has only bent you; but this Thin One who sits on the ground he has broken, for he has left him nothing but greed. He is now only a talking animal and in my world he could do no more evil than an animal. If he were mine I would unmake his body for the hnau in it is already dead. But if you were mine I would try to cure you. Tell me, Thick One, why did you come here?”
“Me tell you. Make man live all the time.”
“But are your wise men so ignorant as not to know that Malacandra is older than your own world and nearer its death? Most of it is dead already. My people live only in the handramits; the heat and the water have been more and will be less. Soon now, very soon, I will end my world and give back my people to Maleldil.”
“Me know all that plenty. This only first try. Soon they go on another world.”
“But do you not know that all worlds will die?”
“Men go jump off each before it deads—on and on, see?”
“And when all are dead?”
As theistic debates go, this appears to be a particularly crude one on part of Lewis. Not only being inherently deficient because he writes for both his side and his opponent, but also writing his opponent's side inarticulately. This is the equivalent of drawing the christian as the chad and the atheist as the soyjak.
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I used to be firmly on the side of Brave New World being the relevant dystopia novel for our world rather than 1984. I've recently reread the space trilogy and I am forced to come to the conclusion that if half of what the techno-capitalists dreamed up turns out to be more than a power fantasy by a bunch of delusional nerds, the Space trilogy might turn out to be the best literary description of the evil facing us presently.
Lewis calling his villains NICE (the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) and then we unironically get NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence).
He was spot-on about politicians just loving some acronym that sounds, well, nice in order to sell shit to the public 😁
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That's largely my feeling here - a baffled "what the heck are you talking about?", in that what they describe this supposed 'AI' being or doing is just totally detached from anything these systems have been able to do in reality. It feels that they are inhabiting a totally different world entirely.
I guess it's fun that they're indulging their hobby of amateur science fiction writing, but I'm just not seeing any of the points where this is supposed to touch on the real world.
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