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 -
With the recent discussion on AI 2040, I have been thinking about how the modern AI safety movement of the early 21st century almost entirely pattern matches against the Marxist movements of the early 20th century.
They were both largely wrong about what begat capitalism / AI; Marxism was very insistent on labor value theory, and LW used to be very focused on symbolic AI/GOFAI/FOOM. Despite this, both were extremely prescient about the eventual end states of capitalism and AI well before the general public were aware of such concepts; capitalism leading to involution, monopolism, inequality, alienation, overproduction vs AI leading to AGI/ASI/singularity/the end of humanity.
Both movements have a history of having rock-solid beliefs, perhaps somewhat overconfidently, that current developments will lead to an imminent, eschatological Event; the 1848 revolutions, WW1 revolutions, and the Great Depression leading to the imminent collapse of capitalism, vs Deep Blue, AlphaGo and LLM's leading to the imminent creation of AGI.
Many genuinely altruistic, intelligent people find themselves drawn to both movements as they become convinced by the prescience of the movement's thinkers and start believing in the imminence of the Event - Scott himself has talked about such sympathies before.
Such people (the vanguard party / AI safetyists) are convinced that they are the ones that know best, that they are the only people who are clearly forecasting the imminent Event, and that it's their role to save the lumpenproles / permanent underclass who don't understand class consciousness / the exponential from the Event.
They both believe if the Event goes poorly it will end the world, and if it goes well it will lead to utopic abundance; hence assigning infinite stakes to the actions of the vanguard party / AI safety movement.
They both (correctly) identify that Molochian co-ordination problems make regular action incapable of affecting enough change to make the Event go well; hence the only way out is absolute control over the world by those ideologically and culturally aligned, in order to bring about utopia (communist revolution to seize the means of production vs bombing the data centres and seizing the means of compute).
Inevitably, all such movements end up being co-opted by those very same Molochian dynamics, while never having actually done anything to prevent the Event or improve the chances of the Event leading to abundance (Mao, Stalin vs frontier lab regulatory capture and degrowth ideological capture).
Frankly I also hold similar sympathies myself, with regards to both ideologies. It really is true that capitalism, despite being the best known economic system out of a lot of worse economic systems, has been the genesis of enormous amounts of externalities and suffering, and it really is true that if/when AGI is ever eventuated, at very best it is still going to be the end of the world as we know it, and at worst if anyone builds it everyone dies.
And yet neither Marxism nor AI safety has ever achieved anything that might facilitate a more favorable outcome for the Event, whether it truly is imminent or not, and mostly have just made everything worse. One can only hope that AI safety doesn't rack up Marxism's mountain of bodies along the way.
This is not a fully developed thought, but I'll throw it out there as well - another similarity I see is a combination of what I see as deep conceptual confusion alongside a baffled failure to understand that anybody thinks differently to them.
In this context I doubt it will be necessary to explain where I see the Marxist confusions. What is value? What constitutes exploitation? Why is incremental reform insufficient? Perhaps more controversial would be the idea that the AI people are similarly confused.
Let me take a simple example. What's alignment? There is a great deal of talk about it and I'm not sure it's a coherent category. Structuring AI to prioritise 'human values'? Great. What are those? What on Earth are those? Channelling Alisdair MacIntyre for a moment - Whose Alignment? Which Human Values? Presumably they would reply to me that they don't think they need to have a complete, comprehensive moral theory (after all, that has been baffling philosophers for millennia), but just need some broad strokes like "humans being alive is good" or "material prosperity is good", but I am unsatisfied that this is enough, especially considering the, well, crazy moonbat stuff that so many of these thinkers end up committing themselves to.
Moreover, just on the practical level, I can hardly resist pointing out that we can't align dumb technology, much less any hypothetical future AI. Phones are mis-aligned. Television is mis-aligned. There's a small cottage industry arguing that agriculture is mis-aligned. We have rarely aligned anything before now. It is a good idea in principle to design our tools to accomplish the tasks we intend them for, but every transformative technology before now has had unexpected, unintended, and frequently undesirable effects, alongside the intended effects.
Marxism describes a system that it calls 'capitalism', postulates a set of problems with that system which are both moral/ideological (exploitation, theft of surplus value, etc.) and empirical (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc.), and then points the way to an imagined solution. I feel like 'AI safety' does something similar. Unfortunately I don't think either group is particularly tethered to reality. They both start from a series of reasonable observations about something happening in the world, but then go on to confidently build towers in the sky.
Your second point seems like the more fundamental critique. But I don't get it: "we fail at aligning other technologies, so it seems likely we'll inevitably fail at aligning AI" might have some bite at safety folks at frontier labs who are trying to build an aligned AI. But there's also plenty of people who see the task of aligning AI as about the same as the task of building and aligning COVID-49 i.e. something that just shouldn't be done.
Maybe there's a capability critique in there i.e. AI will never have the capabilities to pose an existential risk. But that is a separate question from the alignment/safety critique of AI (if that is your argument, of course alignment questions drop a lot in importance).
I suppose I do need to be careful here. I think of LLMs as just like any other technology, rather than a paradigm shift, and that means that while I think they will inevitably have effects that we can't predict, some of which will be undesirable, 'standard' safety precautions are sensible. No technology has wholly predictable efforts, but we don't abandon the entire idea of safety. So trying to make bots as safe as possible is a good idea.
What I think of when I hear people talk about 'alignment' or 'AI safety' feels different to that, though. The framing is generally not "let's try to make this tool as practical and safe as possible", just like every other tool we make, but rather "we are on the cusp of making robot gods who will radically change everything about what it is to be human, and we have to make sure that they turn out to be benevolent toward us".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link