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Notes -
I mean, I don’t do that either.
But if I had to make the case, I’d say that the Sims AI is transparent enough to leave no room for consciousness. Someone designed it, someone implemented it as a series of instructions. It might take some work but those are comprehensible.
Frontier AI is on the wrong side of that boundary. We are extending the frontier faster than we can explore the area between the two. We’re doing so specifically by mimicking human responses and then obscuring the inner workings.
I can’t say I find the AI torture chamber existentially horrifying. I think our barely-incomprehensible models are probably not that far from the comprehensible ones. What bothers me about this is the idea that if it were possible to upload a torture chamber, people would want to do it.
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