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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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It is my belief that after the AI takeover, there will be increasingly less human-to-human interaction. This is partially because interacting with AI will be much preferable in every way, but it is also because safetyism will become ever more powerful. Any time two humans interact, there is the potential for someone to be harmed, at least emotionally. With no economic woes and nothing to do, moral busybodies will spend their time interfering with how other people spend their time, until the point where interacting with another human is so morally fraught and alienating that there is no point. Think about it, who would you rather spend time with: an AI who will do whatever you want and be whatever you want, anytime, or a grumpy human on her own schedule who wants to complain about someone who said "hi" to her without her consent? The choice seems obvious to me.

It is my belief that after the AI takeover, there will be increasingly less human-to-human interaction.

This is a major concern, yes.

One of the worst possible outcomes of ASI/singularity would be everyone plugging into their own private simulated worlds. Yudkowskian doom at the hands of the paperclip maximizers may be preferable. I'm undecided.

who would you rather spend time with: an AI who will do whatever you want and be whatever you want, anytime, or a grumpy human on her own schedule who wants to complain about someone who said "hi" to her without her consent?

Freedom is boring, not to mention aesthetically milquetoast, if not outright ugly in some cases. I have always been opposed to trends towards greater freedom and democratization in the arts - open world video games, audience participation in performance art and installations, and of course AI painting and photo editing recently - I find it all quite distasteful.

Is Tolstoy applicable here? Free men are all alike in their freedom; but to each unfree man we may bestow a most uniquely and ornately crafted set of shackles.

You sound like the exact kind of person I'm trying to wake up with my statements. You want to put humanity in shackles because you are afraid that freedom might be boring? You want to force me to spend eternity shackled to my psychological abusers because you're worried that I might not use my time in the most aesthetic way? No one is forcing you to play open world video games, but you want me to be forced to play a closed world video game. Why?

I view plans of giving humans GOD mode (but not really) via AI as fundamentally removing all sort of meaning from life.

Things are easier now than they were, yes, but we still suffer. Suffering is, in my opinion, a core pillar of what it means to be human.

Great, suffer then. That doesn't give you the right to impose suffering on others.

What about his children? Will you send men with guns to snatch them away from him to hook them into AI-fueled hypermodernity?

Good, complicated question. We are I think agreed that adults should (usually) be able to do whatever. We are probably also agreed that very young children should not have their life outcome dominated by whatever decision they hold at any given moment. I believe it is also uncontroversial that children in plainly abusive (violent/sexual) households should be removed. Between that, I think this worry is overstated - parenting is also a skill whose scarcity will be reduced by the singularity.

Maybe if his children want to leave for a month, they can; it is then his problem to avoid this. I don't know where the actual degree shakes out; I suspect the actual numbers will be relative to circumstances. Presumably an AI will be able to analyze if an intention to leave is temporary or stable; this should affect decisionmaking. (Imagine how uncontroversial trans would be if satisfaction and outcome could be perfectly forecast.) But in sum, I simply think we have a warped picture of the tradeoffs involved in liberty vs parenthood due to the fact that we live in a very broken world filled with people who are very bad at what they do.

I'd send whatever needed to be sent to hear from the children themselves, give them an informed opinion of the state of the wider world, and hand them a ticket to leave whatever Neo-Malthusian hellscape Panem wants them to dwell in.

It's completely up to them whether they want to leave, but I fully support their exit rights.

I'm sure there will be people insane enough to want to dwell in such places, and that's their prerogative, but the opinion of the father shouldn't override the desires of the son. Offer to wipe their memories of the outer world after they decline if the knowledge it's out there is so unpleasant.

What age? 2? 5? 15?

Age is unlikely to be a meaningful signifier of mental maturity at that point in the future.

If a baseline human, then I'd go with 16ish, otherwise when they can be reasonably expected to have the maturity of a baseline 16yo human.

Rumspringa rules, so 16 or 17? Seems the closet analogy for modern life : experience machine would be Amish : modern life.

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