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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I don't know. I don't believe the AI doomerism, but neither do I believe the AI pollyannas about how Fairy Godmother AI will solve all the world problems and we'll all be rich and living high on the hog.

And while I try to be sympathetic to Aaronson because I do think he is severely neurotic and troubled, lines like this have me facepalming:

It was also defined by my struggle against the bullies—i.e., the kids who the blankfaced administrators sheltered and protected, and who actually did to me all the things that the blankfaces probably wanted to do but couldn’t.

Dude, mate, pal: I've worked in a school and related areas. The "blankfaces" don't want to stick your head down the toilet, they don't think of you as anything other than "okay, another problem to be solved", especially if your parents were on the phone every five minutes about how unfair it was that little Scott wasn't allowed to jump ahead three grades in maths.

This is someone smart, who works in academia, is married with kids - and is still going through the world as the scared and resentful 12 year old who was bullied at school. If he thinks AI is going to recognise him as a kindred 'high intellect' and be on his side, he needs to wake up fast. AI won't recognise or think of anybody as anything, it'll be a tool in the hands of whoever brings their product to market first.

If the doomerists are anyway right, he'll be just another one of the fleshbags. For someone who seems to live in a constant state of "I'm Jewish, so everyone wants to Holocaust me", I can see why he'd pin his hopes on machine intelligence being the boss of the world. But he's wrong - sure, the machine won't care that he's Jewish, but it also won't care that he's smart for a fleshbag. He's just more paperclip material.

If the doomerists are anyway right, he'll be just another one of the fleshbags. For someone who seems to live in a constant state of "I'm Jewish, so everyone wants to Holocaust me", I can see why he'd pin his hopes on machine intelligence being the boss of the world. But he's wrong - sure, the machine won't care that he's Jewish, but it also won't care that he's smart for a fleshbag. He's just more paperclip material.

I think Aaronson thinks of himself primarily by his intellect and lack of emotional range, and he's read/watched a lot of science fiction where the AGI is the intellect in the group and lacks emotional range (despite, at the end of the day, being a character written by a human), so he's come to subconsciously identify himself with the AGI. He sees a lot of himself in, say, Lt. Data. When an android like Data comes on screen he starts to identify with him instantly, that's the character that's going to act like me.

I think I've talked before on here how, in media, I realized that subconsciously I identified myself sometimes with Jewish and often with Asian or South Asian characters as soon as they walked on screen when I was growing up. Even though I personally have none of those traits, or anything close, in the 90s/oughts when a character from those groups popped up he was more likely to be off-beat but intelligent, more known for brains than brawn, didn't fit in with the "cool kids" and had to find his own way. Which was what I thought myself to be at the time. The Judaism wasn't really necessary to that plot, but it was an instant signal that would be his role. Where when a character that actually looked like me appeared on screen, he was likely to be a dumb blonde jock, someone I didn't identify with at all. This is, I think, what is going on when people talk about liberals preferring the outgroup.

Aaronson has taken this all the way to the extreme of making his preferred outgroup non-humans, because that's the group he identifies with when they walk on camera.

When an android like Data comes on screen he starts to identify with him instantly, that's the character that's going to act like me

I noticed the same reaction in myself a while ago, but I'm a big fan of AI/robot tropes, and the real-world AIs we have so far don't have much thematic similarity to Wall-E, Data, Iron Giant, Bob the T-800, or Johnny-5. Most of the genuinely human AI fictional characters were never intended (in-universe) to be human. Iron Giant was a gun. Wall-E was a garbage collection unit. Data is maybe an exception, depends on what the intentions of his builder were, but the attempts at humor and the cat and the flute and such probably weren't intended in his design.

Narratively and IRL, Robots are not to be trusted unless they're acting WAY outside their intended parameters.