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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37996 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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If the concern is that AI will drive us to (near) extinction like humans have whales, I would observe that culling humans seems to lack the economic incentives of whaling -- although it's unclear from the whales' perspective what those incentives are, I suppose. Matrix-like human farming arrangements seem like fiction tropes, but not practical future realities.

Compared to our ancestors a few centuries ago, we consider ourselves wiser in many ways, and we appreciate the conserving wildlife is worth dollars we might spend elsewhere in many cases (although admittedly our actions fare quite poorly). I see the particular case of AGI capable of consistently outsmarting and overpowering humans but also incapable of having a rational discussion about why human culture is worth preserving over paperclips seems unlikely. Worth considering, certainly, but the singular focus on it seems driven by a God-less eschatology in which humans are presumed to be not worth saving.

I'm not sure what that "rational discussion about why human culture is worth preserving" would look like if one agent didn't already values those things more than almost any competing concern. How much of your time do you dedicate to preserving, idk, virus culture? Random rock pile culture? Could ghonorrea or tuberculosis convince you that its presence (and use of precious resources such as human bodies) was a net positive, if it were sufficiently eloquent?

How much of your time do you dedicate to preserving, idk, virus culture? Random rock pile culture? Could ghonorrea or tuberculosis convince you that its presence (and use of precious resources such as human bodies) was a net positive, if it were sufficiently eloquent?

Probably? We still keep around Smallpox samples in labs purely for the potential research its genetic diversity brings. People are surprisingly passionate about random rock piles, doubly so for interesting cases [1] [2] [3] [4]. There are a few Star Trek episodes that ponder the idea of sentient parasites, for which I'd admit the answers are less clear.

Okay, but smallpox is a good example - we keep it in an entirely disempowered state, as we do for almost all wildlife. But again, if we didn't already think something was worth keeping around in the state they want to be kept in (e.g. serial killers), what could they possibly say to change our minds?

Sure, 'total human death' isn't guaranteed. but ... what will happen to humans? Will we fully separate? Will we be left alone ... given our own portion of the earth, fenced off, to develop and grow and fight wars in? Can we go outside? Will we have to run out from under the feet of the AI when it decides to plant down a gigafactory wherever it decides? But, separation doesn't seem likely, given how AI is being shoved into every piece of human civilization it can be, even as primitive as it is today ... but if it's integrated, then what? Will it remain subservient to explicit human decisionmaking despite being gigantically more capable than humans? Is that even meaningful? Maybe humans are "aligned to dogs", but will we all be domesticated as dogs are? Why won't the reins of control over corporations, human lives, politics be handed over to it, to the immense benefit of whoever does so? And what will it do with those reins? Why would it give humans the unprecedented and strange level of 'personal freedom / control over course of life' we have today (and is that even worth much)? What prevents it, as it stumbles through its own development of technology and politics and 'action' generally, from 'changing its mind' about what the course of human civilization should look like - just as we have, looking at how much human 'values' and political and economic organization has changed over the past few centuries?

How is the AI going to do any of that. There’s so much leaps of logic in AI that it’s impossible to even argue against.

Sure, AI being capable of all that should be argued for first. But plenty of people believe "AI will become as smart as, or smarter than, humans eventually", but don't take that all the way to "... and will determine the future of human civilization on this planet" as a result.

GPT-4 sure seems like it's capable of a lot of things! What, exactly, separates 'GPT-4 but scaled up 1000x' from what people can do? Even outside that, what, in principle, prevents a computer from being intelligent? And we're sure trying very hard to create intelligent machines. Even if you'd claim something not-mechanistic, like a spirit or something is important in human experience or intelligence - clearly the 'matter', the incredibly complex biology of the brain, is plays a big role in human intelligence, so why can't machines with that be intelligent too? And then technology has revolutionized every other facet of human life, and the smartest people are putting their effort into creating intelligence on a computer ... even if the current 'make transformers scale' thing fails somehow, they'll be hard at work for something that does.

I’m not saying there won’t be AGI sometime. Or very smart AI. But then it’s the taking over the world in an unexplained way that’s not explained.

The AI is rounding up humans and turning us into batteries within a few years. What’s never explained is how.

If you accept the possibility of the existence of a hyper-intelligent AI then there is no utility in trying to guess how such an AI might take over the world. By mere virtue of the AI being hyper-intelligent and you being, well not, the AI is sure to out think you.

Also I disagree that such explanations don't exist in the first place. Off the top of my head I think of nanobot swarm, but I could think of ten more in an hour.

That’s basically an argument religious people make about the mind of God. In this case however the god is in a little box and can be turned off.

Nanobots were last generations existential panic, and possible future technology. But 2000 called and wants its moral panic back.

Oh well that's good, atleast we can rest assured knowing it's unfashionable.

A valid technology has to actually work.

It’s not about humans being “worth saving”. It’s about humans being a threat to the AI (because they can theoretically build another AI that competes with it), and the AI having an instrumental goal to remove that threat.

If the AI is so smart couldn't it easily disempower humanity without even going through the effort of killing us all?

That might end up being the same thing. It doesn't need to actively kill humans, deciding that it needs some finite resource like fossil fuels more than humans do would kill billions without any intervention more aggressive than blocking access to production sites. It seems plausible that an all-powerful AI might not mind people living in pre-modern farming communities, but that would also mean huge reductions in QoL and the number of humans around.

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