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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   40081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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What would make you scared?

"If I had infinite freedom to write laws" <---- this would

Fortunately, it's not likely. As for AI, I don't think there's anything that made me scared yet. Maybe there will be, but I'd have to see it first.

I agree that totalitarianism is really, really scary and plausible.

But I'm saying that wrt AI, if you wait until you see something really scary, it'll probably be too late.

I don't have anything to rely on but my previous experience. My and humankind's previous experience tell me: a) totalitarians killed literally millions of people, all in service of the goals that they considered noble and existentially important and b) so far, every time we were told something would surely kill everybody it didn't, and not for the lack of such predictions. Of course, it could very well happen that this time it's different and it will kill everybody. But I see no way to establish that, and the bar for resorting to measures that are already known to kill millions is very, very high, and merely proclaiming "yes, those guys all were wrong and false prohpets, but it's different with me, I am the real prophet" - it's just not enough. I understand that it could be very frustrating for a real prophet, but it doesn't mean I would abandon my reason.

This sounds totally reasonable. We certainly could be in a world where there are threats that are too hard to distinguish from fake ones to respond to them without screwing ourselves in other ways.

I guess I won't try to further convince you here, other than to say "every time we were told something would surely kill everybody it didn't" is certainly a valid reason to discount doomsday prophets in general, but not a good reason to dismiss the possibility of doomsday.

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