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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   38909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I haven't listened to the whole conversation but what I've heard and seen I have question. When did Autistic Catastrophizing become accepted by the mainstream? We got Greta Thunberg and now we have the "Big Yud" getting his opinion in the Time.

How do I become mainstream with my Catastrophizing that the combination of attention grabbing AI that subvert our lives with knowledge of behavioral psychology and the combination with generative AI giving us personalized content just massaging our brains just right? Imagine people trapped in a pleasure cube just watching personal generated colors and sounds that only has meaning to them....

How do I become mainstream with my Catastrophizing that the combination of attention grabbing AI that subvert our lives with knowledge of behavioral psychology and the combination with generative AI giving us personalized content just massaging our brains just right?

I'm a little disappointed that "AI safety" is so strongly associated with Skynet-style scenarios, instead of concerns about (in my view) more plausible near-term AI risks like this (and others - social unrest from sudden mass unemployment, expanding surveillance capabilities, etc). But, I'm certainly willing to make common cause with the x-riskers if it also gets people thinking about near-term AI risks as well.

I'm a little disappointed that "AI safety" is so strongly associated with Skynet-style scenarios, instead of concerns about (in my view) more plausible near-term AI risks like this (and others - social unrest from sudden mass unemployment, expanding surveillance capabilities, etc).

How ironic, I'm a little disappointed that anyone bothers to waste an iota of intellectual effort on those nothingburger risks when Skynet-like scenarios are potentially bearing down on you.

When the Skynet term in your expectation function has a probability >0 and an expected utility of minus infinity, worrying about the small stuff like "They took our jerbs" is imo a bit dumb.

Plus I can always just... choose not go into the pleasure cube, whereas I can't choose not go into the paperclip nanobot.

When the Skynet term in your expectation function has a probability >0 and an expected utility of minus infinity,

This is called Pascal's Mugging.

Except the arguments for the existence of the risk are substantially stronger than those presented by the theoretical mugger.

After all, we can all clearly see that the AIs exist now and that them becoming smarter-than-human is, indeed, plausible. This does not require you to take the mugger's words at face value.

So what's irrational about considering the actual evidence that exists?

Except the arguments for the existence of the risk are substantially stronger than those presented by the theoretical mugger.

No they're not. Superintelligence and other fictions have exactly as much evidence backing them as God.

AIs don't exist now, never have, and likely never will.

The implications of the existence of LLMs might be great of small, but to see them in this paradigm of "intelligence" is boneheaded and ridiculous, and I remain convinced that history will show this framing to be completely delusional.

What do you think human intelligence is?

Or more precisely, if we're leaving God off the table, then why should whatever humans do that produces the appearance of intelligence be impossible to reproduce artificially?

I don't know, neither do you, and that's exactly why.

I'm by default skeptical of the ability to reproduce processes we do not even understand.

That's completely fair.

But the argument on the other side is that a blind tinkerer known as natural selection managed to get us as far as an intelligent entities like Isaac Newton, Richard Feymann, Jon Von Neumann. And getting that far was enough for humans to create nuclear weapons.

It seems probable that humans can improve upon the work of a million years of random chance in this department, to me.

And unlike Pascal's mugging, you aren't solely and completely relying on the mugger's words for your decision, you have access to all the same records and evidence that AI alarmists do, they're not hiding the ball in that way.

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