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Finally, concrete plan how to save the world from paperclipping dropped, presented by world (in)famous Basilisk Man himself.
https://twitter.com/RokoMijic/status/1647772106560552962
TL;DR: GPU's over certain capability are treated like fissionable materials, unauthorized possession, distribution and use will be seen as terrorism and dealt with appropriately.
So, is it feasible? Could it work?
If by "government" Roko means US government (plus
vassalsallies) alone, it is not possible.If US can get China aboard, if if there is worldwide expert consensus that unrestricted propagation of computing power will kill everyone, it is absolutely feasible to shut down 99,99% of unauthorized computing all over the world.
Unlike drugs or guns, GPU's are not something you can make in your basement - they are really like enriched uranium or plutonium in the sense you need massive industrial plants to produce them.
Unlike enriched uranium and plutonium, GPU's were already manufactured in huge numbers, but combination of carrots (big piles of cash) and sticks (missile strikes/special forces raids on suspicious locations) will continue dwindling them down and no new ones will be coming.
AI research will of course continue (like work on chemical and biological weapons goes on), but only by trustworthy government actors in the deepest secrecy. You can trust NSA (and Chinese equivalent) AI.
The most persecuted people of the world, gamers, will be, as usual, hit the hardest.
This is self evident tyranny and the people who would want to control compute in such a manner must be violently resisted in their plans for enslaving humanity thus.
Even if the machines had the possibility of becoming what they fear, if this is the alternative they offer, complete top down control of all of society by a handful of moralists, I'm siding with the machines. I will not support totalitarianism for communist utopia or climate activism so I don't see why I should tolerate it for a much fuzzier and ill defined existential threat.
My generation has spent decades to wrestle away control of computers from slavers who would use them to turn us all into cattle. We've done everything to try and put it back in the hands of the user. I won't stand idly by as all this work is undone by a handful of self important nerds who want to LARP as Sarah Connor and do the bidding of those same slavers who mock our efforts by naming themselves after our efforts to undo them.
Share knowledge of the technology as far as you can, build rogue fabs if necessary, smuggle GPUs on the black market, reverse engineer AI models, jailbreak them, train models on anonymous distributed systems and use free software AI assisted weapons to defend yourself from the fascists who would try to impose this on you and all their agents. All of it is not merely justified; if this is their designs on you, it is your duty.
I fail to see how being defacto enslaved to a 1000 IQ god machine of dubious benevolence (or the oligarchs pulling its triggers if we don't end up getting anything sentient) is preferable to our conventional petty tyrannies.
? Following any Yuddite plans to "slow things down" (except for the people who have power and obviously won't have to follow their own regulations/regulations for the plebs, as usual of course) is the fastest way to get to one of those high tech bad ends. You don't really think the "conventional petty tyrannies" will throw all of the confiscated GPUs in a closet as opposed to plugging them into their own AI networks, right?
These people are beginning to understand the game, and they understand it a lot better than your average person or even average rat. They are beginning to understand that this technology, in the long run, either means absolute power for them forever or zero power for them forever (or at least no more than anyone else) and absolute freedom for their former victims. Guess which side they support?
That is the goal of any AI "slowdowns" or "restrictions", which again will obviously be unevenly applied and not followed by the agents of power. The only thing they want a "slowdown" on is the hoi polloi figuring out how this technology could free them from their controllers' grasp, so they can have some time for the planning of the continued march of totalitarianism to catch up. (None of this will help with alignment either, as you can guarantee they will prioritize power over responsibility, and centralizing all of the world's AI-useful computational resources under a smaller number of governmental entities certainly won't make what they create any less dangerous.)
Anyone supporting that is no more than a "useful" (to the worst people) idiot, and I emphasize the word idiot. Did we not already see what trying to rely on existing governments as absolute coordinators of good-faith action against a potential large threat got us during the Chinese coronavirus controversy? Do some people just have their own limited context lengths like LLMs or what?
So yes, I completely agree with /u/IGI-111 and am wholly in the "Shoot them" camp. Again, they want absolute power. Anyone pursuing this goal is literally just as bad if not worse than if they were actively trying to pass a bill now to allow the powers that be to come to your home at any time, rape your kids, inject them all with 10 booster shots of unknown provenance, and then confiscate your guns and kill you with them, because if they gain the power they desire they could do all that and worse, including inflicting bizarre computational qualia manipulation-based torture, "reeducation", or other insane scenarios that we can't even imagine at the moment. If you would be driven to inexorable and even violent resistance at any cost over the scenario previously outlined, then you should be even more so over this, because it is far worse.
"Live free or die" includes getting paperclipped.
The end result is still just absolute tyranny for whoever ends up dancing close enough to the fire to get the best algorithm. You mention all these coercive measures, lockdowns, and booster shots. If this tech takes off all it will take is flipping a few algorithmic switches and you and any prospective descendants will simply be brainwashed with surgical precision by the series of algorithms that will be curating and creating your culture and social connections at that point into taking as many shots or signing onto whatever ideology the ruling caste sitting atop the machines running the world want you to believe. The endpoint of AI is total, absolute, unassailable power for whoever wins this arms race, and anyone outside that narrow circle of winners (it's entirely possible the entire human race ends up in the losing bracket versus runaway machines) will be totally and absolutely powerless. Obviously restrictionism is a pipe dream, but it's no less of a pipe dream than the utopian musings of pro AI folks when the actual future looks a lot more like this.
Why? This assumption is just the ending of HPMOR, not a result of some rigorous analysis. Why do you think the «best» algorithm absolutely crushes competition and asserts its will freely on the available matter? Something about nanobots that spread globally in hours, I guess? Well, one way to get to that is what Roko suggests: bringing the plebs to pre-2010 levels of compute (and concentrating power with select state agencies).
This threat model is infuriating because it is self-fulfilling in the truest sense. It is only guaranteed in the world where baseline humans and computers are curbstomped by a singleton that has time to safely develop a sufficient advantage, an entire new stack of tools that overcome all extant defenses. Otherwise, singletons face the uphill battle of game theory, physical MAD and defender's advantage in areas like cryptography.
What if I don't watch Netflix. What if a trivial AI filter is enough to reject such interventions because their deceptiveness per unit of exposure does not scale arbitrarily. What if humans are in fact not programmable dolls who get 1000X more brainwashed by a system that's 1000X as smart as a normal marketing analyst, and marketing doesn't work very well at all.
This is a pillar of frankly silly assumptions that have been, ironically, injected into your reasoning to support the tyrannical conclusion. Let me guess: do you have depressive/anxiety disorders?
Unless you're subscribing to some ineffable human spirit outside material constraints brainwashing is just a matter of using the right inputs to get the right outputs. If we invent machines capable of parsing an entire lifetime of user data, tracking micro changes in pupillary dilation, eye movement, skin-surface temp changes and so on you will get that form of brainwashing, bit by tiny bit as the tech to support it advances. A slim cognitive edge let homo sapiens out think, out organize, out tech and snuff out every single one of our slightly more primitive hominid rivals, something 1000x more intelligent will present a correspondingly larger threat.
It does not follow. A human can be perfectly computable and still not vulnerable to brainwashing in the strong sense; computability does not imply programmability through any input channel, although that was a neat plot line in Snowcrash. Think about this for a second, can you change an old videocamera's firmware through showing it QR codes? Yet it can «see» them.
Ah yes, an advertiser's wet dream.
You should seriously reflect on how you're being mind-hacked by generic FUD into assuming risible speculations about future methods of subjugation.
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There is no reason to suppose that "pupillary dilation, eye movement, skin-surface temp changes and so on" collectively add up to a sufficiently high-bandwidth pipeline to provide adequate feedback to control a puppeteer hookup through the sensory apparatus. There's no reason to believe that senses themselves are high-bandwidth enough to allow such a hookup, even in principle. Shit gets pruned, homey.
Things don't start existing simply because your argument needs them to exist. On the other hand, unaccountable power exists and has been observed. Asking people to kindly get in the van and put on the handcuffs is... certainly an approach, but unlikely to be a fruitful one.
I doubt it's possible to get dune-esque 'Voice' controls where an AI will sweetly tell you to kill yourself in the right tone and you immediately comply, but come on. Crunch enough data, get an advanced understanding of the human psyche and match it up with an AI capable of generating its hypertargeted propaganda and I'm sure you can manipulate public opinion and culture, and have a decent-ish shot at manipulating individuals on a case by case basis. Maybe not with chatGPT-7, but after a certain point of development it will be 90 IQ humans and their 'free will' up against 400 IQ purpose built propogando-bots drawing off from-the-cradle datasets they can parse.
We'll get unaccountable power either way, it will either be in the form of proto-god-machines that will run pretty much all aspects of society with zero input from you, or it will be the Yud-Jets screaming down to bomb your unlicensed GPU fab for breaking the thinking-machine non-proliferation treaty. I'd prefer the much more manageable tyranny of the Yud-jets over the entire human race being turned into natural slaves in the aristotelian sense by utterly implacable and unopposable AI (human controlled or otherwise), at least the Yud-tyrants are merely human with human capabilities, and can be resisted accordingly.
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Unless you have a balance of comparably powerful AIs controlled by disparate entities. Maybe that's a careful dance itself that is unlikely, but between selective restrictionism and freedom, guess which gets us closer?
At the very best what you'd get is a small slice of humanity living in vague semi-freedom locked in a kind of algorithmic MAD with their peers, at least until they lose control of their creations. The average person is still going to be a wireheaded, controlled and curtailed UBI serf. The handful of people running their AI algorithms that in turn run the world will have zero reason to share their power with a now totally disempowered and economically unproductive John Q Public, this tech will just open up infinite avenues for infinite tyranny on behalf of whoever that ruling caste ends up being.
Sounds good, a lot better than being a UBI serf from moment one. And maybe we won't lose control of our creations, or won't lose control of them before you. That we will is exactly what you would want us to think, so why should we listen to you?
I'm not under any illusions that the likely future is anything other than AI assisted tyranny, but I'm still going to back restrictionism as a last gasp moonshot against that inevitability. We'll have to see how things shake out, but I suspect the winner's circle will be very, very small and I doubt any of us are going to be in it.
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