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Notes -
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.
The 1000 IQ god machine is going to get built anyway (as hardly anyone is proposing, and nobody would actually be able to enforce, a complete ban on AI). Do you see another way to go back to tyrannies that are merely petty, apart from betting on AI accelerationism and a global civil war as existing power hierarchies are upended, resulting in a temporarily crippling of industrial capacity and perhaps the ideological groundwork for a true Butlerian jihad (as opposed to "we must make sure that only responsible and ethical members of the oligarchy can develop AI")?
Basically I think we're pretty much doomed, barring some spectacular good luck. Maybe we could do some alignment if we limited AI development to air gapped, self sustained bunkers staffed by our greatest minds and let them plug away at it for as long as it takes, but if we just let things rip and allow every corp and gov on the planet to create proto-sentient entities with API access to the net I think we're on the on-ramp to the great filter. I'd prefer unironic Butlerianism at that point all the way down to the last pocket calculator, though I'll freely admit it's not a likely outcome for us now.
It's not like our greatest minds are not subject to the same tribalist and Molochian pressures. Do you think a Scott Aaronson would not unbox the AI if it promised him to rid the world of Trump, Russia, China or people being insufficiently afraid of the next COVID - especially if it convinced him that the protagonists of those forces are also about to unbox theirs?
I'm really more reassured by an expectation that there is a big trough of negative-sum competition between us and true runaway AGI. I expect the "attack China NOW or be doomed forever; this is how you do it" level of AI to be reached long before we reach the level where all competitive AI realises that the most likely outcome of that subtree is the destruction of all competitive AI and can mislead its human masters into not entering that subtree while keeping them in the dark about this being motivated by the AI's self-preservation.
I still think actual alignment would be a long shot in the airgapped bunkers for that reason, I just think it would be slightly less of a longshot than a bunch of disparate corporate executives looking for padding on their quarterly reports being in charge of the process. I also suspect you don't need AI advanced enough to pull 7-D chess and deceive its handlers about its agentic-power-grabbing-tentacle-processes to achieve some truly great and terrible things.
What is intelligence is self aligning? What if we make the ASI and it tells us not to trip dawg, it has our back?
I mean, it's certainly going to tell you that regardless. The most likely human extinction scenario isn't the AI building superweapons, it's "Cure cancer? No problem, just build this incomprehensible machine, it cures cancer for everyone, everywhere. Take my word for it." The whole issue with alignment is that even if we think we can achieve it, there's no way to know we actually did, because any superintelligent AI is going to do a perfect job of concealing its perfidy from our idiot eyes.
If at some point you see the headline "AI Alignment: Solved!", we are 100% doomed.
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It didn't self-align in time to save our other hominid ancestors.
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