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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33025 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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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

Government prints money to buy all advanced AI GPUs back at purchase price. And shuts down the fabs. Comprehensive Anti-Moore's Law rules rushed through. We go back to ~2010 compute.

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 vassals allies) 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.

There is no such thing as a 1000 IQ god machine. It does not exist, and the potential existence of such a machine is still in the realm of fantasy.

That is not the case with conventional petty tyrannies, which are real, really happen, and are a real threat that we have already spilled the blood of countless generations trying to control.

So I'd say that's the difference, and if you can't see it, you might look again.

There is no such thing as mutually assured destruction. It does not exist, and the potential existence of such a nuclear exchange is still in the realm of fantasy.

That is not the case with the conventional competition from Asian autocracies, which is real, really happens, and is a real threat that we have already spilled the blood of countless generations trying to control.

Time to press the button?

I'd say the correct analogy is to the idea that a nuclear bomb will create an unstoppable chain reaction in the atmosphere.

MAD is nothing more than deploying ordinance. Ordinance that is already created, already armed, already combined with delivery systems which are already standing at the ready. None of those characteristics are shared with the AGI doomsday scenario, which is much more like the fear of the unknown in a new technology.

Let me know when the god machine is created, armed, deliverable, and ready.

I will take the charge that the certainty of MAD (now) is greater than the certainty of a superintelligent machine, but I disagree that the unstoppable chain reaction idea is at all in the same ballpark. At this point it is pretty clear how a machine having human-level performance on intellectual tasks can be built, and scaling it up in a way that increases IQ score by common definition is then just a matter of pumping more and better compute (we haven't even dipped into ASICs for a specific NN architecture yet). The chain reaction thing, on the other hand, was based on hypothetical physics with no evidence for and lots of circumstantial evidence against (like Earth's continued existence in spite of billions of years in which natural nuclear chain reactions could have set off a similar event, and the circumstance that oxygen and nitrogen came to be in the universe in large quantities to begin with, implying upper bounds on how reactive they are in a nuclear chain reaction setting).

I'll take "risk of MAD, as seen from a 1940 vantage point" as a more appropriate analogy than either.

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