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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33045 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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My concern with safetyism is mostly that it basically ensures that AI will be much more likely to be first realized by the most dangerous people to be doing so. Basically, all of those concerned with safety, or who would be willing to consider safety alongside profits would stop, and everyone else laughs at the stupidity and goes on building AGI and leapfrogs ahead. China might well be willing to take the risk of a containment failure to be guaranteed to be the global leader in all aspects of military and economic and social power for centuries. If the AI boosters are correct, this is the chance of the millennium, and nobody with power and who understands the technology is going to let a concern for safety keep them from having such staggering power for themselves and their children to the next fifty generations. If we have a moratorium, that’s just going to mean AGI comes from China, India, or somewhere else.

China might well be willing to take the risk of a containment failure to be guaranteed to be the global leader in all aspects of military and economic and social power for centuries.

I wonder if there is anything at all that can shake American confidence in this projection. Not to mention the premise that Chinese leaders understand what is at stake.

Anyone with a brain would do so, again if they understood the significance of this technology in potential. AGI, once achieved to a reasonable standard and given the ability to iterate more intelligent versions is going to quickly be a technological leap on the order of the invention of writing or agriculture. Those that get there first will rule over the rest of us as the Europeans ruled the Native Americans. Those who don’t have access will be at the mercy of those who do.

Anyone with a brain would do so, again if they understood the significance of this technology in potential.

I've watched too many Liveleak videos of Chinese industrial accidents to believe that anyone with a position of power in the PRC isn't a degenerate high-time-preference psychopath who'd take the safety rails off anything if he thinks he can sell them for scrap metal and earn a few extra yuan.

Would anyone with a brain initiate zero COVID, suffocate the country for three years, then cancel it overnight and overload the medical system?

China is observably not maximizing their odds of geostrategic dominance, nor much of anything else, sans ass-covering by party elites.

And before we start worrying about Choynese AGI, we should focus on something they've had much more of a head start in: Choynese Eugenics.

China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

Edge.org 2013: 2013 : WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

Geoffrey Miller, currently an AI decelerationist

How's it been going for the last decade?

China is not a competitor to the West. China will implement any braindead regulation the West devises, faster and harsher and stupider. China is less relevant than Turkey or, certainly, Israel. I will say it as many times as I have to.

So they couldn’t be doing both? I’m not sure they are, but given that they aren’t poised to impose stupid moratoriums on research as the west seems ready to (we’ve already banned eugenics). it’s seems that Americans and perhaps thx Atlantic countries will hobble themselves as decadent falling empires often do, and will reap the benefits of having an irrelevant moral high ground and watching as others overtake them.

This could be a western version of Haijin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin) in which we just decide to not move forward in science and technology. It’s never worked.

I agree, but with the catch that non-competitors can radically change for contingent reasons, get their shit together, and become competitors, sometimes. It'd be easy to say something similar about historical China's economy, and now they're top 2 nominal gdp.

It's historically normal for China to have the world's greatest GDP. USA is the weird one here.

Even now, most people don't understand the significance. At least in polite circles, the main thoughts around AGI seem to be worrying about how it will help kids cheat on their homework or reinforce racial/gender biases (that applies all around; see all the worries about ChatGPT being too woke). A significant number of those who do recognize its power are caught up in catastrophizing sci-fi stories about Clippy. As for China, it's not treating AGI as an existential issue; it mostly seems to worry about losing a couple productivity points relative to the US and using it to more efficiently enforce its internal security, and it wouldn't hesitate to give up all its (so far trailing) efforts if it could get Taiwan in exchange.

the Europeans ruled the Native Americans

Eh, that wasn't as dramatic as usually depicted. Europeans had the massive benefit of playing local tribes off against one another, and horrific waves of disease that killed 95% of the native population.

That being said, I agree with the game theory argument against AI safety.

Europeans had the massive benefit of playing local tribes off against one another, and horrific waves of disease that killed 95% of the native population.

It's a good thing, then, that there are no bitter tribal divisions within Western countries and no dangerous infectious diseases spreading from China.

It also took a couple centuries for Europeans to establish their absolute dominance over and destruction of Native Americans. Even that would have been uncertain if not for the the aforementioned disease-induced massive depopulation of the Americas; something more like sub-Saharan Africa would have been the more likely outcome.

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