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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.
To all people that think "the gubmint" can save us from AI I have only one question: what year it was when the US Government won the War on Drugs?
Note that drugs just make you feel better, they don't actually give you superpowers. And most of them kill you quite fast. Now imagine there was a drug that actually can make you 10x smarter, with no (immediate) adverse effects. Do you think it's something that could be suppressed, knowing what we know about the world around us? Do you think "just take the fascism to 11 and it solves everything" is going to help?
They always do. You see, that fascism wasn't rationally planned enough, now here's my proposal…
I think people who make decisions should have less credentials and more experience with different and unappealing facets of the world – and not isolated to enclaves of their distributed elite republic of conferences and respectable institutions. Regularized, so to speak. Ideally we should have the equivalent of Rumspringa for the aspiring PMCs. Imagine if every one of those do-gooders had to work for a year in a provincial Russian police office, then in a Haitian hospital, then something else along these lines. Perhaps the resulting selection and education wouldn't necessarily be very helpful, but it'll probably make things more interesting.
Seriously though I accept @2rafa's arguments, «compute governance» at least for new capacity is easy. I'm also more pessimistic because there's significant political will in favor of it, and crucially, no coherent and comparably fanatical opposition. We know how this went in Culture War battles.
I agree with all of this, but what do you say to those of us that think it'll be a fascist disaster, but think it might be our best hope anyways?
I'll note that on your side you have the brilliant Robin Hanson. But he also seems to be fine with handing off the future to machine descendants.
I may also note every movement that murdered millions of people in 20th century was doing it for the sake of the future. Maybe it suggests some pattern here? Some general rule, like "if you see somebody calling for suspension of moral inhibitions today, for the sake of the bright future, you may be looking at somebody, killing whom by time travelers would be a common topic in future science fiction works". Or at least I'd be very, very cautions with such claims, just on the strength of the prior experience.
You know who else planned for the future? Hitler! I mean, I agree, but this seems like a fully general argument against planning for the future.
I agree that invoking the devil-we-know to save us from a potentially worse devil is a terrible idea unless we're very sure it's going to be worse. But I'm saying that it's likely that it will be worse. I think you're right to be skeptical, and I'm only like 60% sure myself.
No, you missed half of it. What it should have been is "you know who else called to sacrifice present morality in service of the bright future? Hitler!". Yes, I am ready to stand behind this comparison.
Oh, ok yes that is a little more specific. And I do think it's a reasonable comparison. But perhaps another reasonable comparison would have been to the Allies in that same war. I'd say both sides threw their weight behind (notionally temporary) totalitarianism and sacrificed huge amounts of value and lives in the name of the greater good. So maybe then the closest analogue to your position would have been the pacifists on both sides?
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To add a point in your favor, perhaps every communist revolution ever could point to real harms of the Tsar, or capitalism, or whatever. But what they mostly got was destructive civil war, followed by grinding misery and totalitarianism.
That said, I still buy the argument that in the long run, no un-upgraded human brains will be in effective control of anything important. Robin Hanson basically says, yes that's OK. I guess I'm thinking our only hope is to slow things down enough to upgrade human brains + institutions so they can keep up.
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