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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.

The trick now is that a lot of companies are staking their survival on these AI models being allowed to exist and improve, and they can use their existing AI models to influence opinion, plan strategy, and implement their plans.

And as Roko well knows, AI companies can plausibly bribe the decision-makers with the promise of even more wealth in the future once the AI becomes super-intelligent.

Basically, it's all the coordinated might and wealth of world governments vs. all the potential wealth that a hypothetical superintelligent AI will control in the future.

they can use their existing AI models to influence opinion, plan strategy, and implement their plans.

Nothing that I've seen from GPT-4 indicates that it can do any such thing.

Uh. Really? GPT-4 is the first thing I go to for an intuition pump for how to do literally anything before I move on to referencing further sources. And often it provides faster access to and elaboration upon those sources too.

Maybe the AI can't do it alone, but the people with the best AI will be enhancing their ability to perform these actions and spread their will more than other people.

Sure. Maybe It's helping me so much because I'm bad at programming or something. But if you can hire more people at lower skill level and have them elevated to a higher skill level than when your competition hires the same level of people, then you have an edge.

I can't spend hours every day talking to my most intelligent peers about what the optimal workflow is because they have stuff to do. But GPT-4 always has advice.

Say did you know that under the hamburger button->more tools->save page as on chrome, there's an option that lets you save the current web page as a single page app on your desktop?

Because maybe I'm dumb. But I sure didn't. And now I have gpt-4 in an isolated window that I can open from my taskbar that doesn't get lost when I absentmindedly open tabs.

And that was 5 minutes of talking to GPT-4. Now multiply that by your entire life.

Uh. Really? GPT-4 is the first thing I go to for an intuition pump for how to do literally anything before I move on to referencing further sources. And often it provides faster access to and elaboration upon those sources too

I get that it's a cool technology, but you're not afraid you're feeding a monster that's just as censorious as Google, but will likely eclipse it in terms of capabilities?

Whether it's a monster or not, it's there and it will continue to grow and feed. The marginal utility I get from using it is far greater than the potential risk, IMO. I'm not a believer in s-risk basilisk scenarios though.

Yeah, me neither. I'm a believer in tech monopolies leveraging their position to gatekeep information and manipulate people.

All I'm saying is, isn't there an open source monster you can feed instead?

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