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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33012 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.

I like Anatoly Karlin's argument:

I disagree with AI doomers, not in the sense that I consider it a non-issue, but that my assessment of the risk of ruin is something like 1%, not 10%, let alone the 50%+ that Yudkowsky et al. believe. Moreover, restrictive AI regimes threaten to produce a lot of outcomes things, possibly including the devolution of AI control into a cult (we have a close analogue in post-1950s public opinion towards civilian applications of nuclear power and explosions, which robbed us of Orion Drives amongst other things), what may well be a delay in life extension timelines by years if not decades that results in 100Ms-1Bs of avoidable deaths (this is not just my supposition, but that of Aubrey de Grey as well, who has recently commented on Twitter that AI is already bringing LEV timelines forwards), and even outright technological stagnation (nobody has yet canceled secular dysgenic trends in genomic IQ). I leave unmentioned the extreme geopolitical risks from “GPU imperialism”.

While I am quite irrelevant, this is not a marginal viewpoint—it’s probably pretty mainstream within e/acc, for instance—and one that has to be countered if Yudkowsky’s extreme and far-reaching proposals are to have any chance of reaching public and international acceptance. The “bribe” I require is several OOMs more money invested into radical life extension research (personally I have no more wish to die of a heart attack than to get turned into paperclips) and into the genomics of IQ and other non-AI ways of augmenting collective global IQ such as neural augmentation and animal uplift (to prevent long-term idiocracy scenarios). I will be willing to support restrictive AI regimes under these conditions if against my better judgment, but if there are no such concessions, it will have to just be open and overt opposition.

Naturally, people who speculate that their safetyism is protecting quintillions of eventual superduperhappy podmen scoff at a few tens or hundreds of excruciating megadeaths of their contemporaries.

Yudkowsky, for me, was at his most sympathetic when he lamented the death of his brother Yehuda Nattan.

I used to say: "I have four living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out." I still have four living grandparents, but I don't think I'll be saying that any more. Even if we make it to and through the Singularity, it will be too late. One of the people I love won't be there. The universe has a surprising ability to stab you through the heart from somewhere you weren't looking. Of all the people I had to protect, I never thought that Yehuda might be one of them. Yehuda was born July 11, 1985. He lived 7053 days. He was nineteen years old when he died.

I wonder at the strength of non-transhumanist atheists, to accept so terrible a darkness without any hope of changing it. But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day. One point eight lives per second, fifty-five million lives per year. Convert the units, time to life, life to time. The World Trade Center killed half an hour. As of today, all cryonics organizations together have suspended one minute. This essay took twenty thousand lives to write. I wonder if there was ever an atheist who accepted the full horror, making no excuses, offering no consolations, who did not also hope for some future dawn. What must it be like to live in this world, seeing it just the way it is, and think that it will never change, never get any better?

It's still about one minute, likely zero, for our cryogenic technology didn't progress much since then. I liked Yud more when he worried about that, instead of freaking out on podcasts about the need to slow progress to a crawl.

OTOH, never cared much for Roko.

What an incredibly dumb thing to say. If I took this kind of talk as anything more than cringeworthy rationalist homily, I'd come away thinking the speaker was some sort of idiot with zero grasp of technology or the course of its progress.

Nice try with the "if," as if to convince the mods that you are not, in fact, calling the other poster an idiot.

You've been warned and banned multiple times for this kind of petty antagonism. You do not seem to post anything but these attempted dunks on other people, providing no value whatsoever to the discussion. Your last ban was one week; this one will be two. Next one will likely be permanent. This place is not for giving yourself a dopamine hit testing how creatively you can call people stupid.

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