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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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It's incredible how quickly you go from accusing the doomers of anthropomorphism to committing the most blatant act of anthropomorphism of AIs I've seen recently.

Thought about letting this go, but nah. This is a bad comment. You took an antagonistic tone after misunderstanding what I wrote. You could have asked for clarification like "This reads like you're criticizing them for anthropomorphizing while doing it yourself." If I had you would be correct to point out the hypocrisy, but I haven't. I'll set things straight regardless.

  1. People like Yudkowsky and Roko, concerned at hostile AGI or incidentally hostile (hostile-by-effect) "near" AGI, advocate tyranny; I criticize them for this.

  2. The above believe without evidence computers will spontaneously gain critical AGI functions when an arbitrary threshold of computational power is exceeded; I criticize them for this also.

  3. They hedge (unrealizing, I'm sure) the probability of catastrophic developments by saying it may not be true AGI but "near" AGI. When they describe the functions of such incidentally hostile near-AGI, those they list are the same they ascribe of true AGI. Inductive acquisition of novel behaviors, understanding of self, understanding of cessation of existence of self, value in self, recursive self-improvement, and the ability to solve outside-context problems relative to code-in-a-box like air gaps and nuclear strikes. This is an error in reasoning you and other replies to my top-level have made repeatedly: "Who's to say computers need X? What if they have [thing that's X, but labeled Y]?"; I criticize them for making a distinction without a difference that inflates the perceived probability of doomsday scenarios.

To summarize: I criticize their advocacy for tyranny principally; I specifically criticize their advocacy for tyranny based on belief something will happen despite having no evidence; I also criticize their exaggeration of the probability of catastrophic outcomes based on their false dichotomy of near-AGI and AGI, given near-AGI as they describe it is simply AGI.