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Notes -
More developments on the AI front:
Big Yud steps up his game, not to be outshined by the Basilisk Man.
Now, he officially calls for preemptive nuclear strike on suspicious unauthorized GPU clusters.
If we see AI threat as nuclear weapon threat, only worse, it is not unreasonable.
Remember when USSR planned nuclear strike on China to stop their great power ambitions (only to have the greatest humanitarian that ever lived, Richard Milhouse Nixon, to veto the proposal).
Such Quaker squeamishness will have no place in the future.
So, outlines of the Katechon World are taking shape. What it will look like?
It will look great.
You will live in your room, play original World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your PC, read your favorite blogs and debate intelligent design on your favorite message boards.
Then you will log on The Free Republic and call for more vigorous enhanced interrogation of terrorists caught with unauthorized GPU's.
When you bored in your room, you will have no choice than to go outside, meet people, admire things around you, make a picture of things that really impressed with your Kodak camera and when you are really bored, play Snake on your Nokia phone.
Yes, the best age in history, the noughties, will retvrn. For forever, protected by CoDominium of US and China.
edit: links again
Ok, let's say that Russia builds a large GPU cluster. Then the US and China have two options:
Put up with it, in which case there is an unknown chance of a superhuman AI emerging and destroying humanity
Nuke Russia, in which case there is a very high chance of a total nuclear war that kills hundreds of millions of people and devastates much of the world
Does Yudkowsky actually think that 2 is preferable?
I'm not a mind-reader, but with a lot of reasonable parameters I'd be in favour of #2, so I see no particular reason to disbelieve other people saying they'd prefer #2.
Framework #1: people dying is bad.
Global Thermonuclear War would kill a lot of people - indeed, with Russia's arsenal against both the West and China, it'd probably be 1-1.5 billion. AI apocalypse would kill all humans, which is roughly 8 billion. If we want to minimise mean humans killed, then a 100% chance of GTW is still worth it if we predict greater than a 12-20% chance of AI apocalypse in the alternative. To quote EY himself: "shut up and multiply".
Framework #2: existential risk and categorical imperative.
This is not necessarily a one-off. It may be repeated. Consider the results of pursuing either policy consistently in a series of similar situations.
If we always do #1, then (without some means of solving AI alignment) the final outcome is that humanity gets destroyed by AI.
If we always do #2, then we have a GTW every 50-200 years, but we don't get destroyed by AI.
If you think, as I do, that the existence of humanity and the birth of new humans are very good things, then in the long run it is clearly better to always do #2 than to always do #1. Kant's categorical imperative says, among other things, that we should do the things that we would prefer for everyone to do in our place. So we should do #2.
I mean, obviously I'd be in favour of telling Russia "knock it off" on multiple occasions before escalating to war, but if it comes down to "start GTW or take significant X-risk", I'd push the button.
Given that he is a crank who beclowns himself in a variety of ways, and given his "shutting up and multiplying" results in hypothetical advocacy of extreme torture to prevent motes of dust in eyes, etc: I accept this as weak evidence that the opposite is true.
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