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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
I still see no plausible scenario for these AI-extinction events. How is chat-GPT 4/5/6 etc. supposed to end humanity? I really don't see the mechanism? Is it supposed to invent an algorithm that destroys all encryption? Is it supposed to spam the internet with nonesense? Is it supposed to brainwash someone into launching nukes? I fail to see the mechanism for how this end of the world scenario happens.
There are a few ways that GPT-6 or 7 could end humanity, the easiest of which is by massively accelerating progress in more agentic forms of AI like Reinforcement Learning, which has the "King Midas" problem of value alignment. See this comment of mine for a semi-technical argument for why a very powerful AI based on "agentic" methods would be incredibly dangerous.
Of course the actual mechanism for killing all humanity is probably like a super-virus with an incredibly long incubation period, high infectivity and high death rate. You can produce such a virus with literally only an internet connection by sending the proper DNA sequence to a Protein Synthesis lab, then having it shipped to some guy you pay/manipulate on the darknet and have him mix the powders he receives in the mail in some water, kickstarting the whole epidemic, or pretend to be an attractive woman (with deepfakes and voice synthesis) and just have that done for free.
GPT-6 itself might be very dangerous on its own, given that we don't actually know what goals are instantiated inside the agent. It's trained to predict the next word in the same way that humans are "trained" by evolution to replicate their genes, the end result of which is that we care about sex and our kids, but we don't actually literally care about maximally replicating our genes, otherwise sperm banks would be a lot more popular. The worry is that GPT-6 will not actually have the exact goal of predicting the next word, but like a funhouse-mirror version of that, which might be very dangerous if it gets to very high capability.
Do you mean this in the sense of, “there is no possible DNA sequence A, protein B, and protein C which, when mixed together in a beaker, produces a virus or proto-virus which would destroy human civilization”? Because I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. Finding that three-element set is very much a “humans just haven’t figured out the optimization code yet” problem.
Biology isn't magic, viruses can't max out all relevant traits at once, they're pretty optimized as is. I find the idea of superbugs a nerdsnipe, like grey goo or a strangelet disaster, a way to intimidate people who don't have the intuition about physical bounds and constraints and like to play with arrow notation.
(All these things scare the shit out of me)
Yes we can make much better viruses, no there isn't such an advantage for the attacker, especially in the world of AI that can rapidly respond by, uh, deploying stuff we already know works.
Consider that the first strain of myxomatosis introduced to Australian rabbits had a fatality rate of 99.8%. That’s the absolute minimum on what the upper bound for virus lethality should be. AI designs won’t be constrained by natural selection either.
Yes, it's an interesting data point. Now, consider that rabbits have only one move in response to myxomatosis: die. Or equivalently: pray to Moloch that he has sent them a miraculously adaptive mutation. They can't conceive of an attack happening, so the only way it can fail is by chance.
Modern humans are like that in some ways, but not with regard to pandemics.
Does this strike you as something that'd wipe out modern humanity just because an infection would be 100% fatal?
Do you think it's just a matter of fiddling with nucleotide sequences and picking up points left on the sidewalk by evolution, Pandemic Inc. style, to make a virus that has a long incubation period, asymptomatic spread, is very good at airborne transmission and survives UV and elements, for instance? Unlike virulence, these traits are evolutionarily advantageous. And so we already have anthrax, smallpox, measles. I suspect they're close to the limits of the performance envelope allowed by relevant biochemistry and characteristic scales; close enough that computation won't get us much closer than contemporary wet lab efforts, and so it's not the bottleneck to the catastrophe.
Importantly, tool AIs – which, contra Yud's predictions, have started being very useful before displaying misaligned agency – will reduce the attack surface by improving our logistics and manufacturing, monitoring, strategizing, communications… The world of 2025 with uninhibited AI adoption, full of ambient DNA sensors, UV filters, decent telemedicine and full-stack robot delivery, would not get rekt by COVID. It probably wouldn't even get fazed by MERS-tier COVID. And seeing as there exist fucking scary viruses that may one day naturally jump to, or be easily modified to target humans, we may want to hurry.
People underestimate the potential vast upside of a early Singularity economics, that which must be secured, the way a more productive – but still recognizable – world could be more beautiful, safe and humane. The negativity bias is astounding: muh lost jerbs, muh art, crisis of meaning, corporations bad, what if much paperclip. Boresome killjoys.
(To an extent I'm also vulnerable to this critique).
But my real source of skepticism is on the meta level.
Real-world systems rapidly gain complexity, create nontrivial feedback loops, dissipative dynamics on many levels of organization, and generally drown out propagating aberrant signals and replicators. This is especially true for systems with responsive elements (like humans). If it weren't the case, we'd have had 10 apocalyptic happenings every week. It is a hard technical question whether your climate change, or population explosion, or nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, or the worldwide Communist revolution, or the Universal Cultural Takeover, or the orthodox grey goo, or a superpandemic, or a stable strangelet, or a FOOMing superintelligence, is indeed a self-reinforcing wave or another transient eddy on the surface of history. But the boring null hypothesis is abbreviated on Solomon's ring: יזג. Gimel, Zayin, Yud. «This too shall pass».
Speaking of Yud, he despises the notion of complexity.
I think @2rafa is correct that Yud is not that smart, more like an upgraded midwit, like most people who block me on Twitter – his logorrhea is shallow, soft, and I've never felt formidability in him that I sense in many mid-tier scientists, regulars here or some of my friends (I'll object that he's a very strong writer, though; pre-GPT writers didn't have to be brilliant). But crucially he's intellectually immature, and so is the culture he has nurtured, a culture that's obsessed with relatively shallow questions. He's stuck on the level of «waow! big number go up real quick», the intoxicating insight that some functions are super–exponential; and it irritates him when they fizzle out. This happens to people with mild autism if they have the misfortune of getting nerd-sniped on the first base, arithmetic. In clinical terms that's hyperlexia II. (A seed of an even more uncharitable neurological explanation can be found here). Some get qualitatively farther and get nerd-sniped by more sophisticated things – say, algebraic topology. In the end it's all fetish fuel, not analytic reasoning, and real life is not the Game of Life, no matter how Turing-complete the latter is; it's harsh for replicators and recursive self-improovers. Their formidability, like Yud's, needs to be argued for.
Oh sure, if hypothetical actually-competent people were in charge we could implement all kinds of infectious disease countermeasures. In the real world, nobody cares about pandemic prevention. It doesn't help monkey get banana before other monkey. If the AIs themselves are making decisions on the government level, that perhaps solves the rogue biology undergrad with a jailbroken GPT-7 problem, but it opens up a variety of other even more obvious threat vectors.
-He says while speaking the global language with other members of his global species over the global communications network FROM SPACE.
Humans win because they are the most intelligent replicator. Winningness isn't an ontological property of humans. It is a property of being the most intelligent thing in the environment. Once that changes, the humans stop winning.
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