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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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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 have suggested on numerous occasions that to the degree that AI poses a serious existential threat to humanity it is largely because of Yudkowsky and other MIRI-types rather than in spite of, but I don't think I ever expected him to go this far off the deep end.

Can you link some of your arguments. It fits my priors, but I'd like to see the reasoning behind it.

Long story short the so-called AI Alignment problem isn't about intelligence (artificial or otherwise) as much as it is about the inherent flaws of utilitarianism.

I maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing because there are really only two paths a logically consistant utilitarian can follow, one towards pure hedonism/wire-heading and the other towards being an omnicidal monster as described in @DaseindustriesLtd's reply downthread. The more logical and consistant you make a utilitarian, the less able to avoid these traps they become.

In Bertrand Russell's chapter about Locke, he says something like "Given a choice between being inconsistent and being absurd, Locke will always chose to be inconsistent".

Bentham however, was not like that.

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