This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The future of AI is likely decided this week with Sam Altman's Congressional testimony. What do you expect?
EDIT: the recording is here.
Frankly I've tried to do my inadequate part to steer this juggernaut and don't have the energy for an effortpost (and we're having a bit too many of AI ones recently), so just a few remarks:
AI Doom narrative keeps inceasing in intensity, in zero relation to any worrying change in AI «capabilities» (indeed, with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI; recent results seem to be negative for the LLM shoggoth/summoned demon hypothesis, which is now being hysterically peddled by e.g. these guys). Not only does Yud appear on popular podcasts and Connor Leahy turns up on MSM, but there's an extremely, conspicuously bad and inarticulate effort by big tech to defend their case. E.g. Microsoft's economist proposes we wait for meaningful harm before deciding on regulations – this is actually very sensible if we treat AI as an ordinary technology exacerbating some extant harms and bringing some benefits, but it's an insane thing to say when the public's imagination has been captured by Yuddist story of deceptive genie, and «meaningful harm» translates to eschatological imagery. Yann LeCun is being obnoxious and seemingly ignorant of the way the wind blows, though he's beginning to see. In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.
Anglo-American regulatory regime will probably be more lax than that in China or the Regulatory Superpower (Europeans are, as always, the worst with regard to enterpreneural freedom), but I fear it'll mandate adherence to some onerous checklist like this one (consider this as an extraordinary case of manufacturing consensus – some literally who's «AI policy» guys come up with possible measures, a tiny subset of the queried people, also in the same until-very-recently irrelevant line of work, responds and validates them all; bam, we can say «experts are unanimous»). Same logic as with diversity requirements for Oscars – big corporations will manage it, small players won't; sliding into an indirect «compute governance» regime will be easy after that. On the other hand, MSNBC gives an anti-incumbent spin; but I don't think the regulators will interpret it this way. And direct control of AGI by USG appointees is an even worse scenario.
The USG plays favourites; on the White House meeting where Kamala Harris entered her role of AI Czar, Meta representatives weren't invited, but Anthropic's ones were. Why? How has the safety-oriented Anthropic merited their place among the leading labs, especially in a way that the government can appreciate? I assume the same ceaseless lobbying and coordinating effort that's evident in the FHI pause letter and EU's inane regulations is also active here.
Marcus is an unfathomable figure to me, and an additional cause to suspect foul play. He's unsinkable. To those who've followed the scene at all (more so to Gwern) it is clear that he's an irrelevant impostor – constantly wrong, ridiculously unapologetic, and without a single technical or conceptual result in decades; his greatest AI achievement was selling his fruitless startup to Uber, which presumably worked only because of his already-established reputation as an «expert». Look at him boast: «well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance». He's a small man with a big sensitive ego, and I think his ego will be used to perform a convincing grilling of the evil gay billionaire tech bro Altman. Americans love pro wrestling, after all.
Americans also love to do good business. Doomers are, in a sense, living on borrowed time. Bitter academics like Marcus, spiteful artists, scared old people, Yuddites – those are all nothing before the ever-growing legion of normies using GPT-4 to make themselves more productive. Even Congress staff got to play with ChatGPT before deliberating on this matter. Perhaps this helped them see the difference between AI and demons or nuclear weapons. One can hope.
Scott has published a minor note on Paul Ehrlich the other day. Ehrlich is one of the most evil men alive, in my opinion; certainly one of those who are despised far too little, indeed he remains a respectable «expert». He was a doomer of his age, and an advocate for psyops and top-down restrictions of people's capabilities; and Yud is such a doomer of our era, and his acolytes are even more extreme in their advocacy. Both have extracted an inordinate amount of social capital from their doomerism, and received no backlash. I hope the newest crop doesn't get so far with promoting their policies.
This is a big reason I'm uncomfortable using "AI" to describe LLMs and the main applications I envision are basically extremely useful and efficient virtual personal assistants. They're obviously a huge productivity boon but they also don't feel that qualitatively different?
Big Yud likes to cite hypotheticals involving a malicious actor trying to cause as much damage as possible by leveraging LLMs to create a new deadly pathogen or the like. This is essentially the same archetype as mass shooters or terrorists, and the closest parallels are basically 100x versions of the Anarchist Cookbook, bump stock AR-15s from a hotel room, or cargo trucks. I acknowledge these risks are real but the other obvious application for LLMs is that mass government surveillance will get dramatically cheaper and more pervasive. It doesn't seem obvious to me that the boost towards a bad actor's capacity for destruction will outstrip the government's surveillance boon. Has anyone written about this?
Should it? Do we want to live in a world where government capacity decisively outstrips that of individuals, where the authorities really can make people shut up and do as they're told?
If not, how badly do we wish to prevent such a world? If such a world seems to be what we're heading toward, but the balance of power still lies with the public, should the public take steps to forestall the formation of an unrivaled government?
I find it very, very difficult to believe that a future where the government has perfected truly effective, effectively inescapable surveillance is one that I want to live in. There is no plausible route I can imagine where this sort of power doesn't result in mountain-ranges of skulls.
In any case, your 100x multiplier is difficult to assess, mainly because most people aren't thinking about the problem from the right angle. I'm convinced the base threat is significantly underappreciated, and the second- and third-order effects are largely being ignored.
My post was descriptive, not prescriptive.
I absolutely do not endorse increased government surveillance but all that is careening towards inevitability. Around the time of the Snowden leaks, one of the comforting refrains from those worried about surveillance was to note that at least the government lacked the gargantuan computing resources required to monitor everyone (newly minted Utah data center notwithstanding). That coping mechanism seems so quaint in retrospect given the technological strides since.
Despite my aversion to government surveillance, I nevertheless must acknowledge that governments maintain a zeal towards prosecuting acts of terrorism and mass violence which likely serves as some kind of deterrent. A good illustration of this retributive zeal occurs with acts of violence where the perpetrator is too dead to be punished, so the state goes after tangential "accomplices" in its hunt for a scapegoat. This happened with the prosecution (and acquittal) of the Pulse nightclub shooter's wife, the prosecution of the friend who made a straw purchase for the 2019 Dayton shooting (The idiot invited the FBI into his home with weed in plain view and readily admitted to lying on the 4473 form. Also, the shooter had no record that would've barred firearm purchases, so the straw purchase made no difference.), and the ammunition dealer who got 13 months in federal prison after his fingerprints were discovered on unfired rounds from the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.
I'm not saying that I endorse this modern variant of collective punishment, but it is good indicator of how much retributive energy animates the government's actions in these circumstances. Obviously governments have an interest in leveraging increased surveillance into suffocating population control, and this interest would only magnify as costs drop. But even as an anarchist I would be lying if I claimed that the state's only motivation for surveillance is control. However clouded and selectively applied it might be, there's clearly a genuine interest from the state in punishing and preventing bad acts.
No, I get that. My question is whether we should be rooting for the Authorities or the Chaos, in the final analysis. Faced with that choice, my own bias is heavily in favor of the Chaos, but I try to be aware of it and compensate proportionally. This becomes harder when people argue persuasively that the road we're on clearly leads to the iron chains of long-term dystopia. Some people argue that terrible things are coming, but there's nothing to be done about it. Other people argue that there's things we can do to alter the future, but we shouldn't be in a hurry to do so because intervening would be worse. And it has to be one or the other, doesn't it? Either the coming future is worse, or the things needed to forestall it are worse. One must prefer one or the other, must one not?
The question is, is it in our interest to tolerate the continued existence of the current state?
Ok fair, I apologize for misinterpreting your post. The initial hypothetical is about LLMs empowering bad actors' ability to cause immeasurable destruction, and my response to that hypothetical was to consider that in such a world LLMs would also empower governments to establish immeasurable surveillance and policing. Whether or not we "should" do anything to stop that massive accumulation of power is impossible to decisively answer because we're already buried under an avalanche of hypothetical layers. It depends in part whether you agree that LLM-equipped terrorists are a risk worth worrying about in the first place.
I guess the way I'd put it is that it seems a lot more plausible that LLMs or similar can allow an effective panopticon than that they can allow mega-death terrorism, and so the assurance that Mega-death terrorism would probably be prevented by a government panopticon leaves me more worried on balance, not less. What saves us from the government panopticon?
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link