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.
Since when has this ever been true in anything else? Last time you said this, you based it upon some draft Chinese legislation: https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/translation-measures-for-the-management-of-generative-artificial-intelligence-services-draft-for-comment-april-2023/
Chinese companies are not known for their proclivity to 'respect intellectual property rights and commercial ethics' as this draft law proposes. Especially in a priority area like AI, why would they slow down to respect commercial ethics? It's accepted they're in a race with the US over the most important technology of the century. The US certainly thinks so, that's why they imposed their semiconductor sanctions on China.
Sure, they want to ensure AI upholds the socialist banner. But even that is much easier than having it uphold DEI. Consider the Chinese anime-fication photo app that turned blacks into furniture, monkeys, whitened them, removed them entirely because it was clearly trained that blacks weren't beautiful. That would never pass from Google, they'd get pilloried. China is antsy about Tiananmen square but the US has a huge range of 'alternative facts' about its history, which elections were rigged, the Iraq war... When it comes to lying to their own people, it's debatable about who does it more.
America has regulated its productive industries into the ground, shipbuilding, high-speed rail, construction of literally everything is strangled by red tape. They regulated semiconductors away back in the day. China embraces industry, embraces the automation of ports, embraces innovation at the cost of privacy or civil liberties.
In the US there's extensive fear of AI built into the cultural pantheon. Terminators, Matrix, Warhammer 40K, Butlerian Jihad, HAL... In China there's much more support and trust in technology generally and AI specifically: https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-opinions-about-ai-january-2022
It makes far more sense for China's AI strategy to follow their broad accelerate-economic-development strategy, while the US will delay and regulate excessively like they do with everything else. This should hold in outcomes regardless of whatever laws China or the US pass. Interpretation and enforcement matters more than pure legislation.
Like what?
I'm not American, I don't owe it to your paranoid star-sprangled hivemind to pretend that China is a thing worth paying attention to. There is no «Yellow menace», there is no «threat of Chinese eugenics»; for the world at large, China is about as relevant as Czech Republic, only quantitatively bigger. Do you want to talk about the Czech AI threat? If you want to talk about China, we can go off vibes. My read on vibes is diametrically opposite to yours. If you want to discuss the evidence, well, what is the evidence for this purported Chinese focus on AI?
Because the CCP is well-known for cutting uppity businessmen down to size, and AI to the party bosses looks like «blockchain» or «fintech» – some new grifting scheme to syphon off some of their control over the system; another invention that's a bigger internal threat than external competitive edge. Remember when Americans were afraid that Choyna, ever ruthless and game-theoretically diabolical, will leverage their dominance in cryptocurrency mining? They've gladly regulated it out of existence instead.
Yeah, it's accepted by Americans, but does China notice that they're in an AI race? For all I know they're of the mind that semiconductors are needed only for drone warfare over the first island chain, monitoring Uighur camps and manufacturing automation – or, perhaps, to produce high-end smartphones; which is why the severity of sanctions and impossibility of compromise befuddles them so. Many Americans are, indeed, obsessed with geopolitical dominance of their Empire of Freedom, like some Avengers franchise characters or, less charitably, suicidal ants willing to lay down their livelihoods for the largesse of the colony. But I don't notice the same spirit in Chinese people; they're selfish, entrepreneurial, too engrossed with busywork to notice the big picture. Does Baidu or ByteDance believe they're forging the future of the lightcone? What are the names of Chinese Hassabis or Altman? How many mainlanders are even aware of this eschatological discourse?
Ironically, the underlying model was Stable Diffusion, or specifically a minor finetune of NovelAI. Stability is incorporated in London, UK. Novel – Delaware, US. Alibaba has never released Composer. I wonder why.
Alternatively: Americans are obsessed with building, so they whine about red tape; the Chinese are obsessed with grifting, so they pretend to build. But what has China built concretely? Rail for empty trains, and empty apartment blocks? Automated ports to ship Aliexpress gizmos to the Americans? This is all immaterial in the AI race. Where are their new supercomputers? Buying out consumer GPUs? Centralized collection of annotations to train foundation models, incentivized with Social Credit score (does it even work yet)? They have many levers to compensate for their hardware and expertise shortcomings. Which ones, exactly, have they pressed? They've only ever gone in the opposite direction – prohibiting tech giants from harvesting data, imposing regulations, forgoing opportunities.
They'd rather take an unsustainable loan, erect another concrete dildo, stuff it with pigs and Huawei snout recognition and pat themselves on the back for being innovative. All the while some pig-like official collects gold bricks in the basement of his overpriced siheyuan in the countryside. That's what Chinese building is like.
I may sound a little racist here. But the bigger issue is that Mainland China is so incredibly sheltered. They don't have the sense of what is possible, their culture is a tiny shallow hothouse for midwit takes. It's like Belarus or some other stale post-Soviet backwater; actually worse. This is true of their entertainment as well as of their tech and politics. I've tried to take them seriously for a while, and came to this conclusion. Ignoring China and assuming they won't do anything consequential nor retaliate in any meaningful way when Anglos are kicking them in the balls has consistently been the rational choice.
They've curtailed this strategy though, now it's about «the struggle for security» or something. Not like it'll work.
Not a mod comment, but what is the deal with all the «brackets» used for emphasis? Is it just a stylistic thing, or is it a meme I'm missing?
I think this was discussed back on reddit. It's Russian quote marks.
Wasn't the confusion the source of some creepy red-name censorship that led to us ending up here?
It was admins [Removed by Reddit]-ing a comment which was, verbatim:
"Nazis do (((this)))
But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet"
@Amadan
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