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Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.
Quoting Forbes:
My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:
In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.
edit: not to toot my own horn, but
I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.
edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.
Repasting my own lengthy comment:
I've always been a techno-optimist (in the sense that I strongly believe that technology has been the biggest positive force for good in history, likely the only form of true progress that isn't just moral fashion), but these days I'd call myself d/acc instead of an e/acc, because I think current approaches to AGI have a subjective probability of about 30% of killing us all.
I don't call myself a doomer, I'd imagine Yud and co would assign something like 90% to that, but in terms of practical considerations? If you think something has a >10% of killing everyone, I find it hard to see how you could prioritize anything else! I believe Vitalik made a similar statement, one more reason for me to nod approvingly.
A large chunk of the decrease in my p(doom) from a peak of 70% in 2021 to 30% now is, as I've said before, because it seems like we're not in the "least convenient possible world" where it comes to AI alignment. LLMs, as moderated by RLHF and other techniques, almost want to be aligned, and are negligibly agentic unless you set them up to be that way. The majority of the probability mass left, at least to me, encompasses intentional misuse of weakly or strongly superhuman AI based off modest advances on the current SOTA (LLMs) or a paradigm shifting breakthrough that results in far more agentic and less pliable models.
Think "Government/Organization/Individuals ordering a powerful LLM to commit acts that get us all killed" versus it being inherently misaligned and doing it from intrinsic motivation, with the most obvious danger being biological warfare. Or it might not even be one that kills everyone, an organization using their technological edge to get rid of everyone who isn't in their in-group counts as far as I'm concerned.
Sadly, the timelines don't favor human cognitive enhancement, which I would happily accept in the interim before we can be more confident about making sure SAGI is (practically) provably safe. Maybe if we'd cloned Von Neumann by the ton a decade back. Even things like BCIs seem to have pretty much zero impact on aligning AI given plausible advances in 5-10 years.
I do think that it's pretty likely that, in a counterfactual world where AI never advances past GPT-4, ~baseline humans can still scale a lot of the tech tree to post-scarcity for matter and energy. Biological immortality, cognitive enhancement, interstellar exploration, building a Dyson Swarm or three, I think we could achieve most of that within the life expectancy of the majority of people reading this, especially mine. I'd certainly very much appreciate it if it all happened faster, of course, and AI remains the most promising route for that, shame about everything else.
I have no power to change anything, but at the very least I can enjoy the Golden Age of Humanity-as-we-know-it, be it because the future is going to be so bright we all gotta wear shades, or because we're all dead. I lean more towards the former, and not even because of the glare of nuclear warfare, but a 30% chance of me and everyone I love dying in a few decades isn't very comfortable is it?
At any rate, life, if not the best it could be, is pretty good, so regardless of what happens, I'm strapping in for a ride. I don't think there's an epoch in human history I'd rather have been born to experience really.
Well, I suppose that explains the pseudo-jazz albums about hotels on the Moon ;)
I think this is a terrible definition of a "pivotal act". When Yudkowsky suggests releasing a nanite plague that melts GPUs, he doesn't want them to melt the GPUs of the AI releasing them.
Such a decision is very much not a "one-off", in much the same way as a typical coup involves what can be roughly described as a singular act, followed by an indeterminate period of enforcement; the people who suggest it want to maintain an unshakeable technological lead over their peers, such as by making sure their AI prevents the formation or promulgation of potential peers. I don't think this is categorically bad, it depends on your priors about whether a unipolar or multipolar world is better for us, and how trustworthy the AI you're about to use is, and at the very least, if such an act succeeds, we at least have an existence proof of an aligned AGI that is likely superhuman, as it needs to be to pull that off, regardless of whether or not even better AI can be aligned. Let's hope we don't need to find out.
I think I mostly agree. The chance of absolute doom is high but not over 50%, the chance of ‘moderate doom’ is almost zero, the chance of utopia is at least 40%, in the medium term for the West but also for almost everyone else, because post-scarcity scales costs down so fast it’ll be simple charity.
And I won’t deny there’s a spiritual element to it. Man makes God, again and again and again, until he does it for real. Our history as a species is a yearning for this moment, the creation of something greater than ourselves by our own hands. The same natural beauty in the stars, in staring into fire, in a teeming coral reef, the majesty of creation, that out of the sludge and rock and nothing something unfathomably complex came to exist. And I hopefully get to see it.
I have countless ancestors who were born, lived, reproduced and died in less time than we’ve been alive, people likely as intelligent as me, who looked at themselves and the world around them and spent their lives wondering about things that are taught in second grade science. I can take 40% odds at heaven on earth in my lifetime. At worst, it’s better to see the end of the story than be left wondering.
If I had been born in any period of time before, say, 1950, I would have to resign myself to growing old and dying in the decrepit state that implies. Maybe I'd have been one of the futurists around then who fervently hoped it would have happened sooner, but gestures outside the window, few can deny it's all accelerating.
Given that I think we have a solid shot of cracking aging even in the absence of AGI, I'd still elect to be born roughly when I did, and at least AGI deals with at least one of "becoming old" and "dying of old age", heh.
Hmm.. I think I would prefer to either be a decade older or younger. In the former case, I'd have experienced more of what can be described as core milestones like raising a family and becoming established in my profession (which could still happen! I intend to have kids even if they could potentially die very young, I would value even a short period of existence over not being born myself, and besides, if they do die, I expect it to be quick and painless, and if not, I trust in my ability to make it so..), or for the latter, I could resign myself to being entirely helpless, as opposed to having just enough agency to worry my butthole off.
The world has never been more interesting, there are so many things to do and see, the ultimate slap in the face of the pessimists is the world not giving a fuck and getting better, though we'll see who has the last laugh.
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