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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.
What impact?
I think the interesting question is who is going to have more impact on the discourse?
It seems manifestly obvious to me that the answer will be 2. Google engineers are often very smart people, but in the end Silicon Valley has always bowed down to Washington, and to some extent to Wall Street.
It's like, imagine some absurd new war breaks out in some corner of the world nobody cares about and that nobody expected. Who suddenly has power? Is it the one analyst at a dusty CIA desk or the two guys in some obscure think tank in DC who were the only people who cared before this incident happened? Probably not, it's everyone powerful who jumps in on the gravy train now that something interesting has happened.
I don't think so. For example, I think 'true UBI' will never happen. Which is not to say that I expect the Manna scenario (and indeed I've argued it makes little sense for elites to pursue here before). It's to say that stratification by resource distribution is key to all human hierarchies and it's hard to see this system being abandoned any time soon. Therefore UBI will be distributed according to how closely some individual or group fulfils the role the 'system' considers prosocial in that context. Social credit, belonging to the right group, participating in a certain way, all this varies, but the core structure will be similar - UBI if.
I also think you'll see huge cultural shifts, as huge amounts of ambitious young (particularly young male) energy that has been devoted into pursuing economic self-improvement must suddenly be redirected into some other avenue. It could easily be video games or weightlifting (some would say it already is), but it could be something else.
I also have become more and more sceptical that mass automation heralds some new age of leisure in general. We already live (as both you and I have argued) in a substantially 'automated' society. Even if FALC is technically impossible, in the richest countries it's likely a high standard of living could be maintained with only 20% or even less of the population in full-time employment, the rest work bullshit jobs as per (slighly modified) Graeber. I now consider it substantially possible that in fifty years time the majority of the working age population engages in some form of 'employment'. You really can legislate luddism, New Jersey kept gas pump operators employed sixty years after they ceased to exist elsewhere after all.
I do think e/acc is compelling, and there's no inherent reason why huge social problems can't be brute forced by creating a machine god. The problem, as ever, will be that the solutions the machine god comes up with won't be amenable to a large proportion of the population, including many e/acc types.
This is obviously correct to me too. If there's one thing I agree with Yarvin 100%, it's that Big Tech has no power at all, in the grand scheme of things. People who think Altman or someone has a reasonable shot at harnessing the power of the emerging technology for political gain are deluded. I am not sure what you're imagining here – that I am trying to build our way out of Mot's grasp, one commit at a time?
However, there exists certain wiggle room. Engineers can accelerate the proliferation of specific technologies which will make at least some politically cheaper forms of surveillance and restriction unfeasible; this is but a toy example. Businessmen can lobby for lenience, and their lobbyists need talking points; it's a bit surprising how low the bar in this domain is. Big labs can invest into making their offerings so indispensable to the laymen, political elites will falter in enforcing regulation early and hard; this is what I take to be Altman's gamble.
I am not very optimistic about the degree to which the final state of the game board before singularity can be influenced. But I am not a believer in superdeterminism.
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