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 traditional Yudkowskian rebuttal would be the fact that any given sufficiently advanced AI could operate on models of decision theory visible to other similarly-advanced AIs but not as knowable to you, so that collusion would be possible in the better interest of such AIs with probable compromises and trade-offs in order to better cement their goals per shares of the future lightcone. Such conspiracies could most probably be worse off for humanity rather than simply having one generalized-up-to-super artificial intelligence, given that such a combination of already-complex goals by multiple agencies acting as one seems notoriously harder to comprehend or predict as compared to the (already) ineffable possible future super-AI. This is the defeater to the ‘just make AIs fight each other bro’ take that LeCun et al. posit. Open-sourcing wouldn’t do anything if the alignment problem isn’t solved, and accelerating AI development through open-sourcing seems to be a bad idea, as that also increases the probability of ‘near-misses’ when it comes to alignment, which is considerably more likely to lead to s-risks rather than blatantly robust misalignment.
Yud is right in that a ‘pivotal act’ by some first actor with an aligned AGI is needed in order to safeguard humanity, but the corollary problem with this is that this actor would subsequently become the ‘conditioner’ of all possible future human societies and hence become possibly the worst tyrant ever seen in the history of mankind, especially with the moral ontologies expected of SanFran Venture Capitalists.
In all frankness I’m not sure what the best mode of action is. I doubt humans at our current state can even sufficiently wield such power with wisdom, which is why Yud’s proposal of pausing AI development, going for intelligence augmentation, then going for the gold seems wise. Otherwise I think we’re fucked (…until the parousia).
More options
Context Copy link