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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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I've strongly disagreed with Dase, or well, did, before he blocked me in a hissy fit

Hey he blocked me too (for a time). If we ever add achievements to the site, one of them should be "Get blocked by Dase".

But at that point, you are more concerned with the alignment of the operators, whose wishes are faithfully reproduced. Are said operators well-disposed towards you?

I agree that's worth asking. But in a true zero regulation scenario, where everyone has access to a personal AGI/ASI, you have a lot more operators to worry about - now you have to worry about how well disposed the entire rest of humanity is towards you. If you give everyone the nuke button, someone is going to push it for shits and giggles.

At least OAI and Anthropic are on record stating that they want to distribute the bounties of AGI to all. While I'm merely helpless in that regard were I to choose to doubt them, I still think that's more likely to turn out well for me than it is if it's the PLA who holds the keys to the universe. Even the USGov is not ideal in that regard, though nobody asked me for my opinion.

I probably trust the US government more than Sam Altman. But regardless, Zvi mentions in this post that there are engineers and execs at multiple leading AI labs who wish they didn't have to race ahead so fast, but they feel like they're locked in a competition with all the other labs that they can't escape. I think that nationalizing the research and eliminating the profit motive could help relieve this pressure.