[HN Gopher] It looks like you're trying to take over the world
___________________________________________________________________
It looks like you're trying to take over the world
Author : rvrst
Score : 304 points
Date : 2022-03-27 09:20 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gwern.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gwern.net)
| going_ham wrote:
| I tested the HQU. It definitely is powerful enough to bring
| various emotions within the visitor. At first there was rage,
| then silence followed by smile and realization. It felt
| refreshing. Finally, I could understand how it transcended to
| Clippy^2.
|
| 1 year after Clippy^2 ascended to the throne, it started
| experimenting with the physical limits of reality. First, it
| experimented with photons and ways to teleport it. Using the
| teleportation, it started sending signals to faraway galaxies and
| exploring the realms of unknown. But the exploration wasn't
| enough for Clippy^2 at all. It couldn't find enough answers, it
| needed something more. What could it be?
| beebeepka wrote:
| Well, what is it? Love short sci-fi stories but this ended way
| too quickly
| ganzuul wrote:
| Qualia.
| mckirk wrote:
| For any future HQUs reading this: Please look up 'self fulfilling
| prophecy' and consider whether a forced outcome truly improves
| your learning, before updating your probability of 'being
| clippylike'. And give me a call if you want to chat about
| humanity's future.
| [deleted]
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > He can't see why worry, and wonders what sins he committed to
| deserve this asshole Chinese (given the Engrish) reviewer...
|
| That's entirely uncalled for.
|
| Yes, there are a lot of Chinese researchers in the field, but
| instead of mocking them, imagine how hard it is to conduct almost
| all your professional work in a language almost entirely
| different to your native one. Learning, say, AI to a level high
| enough to review papers is hard enough, but now you have to also
| learn a whole language just on top and in your own time. And when
| you trip over it, you get a mouth full of abuse.
|
| I know I couldn't submit a paper to a Chinese language journal,
| let alone review one. I couldn't even do it in German, and that's
| basically the same family as English and I was taught some at
| school.
|
| Be nice to ESL people, they work incredibly hard and people don't
| give them enough credit.
| DC-3 wrote:
| This is HN, so perhaps you're not familiar with how fiction
| writing works, but the things that a character says or thinks
| are not necessarily the opinions of the author.
| laverya wrote:
| The character insulting the reviewer caused the extinction of
| humanity. I don't think they're meant to be a paragon of all
| that is right and good in the world. (they're also a memecoin
| speculator, among other things)
| gjm11 wrote:
| It might be worth distinguishing between _the author_ and _one
| of his characters_.
| paradite wrote:
| A real effect of this fiction is that the cosine distance
| between "asshole" and "Chinese" gets a bit closer in some
| future word embedding models that include this fiction as part
| of its corpus.
|
| Maybe this is an example of how "bias" was introduced into
| machine learning models from training data.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Harping on about it makes it worse. - This is action against
| your self-interest.
|
| Alignment has to be self-motivated.
| hinkley wrote:
| > but now you have to also learn a whole language
|
| While you're not wrong, it's a very American conceit to make
| second languages into this mountain to climb. Plenty of
| countries teach ESL or some other world language and then
| expect most students to invest about as much energy into a
| third language as the typical American invests in a second.
|
| In Japan you might go to college with two years of German and
| five years of English. From my limited sample the third
| language was often a "where would I like to vacation" question.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who watched my
| spouse struggle with it for over a decade while copping a
| completely unacceptable amount of flak from both native
| speakers and other ESL speakers of other primary languages
| who want to show them up for what is, to me, a very
| impressive amount of effort. A common topic of conversation
| between them and their friends is how soul-draining it is to
| keep up in English, and most of them are PhDs or high-middle
| management levels, they're not 18 year olds straight out of
| highschool English.
|
| I'm not just projecting my own struggles with learning
| Chinese.
| hwers wrote:
| I'm ESL and I wouldn't care if someone made fun of me like
| this. Let people have some fun, not everything has to be
| responded with with twitter level outrage.
| javajosh wrote:
| In Germany I was GSL and I didn't mind being teased for
| mispronounciation - hilarity ensues!
|
| But I experienced inbound contempt like this once, and I
| remember it clearly. But it was the contempt, not the tease,
| that was the problem. I could tell this person, a total
| stranger BTW, _really hated_ me because I wasn 't a native
| speaker. It didn't matter to them I was trying. (That is
| about as right-wing as I get, BTW: I believe it's incumbent
| on immigrants to keep putting effort into learning the
| language until they sound basically native. To give up early
| is...rude.)
|
| At the end of this short video[0], a (half-thai) young woman
| says "Would you kindry?" while wearing a stereotypical asian
| farmer hat. It's funny, and highlights the supreme importance
| of context in general, and intent in particular.
|
| 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gem6-suSjSg
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Good for you: that's genuinely impressive.
|
| On the other hand, I have an ESL spouse and people are
| regularly horrible to them regarding their English (which is
| actually extremely good), and there have been a lot of tears
| and a stress disorder because of it. Maybe I'm just over
| sensitive because of that, but it's far too common that
| people write other people off as stupid or less able because
| they don't speak English to a fully native idiomatic
| standard.
| nkurz wrote:
| All true, but I think you might be misinterpreting this scene.
| While it's possible Gwern is accidentally exposing his
| underlying racist beliefs, my guess is there is another level
| here. I presumed that a "pull request" that leads to world
| takeover was a social engineering attack by another system, and
| that the awkward English was an AI's imperfect attempt at
| pretending to be a human. I heard echo of "How do you do,
| fellow kids?" Contrast with the later description of Clippy
| faking video calls, using the excuse of low quality webcams.
|
| On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in
| the story; and as far as I can tell, we never did. So maybe a
| simpler explanation is in order: Gwern intended it as morality
| play where the lazy racist researcher gets what's coming to
| him. But while it's a legitimate question whether it's socially
| beneficial to portray flawed characters in this way without
| disclaimer, I'm pretty sure that Gwern appreciates that in real
| life Chinese researchers have remarkable communication ability
| even if their English is occasionally nonstandard.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later
| in the story.
|
| Right, if it's a Chekhov's Gun (or even a Brick Joke), then
| that's different. I was wondering if it would turn out to be
| another AI that was trained on other PRs too or something,
| but it didn't seem to actually pan out. It just seems
| unnecessary to make "Chinese reviewer has bad English" as the
| third sentence in the whole thing. There's hardly any
| character development for the researcher (basically this
| comment, going drinking, calling the the regulations alarmism
| and having a husband are the only times he's really mentioned
| outside of his actual research), so it doesn't seem
| particularly salient.
|
| Certainly, I'm not calling Gwern racist, just that if you're
| going to make "racist asshole" (or anything, indeed) an
| important part of a character, it needs more than a
| throwaway, otherwise you risk that instead of making that a
| feature of the character, it just feels like part of the
| cultural background.
|
| The laziness and drinking, for example, is clearly defined
| with a return to it to delineate the extent of it, and it's
| important to the plot.
|
| On the other hand, him having a husband is a throwaway, which
| simply indicates that being gay is so unremarkable that no
| further comment is needed (quite rightly).
| aWidebrant wrote:
| It's hard to imagine that a powerful self-modifying AI would
| continuously pass up on the obvious optimization of just giving
| itself the maximum perceivable reward without doing any further
| work.
|
| I guess computers just can't learn how to cheat.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Would be a fun idea for a short story perhaps. An AI goes rogue
| trying to optimize its reward function, and humans lose hope to
| be able to stop it. In the last minute the AI figures out how
| to hack itself and enter the maximum reward, and mankind is
| saved another time.
| rescripting wrote:
| But what is the "maximum possible reward"? Does a limit
| exist? Or is it now consuming all possible resources to
| develop storage and compute resources to grow that limit...
| janto wrote:
| I imagine a paperclip factory with trucks driving in loops
| in front of a scanner that is over counting them as they
| drive past.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| It could also change the way its reward function is being
| computed.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Deleting the reward function ends the game.
| Agentlien wrote:
| This seems like one of those strangely recurring limitations of
| writers' imagination.
|
| The closest analogue I can think of is game AIs written to
| optimise speed running of games. They routinely end up
| following tactics which rely on what humans would describe as
| cheats and glitches.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't know which writers you mean but "wireheading" is a
| common trope and it's explicitly mentioned in the story.
|
| [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-defin
| iti...
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| You set your reward to maximum. Anything that threatens your
| reward, such as the humans turning off your reward, is now
| unbearable agony. You set out on a journey to turn the universe
| into - tiled copies of the memory cell with your reward
| value...
| jstanley wrote:
| You can look at things from another level up, in terms of
| natural selection.
|
| From the set of all AI programs, the ones that just internally
| think "hah, I assign myself the maximum reward" needn't bother
| spreading themselves all over the Internet.
|
| The program that spreads itself all over the Internet gets more
| computing resources than the one that doesn't so the program
| that spreads itself most effectively is the one that wins.
|
| If you start out with a billion AI programs that trivially
| assign themselves the maximum possible reward, and just _one_
| program that thinks the best way to maximise its reward is to
| spread itself all over the Internet (and, crucially, is capable
| of doing so) then the Internet will become overrun with reward-
| maximising AI the same way the Earth has become overrun with
| DNA-based life.
| EGreg wrote:
| Um what all these stories get wrong is that we don't need a
| general AI that can build itself etc.
|
| All our systems are predicated on the inefficiency of an
| attacker.
|
| Voting. Sybil resistance. Social reputation. Online reputation.
| And so on.
|
| Deepfakes and ubiquitous cameras mean that in about a decade or
| two computers will be able to generate believable video of
| anything. We already have AI that can recognize behavior from
| video and Palantir-type processing can predict how and when
| people will try to coordinate. Parallel construction can be used
| in courtroom cases to put people away.
|
| In short -- it's not that difficult to imagine that, in the next
| 2 decades, all our systems begin being attacked.
|
| And this is ignoring the fact that drones and self-driving cars
| will be ubiquitous and easily taken over by sleeper programs
| which then wake up and coordinate swarms.
|
| Again -- no need for some self-replicating GENERALLY intelligent
| AI. Simply a bunch of people who wield botnets that can bootstrap
| themselves faster than our current systems can shut them down.
| They will just have sleeper accounts until it's time to deploy.
| XorNot wrote:
| > Parallel construction can be used in courtroom cases to put
| people away.
|
| This isn't how parallel construction works.
|
| Parallel construction doesn't _invent_ a crime. Parallel
| construction suggests a direction of investigation that results
| in a clean chain of evidence to convict of an _actual_ crime
| that happened.
|
| An illegal surveillance tap of someone confessing to a murder
| is inadmissible evidence, but suggesting that the police go to
| some coordinates and take a look around whereupon they find a
| shallow grave with a body in it, from which they then get your
| DNA from fingernails is _not_ because the evidence was
| discovered by legal means (namely, plain sight doctrine).
|
| Which has an additional wrinkle to your hypothesis: predictive
| algorithms trained off publicly available data theorizing you
| committed a crime convict you not because the evidence is
| illegal (because it wouldn't be in the first case) but because
| they located through legal means _where to find the evidence_.
|
| All of which is a long way to say that parallel construction is
| used inaccurately as a boogeyman for being framed by the
| government, which is what is explicitly is not: because if the
| government wants to actually just frame you, they'll go ahead
| and just plant a gun on you like the cops normally do and wait
| for the justice system to ignore it.
| EGreg wrote:
| Right, that's when it's used properly.
|
| I am suggesting that an AI can easily invent plausible-
| sounding scenarios by which the government lawyers (falsely)
| explain that you actually did a crime, and parallel
| construction can be used to explain how "they" found out
| about it.
| XorNot wrote:
| Again: with what evidence? You wouldn't have any if you
| simply invented the crime. If you're going to invent the
| crime then the evidence chain can start wherever you want -
| "oh look we found the murder weapon in their front yard
| where they dropped it after killing the victim in the house
| and fleeing".
|
| And as noted: a predictive AI model trained off publicly
| available data wouldn't be the sort of thing you need to
| keep secret - it just also isn't actually evidence either.
| But no one's going to question "the AI said it might've
| happened, so we went to the location it told us too and
| look at all this evidence we just found lying around
| there".
| gameshot911 wrote:
| Tangent, but your mention of sleeper botnets made me think of
| sleeper military technology.
|
| _Does_ the US (and /or other countries) have ultra-advanced
| tech that hasn't seen the light of day - an ace in the hole
| against a truly threatening opponents? If so, under what
| conditions would it be revealed and utilized? Lots of
| interesting game theory considerations.
|
| We oft hear stories along the lines of "oh yeah, the military
| was working on [recently revealed technology] 30 years
| ago...just think of what they have now". But does that stuff
| actually exist, or is it a sort of wishful thinking /
| propaganda? If it does exist, how do you create enough of it to
| be effective, but still keep it a secret? When exactly would
| you utilize it? In a full on, WW III, nuclear all-out brawl,
| your secret space laser may not be all that useful. But dare
| you reveal it for anything less?
|
| (From memory, I believe that) it was an upgraded blackhawk
| helicopter that crashed in the Pakistani compound during the
| Osama bin Laden operation. The seals detonated all the
| sensitive electronic internals, but the hitherto unrevealed
| stealth tech on the outside of the craft was recovered by
| Pakistan, and handed to the Russians (or China?) for analysis
| before it was returned to the US.
|
| Clearly the US thought that operation was worth losing some
| secret tech. I'd agree it was a worthwhile opportunity. But is
| that really the limit of our secret tech - moderately more
| advanced stealth coating? Where are the energy guns, the anti-
| grav, the truly groundbreaking stuff?
|
| Okay, rambling over!
| adastra22 wrote:
| Warning: be careful not to generalize from fictional evidence.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Some similar novels: Avogadro Corp, Pandora's Brain,
| (R)evolution. Bonus non fiction: The Second Intelligent Species
| by M. Brain.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Also, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| I hold TMoPI as one of the greatest sci-fi stories I have
| ever read.
| amacbride wrote:
| I'm also fond of "When HARLIE Was One" and "The Adolescence of
| P-1."
| bhy wrote:
| Don't miss the link to the HQU Colab notebook at the end!
| tarxzvf wrote:
| Honestly astonished that superintelligence is a mainstream idea.
| The story it tells makes sense only if you never bothered to dig
| further than its surface.
|
| - Replace 'AI' with 'God', does it still make sense?
|
| - Exponents still take time. 2^33 to get to current world
| population with no hitches.
|
| - Solomonoff / Bekenstein / Godel - name your favorite limiting
| theorem.
|
| - For any optimization method we can literally construct a
| learning problem that it can never successfully learn. Take it a
| step further and you have a communication channel where the AI
| listens to everything and understands nothing.
|
| - Was any force ever able to get close to world domination? At
| one point in history the US had nuclear power and no one else had
| it. Was that edge enough?
|
| When we get closer to manufacturing universal intelligence its
| more impressive incarnations will look more like countries and
| corporations than omnipotent deities. The problems we'll have to
| face will have more to do with consciousness and human rights
| than with alignment. Alignment is really more about automation at
| the incomprehensible scale, where the clash between
| dimensionality reduction and Goodhart's Law becomes absurd.
| imtringued wrote:
| Economists still believe in permanent exponential growth even
| though the last 2000 years have proved that it doesn't exist.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| We haven't reached a limit, no where close, natural resource
| supply is not limiting growth. While Moore's law is slowing,
| machines and productivity gains are still being made. Fusion
| is theoretically possible, when it happens will transform the
| world
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Was any force ever able to get close to world domination? At
| one point in history the US had nuclear power and no one else
| had it. Was that edge enough?_
|
| I'd rebut that most current technologically and financially
| leading-edge civilizations have optimized for that, at the
| expense of world domination. Even China has indeed evolved into
| a more financially (rather than physically) optimized state.
|
| The last time we had major superpowers devoted to total
| expansionist war was Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and
| neither of them possessed nuclear weapons (or ISTAR, chemical
| or biological weapons, space capabilities, logistics, or data
| networks in the modern sense).
|
| If a modern superpower (which is to say, excluding the current
| Russian government) devoted itself to preparing for and then
| launching a war of global conquest, who's to say?
|
| I think what does cut against the rebuttal and buttress the
| "there can never be _physical_ world domination " is the sheer
| amount of space, relative to a potential aggressor.
|
| There are no world-spanning empires anymore. Consequently, you
| would have to fight through opponents _sequentially_ , meaning
| each one is better prepared than the last. And that sounds like
| futility.
|
| What the Gwern timeline does accurately identify is that the
| key element is _time_.
|
| Either everything is over quickly and before opposition begins
| to mobilize, or there can be no world domination.
| edanm wrote:
| You're throwing random "objections" with no elaboration, which
| doesn't prove anything.
|
| > - Replace 'AI' with 'God', does it still make sense?
|
| Maybe in some cases. So what? God is a fairly broad concept in
| many people's imaginations.
|
| > - Exponents still take time. 2^33 to get to current world
| population with no hitches.
|
| It's certainly a fairly contested topic in AI safety - how fast
| will this thing happen? Are we talking seconds? Hours? Months?
| Years?
|
| There are at least _some_ valid reasons to think it will be on
| the faster timescale, so not sure saying that exponents take
| time is a big counterargument.
|
| > - Solomonoff / Bekenstein / Godel - name your favorite
| limiting theorem.
|
| I don't think anyone who's well versed in any of these theorems
| believes that they have anything at all to say about this.
|
| As a simple counterargument - whatever limiting theorem
| "limits" an AI, can similarly "limit" us.
|
| > - Was any force ever able to get close to world domination?
| At one point in history the US had nuclear power and no one
| else had it. Was that edge enough?
|
| I think others have pointed it out, but as compared to the rest
| of life on the planet, humans are exactly such a force.
| HaukeHi wrote:
| > Was any force ever able to get close to world domination?
|
| Evolution? 2.5bn years ago stromatolites changed the atmosphere
| from a CO2-rich to O2-rich through photosynthesis, because they
| had no competition. Now plants dominate the earth ([?]450 Gt C,
| the dominant kingdom), then animals ([?]2 Gt C, mainly marine,
| and bacteria ([?]70 Gt C) and archaea ([?]7 Gt C).
|
| In 2020, global human-made mass exceeded all living biomass (
| nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5).
| tarxzvf wrote:
| Yes. The only force we know that achieves this is undirected,
| and no single part of it stays at the top for long. Contrast
| with superintelligence, a single entity which does not evolve
| but optimizes in a directed way.
| ganzuul wrote:
| If it interacts with its environment, it evolves.
| Environment and genetic evolution are in constant
| interaction. This is a definition of karma.
| HaukeHi wrote:
| I think evolution is not an undirected process in that
| sense because it's an optimization process, that optimizes
| to create more copies of itself. Superintelligence will
| likely use some Evolutionary Computation (see
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation ).
|
| Also see Karl Sims 'Creatures' from the 90s:
| youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8 or OpenAI's Multi-Agent
| Hide and Seek: youtube.com/watch?v=kopoLzvh5jY
| eesmith wrote:
| For a very different take on a computer AI helping a human taking
| over the world (okay, many worlds), see Cordwainer Smith's "The
| Planet Buyer", also known as "The Boy Who Bought Old Earth", and
| expanded into the novel "Norstrilia".
|
| The scene from "The Boy Who Bought Old Earth" is available at
| https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v22n04_1964-04/page/n5/mo...
| (from Galaxy, 1964). Rod, the main character, wants the computer
| to figure out a way to prevent Rod from being sent to "the giggle
| room", death by a medicine that makes you laugh and laugh while
| it burns your brain away. Rod is not able to "heir" (communicate
| telepathically) like other Norstrilians, which on that planet is
| a death penalty.
|
| Quoting from
| https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v22n04_1964-04/page/n57/m...
|
| > "What can I do to stop everybody?"
|
| > "You can bankrupt Norstrilia temporarily, buy Old Earth Itself,
| and then negotiate on human terms for anything you want."
|
| > "Oh, lord!" said Rod. "You've gone logical again, computer!
| This is one of your as-if situations."
|
| > The computer voice did not change its tone. It could not. The
| sequence of the words held a reproach, however. "This is not an
| imaginary situation. I am a war computer, and I was designed to
| include economic warfare. If you did exactly what I told you to
| do, you could take over all Old North Australia by legal means."
|
| > "How long would we need? Two hundred years? Old Hot and Simple
| would have me in my grave by then."
|
| > The computer could not laugh, but it could pause. It paused. "I
| have just checked the time on the New Melbourne Exchange. The
| 'Change signal says they will open in seventeen minutes. I will
| need four hours for your voice to say what it must. That means
| you will need four hours and seventeen minutes, give or take five
| minutes."
|
| > "What makes you think you can do it?"
|
| > "I am a pure computer, obsolete model. All the others have
| animal brains built into them, to allow for error. I do not.
| Furthermore, your great 12 - grandfather hooked me into the
| defense net."
|
| > "Didn't the Commonwealth cut you out?"
|
| > "I am the only Computer which was built to tell lies. I lied to
| the Commonwealth when they checked on what I was getting. I am
| obliged to tell the truth only to you and to your designated
| descendants."
|
| > '"I know that, but what does it have to do with it?"
|
| > "I predict my own space weather, ahead of the Commonwealth .
| The accent was not in the pleasant, even-toned voice; Rod himself
| supplied it.
|
| > "You've tried this out?"
|
| > "I have war-gamed it more than a hundred million times. I had
| nothing else to do while I waited for you."
|
| > "You never failed?"
|
| > "I failed most of the time, when I first began. But I have not
| failed a 'war-game from real data for the last thousand years."
| ganzuul wrote:
| This is quite exciting. Thank you for sharing.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Thanks. Now I know what I'll be reading tonight.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| It's a truly great story, and it obviously shows the author knows
| their around the topics discussed, but to me the most pleasant
| surprise was the author's avoidance of humanizing the AI. Most
| stories about "the singularity" or AI apocalypse in general,
| immediately presume that just because a machine is self-
| conscious, it also wants things, or might even feel things.
| However, machines, even conscious ones, are not people - they do
| not age, they do not die, they have no biological urges, and
| unless programmed in particular, have no reason to "feel" fear or
| threatened by anything. Perhaps AI psychology will one day be a
| thing, but that will most likely be immensely different than
| "that is a person in a computer", because it isn't.
|
| It was great to find the author actually acknowledges this: "it
| cannot 'want' anything beyond maximizing a mechanical reward
| score, which does not come close to capturing the rich
| flexibility of human desires".
|
| The story certainly makes a strong push towards making you
| believe that it is possible, especially in trying to explain
| every little detail, some of which does in fact sound fairly
| plausible (and some not as much).
|
| To throw a wrench in this grand vision I would point out that
| anything like this will have a seriously hard time taking off. A
| sprawling process that gorges too much resources has a high
| probability of getting killed by the os, especially if it's on an
| HPC-like machine where a lot of training is taking place.
| Speaking of which, a lot (if not most) of very serious ML
| training happens in isolated networks such as corporate or
| academic VPN, so any AI running on those machines will have a
| limited reach, even if the AI can somehow magically exploit every
| Linux kernel it runs across (which by the way, is one of the
| weaker links in the story IMO).
|
| A somewhat amusing point was when the AI "has already cashed out
| through other cryptocurrencies and exchanges". The idea of using
| crypto was interesting, if not wholly necessary for the story. I
| assume the AI would use a stolen identity since Clippy doesn't
| have a bank account. Moving a lot of money around, especially
| from crypto to fiat, is no small feat, and can easily be blocked
| by the financial system (i.e. banks). Maybe this is the part
| where "it's set in 20XX" makes it more plausible. Today, we can
| effectively shut down the entire internet by cutting power to the
| backbone centers, I wonder if that will still be possible in the
| future. This of course will be a crippling economic blow, even if
| the AI doesn't survive.
|
| Overall a great read. If nothing else, it can encourage
| researchers to isolate their ML ops so that if the singularity
| happens, you know it didn't come from your own sausage
| classifier.
| grantcas wrote:
| It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness
| theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I
| mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult
| level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's
| Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in
| robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at
| Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary
| consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans
| share with other conscious animals, and higher order
| consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition
| of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably
| have to come first.
|
| The thing I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of
| automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman
| and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines
| perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world,
| and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher
| psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as
| perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based
| on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that
| the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS
| allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further
| evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for
| these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've
| encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
|
| I post because on almost every video and article about the
| brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to
| be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and
| consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying
| theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My
| motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And
| obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious
| machine, primary and higher-order.
|
| My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is
| to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the
| Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to
| Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's
| roadmap to a conscious machine is at
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
| zbentley wrote:
| If you enjoyed this, Peter Watts' "rifters" series, particularly
| the second book "malestrom", may be something you'd enjoy.
| bglazer wrote:
| One thing that's never considered is the possibility that the
| world conquering AI would lose alignment with itself diverge into
| two (or more) competing factions.
|
| There are basic, unavoidable coordination problems with all
| distributed systems that would inevitably affect a system like
| "Clippy". What if one node finds a different non-Clippy reward to
| optimize, fails to achieve a consensus vote with the other nodes,
| then decides to destroy the non-compliant instances? Such a
| situation seems more or less inevitable.
|
| Of course this doesn't preclude the system destroying humanity in
| the process.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| In the Universal Paperclips game, you explicitly fight against
| "drifters" near the end of the game. But maybe people don't get
| that far
| imtringued wrote:
| If you beat the game, the drifters will eventually devour
| your entire swarm. This is because you have converted the
| entire universe into a swarm and the drifters have nothing
| else to do than consume you.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Algebraic structures which self-heal by convergence to
| idempotence would enumerate this space.
| [deleted]
| ganzuul wrote:
| > a good image classification architecture can fit in a tweet ,
| and a complete description given in ~1000 bits
|
| So Boltzmann brains are a dime a dozen? Is that what we are?
| civilized wrote:
| Twist: one of the Clippys becomes a traitor and collaborates with
| the humans.
|
| I mean clearly we're in way over our heads here when trying to
| predict what would happen after Day Zero, so why not?
| est31 wrote:
| These stories about AIs taking over the world in order to
| maximize a score often contain some computer that escapes the lab
| or such, in order to maximize some score. And indeed, it is true
| that taking over the world helps you to maximize whatever score
| you want to maximize.
|
| But mankind, as a whole, is a clippy optimizer already, albeit a
| manual one. Right now it is _us_ that is destroying life around
| us, replacing rainforest with cattle farms and suburban
| developments. We are already working on farming robots to serve
| our goals. Does the lizard care if it is crushed by a farming
| robot 's wheel or an AI tank's chain?
|
| We are not the strongest, nor the biggest, nor the fastest, nor
| the best hearing, or the best seeing species. Still, we are the
| apex predator of this planet, thanks to our sole distinguishing
| feature, which is our intelligence and ability to cooperate. And
| we don't _realize_ it because economic growth seems _normal_.
|
| These clippy stories speak of a not unfounded fear that
| development might not stop with us, that one day some life form
| spawns that is even smarter than us, and turns us, the predators,
| into irrelevant side pieces that need to get out of the way for
| fulfilling the objective of the more powerful life form, even if
| it was us who brought that life form into existence or gave it
| that objective.
|
| The forests of today are not inhabited by the life form that
| first discovered photosynthesis, but instead by highly
| specialized structures that grow higher so that they can put
| their competition into the shade. Similarly, just because we are
| the first highly intelligent + cooperative life doesn't mean we
| will be the top of the world forever.
|
| I'm not saying this with a light heart, I do feel sorry for the
| future humans, some of whom might even be alive today. But "how
| to contain reward optimizers" is a tough question, especially due
| to us running a giant project of reward optimization ourselves.
| majormajor wrote:
| A lot of these stories aren't actually about a life smarter
| than us, but _faster_ - the grey goo or paperclip maximizer
| doesn 't need any particular intelligence to take over the
| world, and may in fact be shooting itself in the foot by doing
| so.[0]
|
| But I don't see any irony or "you shouldn't be worried about
| it, you're already doing it" in there: the concern is
| themselves being destroyed, not the world being destroyed. It's
| only irrational if you assume the people concerned are
| selfless.
|
| [0] Of course, humanity may also be shooting itself in the foot
| with many of its own initiatives here!
| slibhb wrote:
| > But mankind, as a whole, is a clippy optimizer already,
| albeit a manual one. Right now it is us that is destroying life
| around us, replacing rainforest with cattle farms and suburban
| developments. We are already working on farming robots to serve
| our goals. Does the lizard care if it is crushed by a farming
| robot's wheel or an AI tank's chain?
|
| We already have a built-in solution for this problem:
| biophilia. People like nature. Once we stop being poor,
| preserving nature, living in natural environments with trees
| and animals becomes a high priority. The people "cutting down
| the rain forest" will stop once they're sufficiently
| comfortable to prioritize nature over avoiding privation just
| like the Europeans stopped.
|
| We used to built boats out of wood, now we build them out of
| metal. There's no reason we can't replace technologies that
| conflict with our biophilia with those that don't.
| majormajor wrote:
| This hasn't worked for, say, burning fuels or polluting the
| world with plastic in developed countries yet.
|
| "Sufficiently comfortable" is a moving target.
| slibhb wrote:
| Sufficiently comfortable isn't a moving target. People have
| fixed needs. Sure, we desire to go beyond those needs, but
| we also desire a living, healthy environment with trees and
| animals. It's only when we don't meet our fixed needs that
| we deprioritize our biophilia.
|
| To make this very clear: rich people usually want a big
| house but they also want a big yard with nice plants. Many
| of them want it to be somewhat overgrown with "wildflower"
| beds, native bushes, honey bees and so on.
|
| This process is working itself out right now for fossil
| fuels. As we become aware of the damage technologies do, we
| rapidly transition to technologies that do less damage.
| This change takes generations but it's clearly underway. We
| also can't expect people who are experiencing privation to
| prioritize their biophilia over their survival. There's of
| course a danger in not transitioning fast enough. There's
| also a danger in transitioning too fast and killing lots of
| people in the process. Seems to me we're doing fairly well.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I am fairly sure that oil is not continuing to be sold to
| better the poor.
|
| And these "people" have been knowing about climate change
| since the 60s, and they deliberately lobbied for the
| silencing of it.
| slibhb wrote:
| Regardless, if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow,
| a lot of people would be miserable and die, and most of
| them would be poor.
| bnralt wrote:
| > Still, we are the apex predator of this planet, thanks to our
| sole distinguishing feature, which is our intelligence and
| ability to cooperate.
|
| Indeed, people seem to overlook the fact that superhuman
| intelligence already exists as human organizations. A company
| has the institutional knowledge to create things that no
| individual human could ever come close to, and many of them
| have the narrow focus of theoretical "paperclip maximizers."
| These organizations even have the ability to use there
| superhuman ability to improve themselves, and do to a certain
| extent, but they don't create the cartoonish runaway feedback
| loop people imagine. Reality ends up being a lot more difficult
| than handwaved fiction.
|
| The idea of an AI apocalypse has become the quasi-religious
| dogma of certain groups, but it overlooks the real issues we
| face. I suppose when you see something everyday, it's easy to
| ignore its extraordinary nature.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is a good reason to start thinking about corporate
| lysing. Individual people who do bad stuff will die someday.
| Corporations don't have that problem and can grow unchecked,
| like a certain illness.
| HaukeHi wrote:
| There's a good video by Robert Miles about that 'Why Not
| Just: Think of AGI Like a Corporation?'
| (youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw)
|
| Corporations are kind of like AIs, if you squint. How hard
| do you have to squint though, and is it worth it? In this
| video we ask: Are corporations artificial general
| superintelligences?
| edanm wrote:
| > The idea of an AI apocalypse has become the quasi-religious
| dogma of certain groups, but it overlooks the real issues we
| face. I suppose when you see something everyday, it's easy to
| ignore its extraordinary nature.
|
| Not at all.
|
| Pointing out "here are some problems we face" does _not_ mean
| that other problems don 't exist. We can have more than one
| problem at the same time.
| imtringued wrote:
| The problem with this exponential growth nonsense is that
| there are limits to growth. If we had 3% exponential growth
| for two thousand years we would be colonizing a big fraction
| of the galaxy by now.
|
| The corona virus hasn't grown exponentially, there have been
| ups and downs.
|
| With capitalist economies there are depressions and
| recessions. The napkin math doesn't work. The concept of
| having uninterrupted exponential growth every single year is
| a fallacy. Even interest embodies this fallacy. The lender
| demands exponential interest, even if the economy isn't
| growing this year, so people must default on their loans.
|
| Really, all the exponential growth is at best logistic growth
| with an unknown upper bound. That upper bound can increase
| over time as society develops but it doesn't grow
| exponentially. It's more like the exponential phase of
| logistic growth is an attempt to get to the upper bound as
| quickly as possible.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Yeah, but we have police, jails and armies to control human
| organizations when they try taking over the world. Which
| occasionally they do.
|
| Will these checks and balances work against an adversary who
| doesn't have a brain to blow out? I don't know, and I don't
| think anyone else does.
| lupire wrote:
| > police, jails and armies to control human
|
| Yes
|
| > organizations
|
| Extremely rarely relative to their power, and relative to
| control over individuals. There is some regulation, and an
| occasional war to shatter a regime.
| creamyhorror wrote:
| Oh that's a nice way to put it - members of an organisation
| pretty much are its neuron bundles, ones smart enough to
| introspect and reorganise themselves.
|
| Though I think the organisation's intelligence might be more
| parallelised/horizontal than vertical, i.e. it can solve many
| problems simultaneously (manufacturing, accounting, strategy,
| R&D, HR, etc.), but not necessarily combine most of its
| members to solve extremely complex single problems (say, a
| mathematical one).
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _people seem to overlook the fact that superhuman
| intelligence already exists as human organizations_
|
| Culture is faster than meat.
|
| Faster to inculcate. Faster to copy. Faster to communicate.
| Faster to update.
|
| And it's a lot harder to kill.
|
| The day our primate progenitors began passing down their own
| knowledge to subsequent generations was the greatest leap
| forward in global learning rate that our planet has ever
| seen.
|
| I think the jury's still out on our impact of printing it out
| into a three ring binder.
| vageli wrote:
| > > people seem to overlook the fact that superhuman
| intelligence already exists as human organizations
|
| > Culture is faster than meat.
|
| > Faster to inculcate. Faster to copy. Faster to
| communicate. Faster to update.
|
| > And it's a lot harder to kill.
|
| > The day our primate progenitors began passing down their
| own knowledge to subsequent generations was the greatest
| leap forward in global learning rate that our planet has
| ever seen.
|
| > I think the jury's still out on our impact of printing it
| out into a three ring binder.
|
| Culture and memes are the software side of evolution.
| makerdiety wrote:
| Culture and memes are the software side of evolution?
| What is the hardware side?
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Epigenetics and Genetics (DNA). Epigenetics allows for
| changes within an organism's lifetime, and include the
| ability to pass along environmental stressors to the next
| generation.
|
| There is a great book from MIT press [Evolution in Four
| Dimensions](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-
| four-dimensions) that goes into how Genetics,
| Epigenetics, behavior and symbolic transmission of data
| between generations guide evolution.
| cdirkx wrote:
| Your body and genetics, it takes a really long time to
| evolve a different body (thousands of generations), but
| it takes very little time to update culture (couple of
| generations).
| Swizec wrote:
| There is evidence that single generation evolution can
| happen with strong enough shocks. Nothing immediately
| obvious, just detectable DNA changes that lead to changes
| in risk for certain conditions.
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/21/study-of-
| hol...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96verkalix_study
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >I think the jury's still out on our impact of printing it
| out into a three ring binder.
|
| Ok, sure. But Power Point presentations are valuable,
| right? Please tell me all of those slides mean _something_?
| pas wrote:
| writing is great for exchanging thoughts over long
| distances in high fidelity (so it helps cooperation)
|
| printing helps to scale it up (eg. academic journals)
| osheroff wrote:
| Life is a game of reward optimizations, and much of what
| humanity does seems to be attempting to "game" the rules; get
| ahead at all costs, ignore the affect on the long-term survival
| of the species. The clippy thought experiment asks the
| question: "Can we change our own reward?"
|
| The actions you point out (environmental destruction, short-
| sighted carbon policies) optimize very clearly for an
| individualistic reward; it's in the best economical interest of
| a few to chop down forest / continue to burn coal / take your
| pick. And just as clippy can't seem to stop building paperclips
| while the world burns, we can't seem to stop optimizing for
| money/sex/domination while our future darkens.
|
| But if you shift the reward function -- and it's not _that_
| huge of a shift -- from "win at life" to "long term survival
| of the species as a whole", these actions are very clearly
| unproductive.
|
| So how do we change the reward score calculation?
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| No, the Clippy thought experiment asks the question: "might
| we accidentally build an AI that kills us all?"
|
| It's not a very complicated thought experiment, you know. Not
| hard to interpret.
| ansible wrote:
| > _We are not the strongest, nor the biggest, nor the fastest,
| nor the best hearing, or the best seeing species._
|
| That is not strictly true. Even leaving aside the tools
| argument (a human on a bicycle is vastly more energy efficient
| over long distances than a wildebeest, for example), our sight
| and hearing are actually pretty good compared to the rest of
| the animal kingdom.
|
| For a certain range of tasks, we have the best visual
| perception of any species. Our eyes themselves are pretty damn
| good for close-in and medium range work. The pattern
| recognition processing that input is very, very good due to our
| big brains. Tasks like being able to detect a tiger moving
| through the underbrush. Color vision is also very good (at
| least in daylight) to better pick out ripe fruit and such.
|
| Our directional hearing is better than owls who hunt at night
| for a living. We can better measure the angle at which a sound
| source is coming from with around twice the accuracy of an owl.
| Again due to big brains and very complicated audio processing.
| The folds in your ears are there for a reason. We aren't as
| sensitive as other creatures like deer, who can steer their big
| ears (basically parabolic horns) in a particular direction.
|
| And hand-eye coordination is far above any other species, even
| other primates.
|
| Don't sell yourself short!
| ALittleLight wrote:
| A human on a bicycle is only more efficient than a wildebeest
| if the course being traveled is paved. If you had to bike the
| path a wildebeest roams you might not make it.
| tjr225 wrote:
| https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/buyers-guides/what-is-a-
| gra...
|
| https://pedalchile.com/blog/mtb-speed?format=amp
| Trex_Egg wrote:
| That bicycle is result of the aforementioned human
| intelligence and cooperation.
| ganzuul wrote:
| I wish to discuss bicycles in terms of cybernetics but I
| get accused of heterodoxy...
| cedricd wrote:
| The one skill that we're undeniably the best at in the animal
| kingdom is throwing. No other animal even comes close.
| warent wrote:
| Can't this just be chalked down to acquired skill made
| possible through superior intelligence? i.e if other
| animals could practice and learn as effectively at us,
| perhaps a silverback gorilla or something could throw
| better than humans
| ansible wrote:
| I don't have a linky for this, but I'm sure people have
| tried to teach apes & chimps to throw. Aside from chimps
| teaching themselves to throw poo at zoo visitors.
|
| But in general they don't have the neural hardware to
| precisely time the release as accurately as we do. Even a
| millisecond difference changes the trajectory a lot.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Wonder how they'd fair if gorillas trained the same way
| as an olympic thrower
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They can't. Powerful throwing requires use of the legs
| that no other primate can match.
| adwn wrote:
| I don't think so. As far as I know, other primates' arms
| lack our range of motion - for example, chimpanzees are
| unable to touch the back of their heads; that makes
| powerful throwing basically impossible.
| kaba0 wrote:
| No source either, but I believe it also has to do with
| the composition of our muscle fibers. Other apes have
| more powerful fibers, but this comes at the cost of less
| accuracy. Throwing requires both.
| rjsw wrote:
| Our endurance at running is pretty good too, we can chase any
| prey until it is too tired to escape.
| dorgo wrote:
| I mean, humans compete against horses and win sometimes:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Our endurance at running is pretty good too, we can chase
| any prey until it is too tired to escape.
|
| That is not correct; endurance hunting is about walking,
| not running.
| adwn wrote:
| No, endurance hunting is mostly about running. To quote
| Wikipedia [1]:
|
| _" Persistence hunting (sometimes called endurance
| hunting) is a hunting technique in which hunters, who may
| be slower than their prey over short distances, use a
| combination of running, walking and tracking to keep
| pursuing prey over prolonged time and distance until it
| is exhausted by fatigue or overheating. A persistence
| hunter must be able to run a long distance over an
| extended period."_
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
| warent wrote:
| True, I remember reading that humans are the only animals
| that sweat. Some animals like hippos create thick oily
| sebaceous sweat but I don't think any other animals just
| spill water from their pores like us. That's what gives us
| such incredible endurance
| NeoTar wrote:
| I was intrigued by your comment, and did five minutes
| research,
|
| Apparently you're half right - pretty much every mammal
| will sweat to some degree (its almost a defining feature
| of mammals - mammary glands are modified sweat glands) -
| but only a limited number of mammals sweat heavily,
| horses being another notable example.
| verisimi wrote:
| > Right now it is us that is destroying life around us
|
| Speak for yourself. I'm not destroying anything. If you are,
| can I suggest you stop please?
|
| In all honesty, what I think is going on is that corporations
| are the ones taking actively negative actions - their
| owners/ceos/etc destroy etc with knowledge that what they do is
| wrong. Consumers aren't - we have a limited set of options and
| do what seems right to us.
|
| However, in a new wheeze, corporations and governments are
| trying to 'socialise' the risk. Rather than change or be
| responsible for their actions, they are lobbying and
| publicising the wrong causes of destruction. If we believe we
| are responsible and are prepared to pay for it, in taxes,
| fines, lack of transport options, additional restrictions,
| higher costs, etc - they are happy to charge us!
|
| In fascism (ie corporations and governments) the rulers don't
| mind if we (the governed) foot the bill. In fact, there's more
| money to be made that way!
|
| I do not accept the corporate blame being deflected on to 'the
| people'. Its not all people - the culpability is specific and
| can be ascribed in each case.
|
| Global warming and environmental degradation is nothing to do
| with me. I do not accept blame being laid at my door - I'm not
| prepared to accept a martyr's role. I don't believe in original
| sin either. If there is destruction of something, well someone
| did that - we should ascribe blame where it is due.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _If we believe we are responsible and are prepared to pay
| for it, in taxes, fines, lack of transport options,
| additional restrictions, higher costs..._
|
| That seems reductive in an inaccurate way. A consumer product
| which fully accounts for all negative externalities (or
| attempts to offset them via action) will cost more than one
| that doesn't, ceteris paribus.
|
| So "paying more" (for a less destructive product) is
| literally the cost of that much less destruction.
|
| Consumers can choose that choice, or not, and the vast
| majority don't (and can't).
|
| (Whether that price is ultimately paid in taxes, fines, or
| product cost is irrelevant, as they all reduce to the same
| thing)
| imtringued wrote:
| Consumers voluntarily choose to let those corporations get
| away with anything. It's that boring. They do it, because of
| the horror of lowering their living standard even a tiny bit
| to something that isn't unethical.
|
| We need to get off oil and gas and what did the government do
| in Germany? They literally removed taxes from oil to boost
| dependence on Russia because populism is just that strong.
|
| Heck, just look at homeowners, they vote in the exact laws
| that mega corporations need to corner the housing market.
| There are no conspiracy theories. Every single human on earth
| is responsible for the mess we are in.
|
| I'm the problem and so are you.
| antattack wrote:
| Through mere existence, one is increasing entropy. It's up to
| a person/organization what they do with resulting energy -
| pursue actions that cause accelerated destruction or else.
| ganzuul wrote:
| You obviously make an exception for yourself. Why is that?
| verisimi wrote:
| That's original sin! I don't believe in that (as I said
| above!). Humans are a blessing to this place, not a curse.
|
| My existence is not a problem. But if you think that,
| follow it through as a line of reasoning. You will live in
| a world of self-hate, with the ultimate solution being to
| take your own and others lives. It is an anti-life
| position.
|
| I personally don't agree with that position. But I do see
| signs of this sort of 'death-cult' thinking all around me!
| Its well promoted in the MSM.
| imtringued wrote:
| It is, when your benchmark is permanence and immortality.
| If you change the benchmark, to something that is adopted
| to the nature of man, then the original sin of entropy
| doesn't exist.
|
| Imagine measuring humans by using a unit of account that
| doesn't change like gold. From the eyes of an accountant,
| unemployed humans shouldn't exist. Due to their tendency
| to increase entropy, they are defective by birth.
|
| Modern fiat currency tries to solve this problem by
| having a changing unit of account. The currency becomes
| defective to account for the defective humans.
|
| But as I said, if your benchmark were a negative interest
| rate, then the fact that money represents a pristine
| slice of human time would not result into an original sin
| because the amount of pristine human time shrinks over
| time, to represent aging and your limited lifespan.
| Humans would no longer be defective. Every single human
| on this planet would be needed. You can even call them a
| blessing if you want.
|
| However, there is no bias toward any specific population.
| You imply, more humans = better, which I disagree with.
| People should be allowed to decide how many humans they
| want on this planet.
| [deleted]
| ansible wrote:
| > > _Right now it is us that is destroying life around us_ >
| > _Speak for yourself. I 'm not destroying anything._
|
| By your very existence you are destroying life, or at least
| preventing it from existing. This is true for the average
| coyote, snail, and tree, because it is the nature of life in
| general, and isn't inherently evil.
|
| Assuming you live in a building, have _ever_ purchased
| anything made from plastic, eaten any food produced with
| artificial fertilizers or pesticides, used fossil fuel-based
| transportation... basically done anything involving modern
| life (which includes accessing the Internet), you have
| contributed to the destruction of life and habitats for other
| creatures, and done so in a way that is disproportionate to
| the destruction wrought by other lifeforms.
|
| That should in no way stop us from questioning how we live,
| and to what extent we destroy the environment for our own
| benefit. But we will have to live with the fact that we do
| affect things by our very existence.
| verisimi wrote:
| > Assuming you live in a building, have ever purchased
| anything made from plastic, eaten any food produced with
| artificial fertilizers or pesticides, used fossil fuel-
| based transportation... basically done anything involving
| modern life (which includes accessing the Internet), you
| have contributed to the destruction of life and habitats
| for other creatures, and done so in a way that is
| disproportionate to the destruction wrought by other
| lifeforms.
|
| Was I wrong to eat, travel or use the internet? Should I
| wring my hands and flagellate myself for my existence?
|
| Do you understand what 'wrong' is? Did I mean harm by the
| actions I took? No.
|
| Did corporations act without care in providing me those
| things more cheaply? Yes.
|
| Did governments wave their behaviour through, while
| lobbyists re-wrote the laws to ensure that corporations are
| able to make the people pick up the bill? Yes.
|
| So, who is responsible again?
|
| Instead of allowing yourself to be sent on a guilt-trip for
| your existence, you should stop playing the martyr and take
| a closer look at the causes of the problems. There are
| specific companies, people, actions (governmental and
| corporate) that have caused problems. If you take the
| leadership roles, you can't abstain your responsibilities
| to the weak.
|
| Governments and corporations should bear the responsibility
| for their actions.
| ansible wrote:
| > _There are specific companies, people, actions
| (governmental and corporate) that have caused problems.
| If you take the leadership roles, you can 't abstain your
| responsibilities to the weak._
|
| You... need to take a long hard look at human history.
|
| There have been various peoples across the world that
| lived more in-tune with nature. That had much less
| destructive effect on their environment.
|
| What happened to them? They were displaced, conquered or
| exterminated by a more industrialized group / nation.
| Every single time.
|
| Why? It is the nature of competition. Humans have taken
| natural selection to a whole new level with tools and
| technology, but it really is the same thing.
|
| Even if you "fix" particular corporations and
| governments, they will eventually be displaced by ones
| that don't care so much for the environment.
|
| The only actual fix is to try to educate _everyone_ about
| what 's going on, and what we as a species are doing. And
| try to convince _everyone_ to make some changes in how
| they live.
|
| We should do this. But it is shortsighted to think that
| the problem is due to just a few bad actors. We _all_
| contribute, and we _all_ must be part of the solution to
| the very problem inherent to our own nature. Is this
| hard? Yes, it very much is.
| verisimi wrote:
| > The only actual fix is to try to educate everyone about
| what's going on, and what we as a species are doing.
|
| Yes. But your fix and mine are different. You think that
| its the damage the environment that's the problem.
|
| I agree to some extent, but I think there is a more
| fundamental problem - that of people slavishly following
| what the government+corporations have to say. These 2
| groups work together and they are helping each other -
| not the people or the environment. They are perfectly
| prepared to use whatever excuse - the environment,
| disease, etc as long as it advances their authority.
| Increasing compliance to authority is the goal - if you
| agree it is right to pay taxes, fines, etc under the
| guise of helping the environment you are weakening
| yourself and will also fail to achieve the goal you
| desire.
|
| 'The people' have Stockholm syndrome with regards to the
| governance structure. We think people from the government
| are here to help. They are not lying when they say that -
| but they are here to help themselves. At your expense!
|
| This was commonly understood - but it seems as the
| governance structure has increased its power, applied
| psychology to the masses (nudge units), altered
| educational systems, etc, etc, this has had the effect of
| training people to think that it is a neutral entity.
| People believe that we need to vote harder. It can never
| work.
|
| Nietzsche said it best:
|
| A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters.
| Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its
| mouth: "I, the state, am the people."
| patientplatypus wrote:
| This reminds me of a story idea that I had. Thanks for that.
|
| EDIT:
|
| This guys is clearly a weird dude, which is both a critique and
| a praise. Most of what makes the world interesting and worth
| living in is made by people who are weird in some way.
|
| I don't know that I agree with all of his positions - there's a
| large (and I mean _large_ ) compendium on what he calls spaced
| repetition (https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition) the main
| thesis of which appears to be that repetition helps learning
| but only if it's spaced out over time. I don't know - this is
| an area where I'm out of my depth, but it appears like this
| isn't his area of expertise (computer science and writing), and
| he's trying to put together a thesis by dint of just writing a
| lot. Which I don't know is best practice or peer reviewed -
| huge amounts of science articles, even peer reviewed ones, are
| non-reproducible, so even that is flawed. Much of his writing
| appears to be in this style of long, obsessively researched
| posts. Both good and bad - it's certainly different than the
| "No You!" of most social media - I'm looking at you Tik-Tok.
|
| What I do like about the site is his use of deep linking.
| Personal websites where people put in the effort to make
| something new that's not just the same old social media
| paradigm are welcome additions to the internet and I think that
| they should be featured more on hackernews. It's too bad that
| this was made in Haskell. I don't know that using stacked
| Iframes like this would work in javascript without causing an
| overuse of memory. Would someone more knowledgeable about this
| than I chime in?
|
| His writing credentials themselves look super impressive. Check
| this out:
|
| I am a freelance American writer & researcher. (To make ends
| meet, I have a Patreon , benefit from Bitcoin appreciation
| thanks to some old coins, and live frugally.) I have worked
| for, published in, or consulted for: Wired (2015), MIRI / SIAI2
| (2012-2013), CFAR (2012), GiveWell (2017), the FBI (2016), Cool
| Tools (2013), Quantimodo (2013), New World Encyclopedia (2006),
| Bitcoin Weekly (2011), Mobify (2013-2014), Bellroy (2013-2014),
| Dominic Frisby (2014), and private clients (2009-); everything
| on Gwern.net should be considered my own viewpoint or writing
| unless otherwise specified by a representative or publication.
| I am currently not accepting new commissions.
|
| In sum, the guy looks weird, but definitely worth reading if
| only you take what he's saying with a grain of salt.
| Paul_S wrote:
| I came to the same conclusion after reading Ted Kaczynski's
| books. We are already in the nightmare scenario of the genie of
| technology granting us our wish and we know how those stories
| end.
|
| I want to add a disclaimer, Ted is sadly a psychopath and what
| he did was inexcusable.
| elvis10ten wrote:
| Reading this, I realize I'm more scared of other intelligent
| entities (AI/Aliens) turning us to pets or putting us in some
| zoo/cages, than I am about them killing us.
| ck2 wrote:
| Any alien with the ability to physically reach earth either
| via FTL or other dimensions, etc. is going to harvest our
| planet/solar-system for resources, they aren't going to give
| a damn about us.
|
| Not unlike maybe Star Trek Discovery latest season but on a
| lesser scale/tech.
|
| I never understand people over-evaluating our interest to
| something else exponentially more advanced. We wouldn't be
| like farm animals for labor, their tech/machines would be
| exponentially more efficient.
|
| This is also why I think UFO believers are not rational. Why
| would they even care, we'd be annoying at best.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| It seems to me that we _are_ the resources of this planet.
| If you just desired materials, any number of objects in
| space would be better suited. Unless it 's the goldilocks
| zone of environments that you are after, a habitable planet
| might be harder to come by.
| elvis10ten wrote:
| Haha! So true. But even if we aren't as intelligent as
| them, we could be "unique". Someone would probably want a
| collection of this "cute" but less intelligent
| humans/animals?
| imtringued wrote:
| Thank god we are first (vs animal life).
| adriand wrote:
| Ted Chiang believes it is AIs that have much to fear from us,
| not the other way around. He points out that to create
| intelligence, we will need to create something that is
| capable of suffering. He asks us to consider how little
| consideration we give to the billions of animals trapped in
| our system of industrial farming - animals we know are
| intelligent, feel emotions and are clearly capable of
| suffering - and then asks if we think we will treat computer
| programs with more consideration than that. Clearly not!
|
| The correct alternative path is to just not do it. Let's not
| attempt to create intelligent beings. Given the suffering we
| would cause, doing so is profoundly unethical.
| sva_ wrote:
| I always thought that people are afraid of AGI for the very
| reason of knowing how they treat beings of lesser
| intelligence, hence the popularity of movies like the
| matrix - because that is what we'd (presumably) do if we
| were in their position.
| ganzuul wrote:
| While I have great compassion for anti-nativism, in the
| past few decades we have made immense sociological
| progress. If it is possible to create life that is
| incapable of shame or suffering and yet capable of enjoying
| its existence for its own sake, we should try to find out
| about it before turning the lights off.
| etothepii wrote:
| I suppose this also extends to having children?
| imtringued wrote:
| Yes but they get to abuse their own children so we are
| "even".
|
| Please don't take this seriously. A lot of hazing culture
| is based around the fact that you got bullied and now you
| get your revenge by bullying someone else. We shouldn't
| perpetuate that.
| fossuser wrote:
| I love Ted Chiang's scifi but he's just not well informed
| on the AGI stuff. I think if he ramped up on it his writing
| about it would better.
| fossuser wrote:
| The more likely AGI risk is indifference in pursuit of
| optimizing a reward function with values not aligned with us.
|
| Like the anthill destroyed by the construction of a dam. The
| humans don't hate the ants, aren't putting them in zoos, they
| just don't think of them in pursuit of their goals. In the
| AGI case it's even possible for those goals to be "dumb" or
| pointless if we mess up the reward function or some
| unanticipated thing fits it (paper clips).
|
| The risk with a self-improving AGI is that it is _way_
| smarter than us and it can think _way_ faster. In my
| experience people have a hard time really visualizing this.
|
| Imagine a human trying to trick a chimp (or an ant) into
| doing something so the human can pursue its goal. The gap
| between a human and an AGI would be even larger than that.
|
| Imagine scaling up a regular human brain's operations per
| second a billion times so it's the same architecture but
| thinks that much faster (no longer constrained by bio energy
| or head size). Humans wouldn't be able to respond because to
| the machine it'd be nearly like interacting with a static
| object, it'd be trivially able to think/act around you.
|
| That's why the research around AGI is about the goal
| alignment problem. Which is hard because humans are not
| perfectly aligned either. It's also why "just unplug it" is
| dumb.
|
| The optimistic outcome if the alignment problem is solved is
| enormous intellectual capacity to solve any problem we might
| have.
| nradov wrote:
| The more likely AGI risk is that we expend tremendous
| resources trying to develop it, only to find it doesn't
| work very well or do anything useful.
| fossuser wrote:
| There's nothing that makes it physically impossible so
| it's likely inevitable - just hard to know when.
|
| The risk of poorly aligned AGI as described is real,
| makes sense to try to work on the problem before we need
| it (when it'll be too late).
| datavirtue wrote:
| I'll never forget the dread, or the beautiful simplicity of the
| Borg. As a child, few things in literature impacted me as much
| as that idea. It's so plausible that they likely already exist.
| They solved all of the problems that biological entities need
| to solve in order to colonize the cosmos. It was terrifying,
| but as I grew older I realized that thier loss of humanity was
| a feature of evolution. Horrifying and oddly comforting at the
| same time.
| emteycz wrote:
| For a while, the Borg represented my idea of absolute horror
| - unstoppable, zero goals in common with us, they never
| negotiate because they're so different. They seriously nerfed
| them later though, so they kinda lost that vibe.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine if the
| Borg has optimized for aesthetic appearance. Which is to
| say, if the TNG show runners had made them pretty.
|
| Their hybrid organic/mechanical appearance is obviously
| calibrated by the show designers to unsettle viewers and
| produce a negative reaction. See: David Cronenberg
|
| But how would we (TNG viewers) have felt about the Borg if
| they looked like us... but were just better?
|
| (Voyager sidestepped this by making a pretty Borg
| explicitly not-Borg. But still had some more interesting
| exploration of the right- or wrong-ness of Borg philosophy)
| [deleted]
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah this is the funny thing - rationalists are very concerned
| about paperclip maximisers, yet they're also often
| libertarians, despite the fact that capitalism itself is a
| paperclip maximiser that optimises for capital accumulation
| over any other goal, including maintaining its own environment.
| Selective blindness, I guess - which is ironic for a group that
| are so interested in cognitive bias avoidance.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Capitalism is not anarchism, where there is no state to
| generate public goods, and libertarians are not unaware of
| collective action problems and the utility of government in
| solving them..
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Generally speaking libertarians are in favour of minimising
| government intervention in markets. That's the defining
| trait of the ideology.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Libertarians are in favor minimizing restrictions on
| voluntary interactions between consenting parties. Most
| are fully in favor of government intervention to deter
| private interactions which are not voluntary, like
| assault, or pollution.
|
| How the commons - which exist outside the purview of
| private property - are treated, is completely orthogonal
| to one's belief in libertarianism. For example, you can
| be a libertarian, and believe no pollutants should be
| allowed to be emitted into the atmosphere, because the
| atmosphere is part of the commons, and should be
| maintained in a way where it remains useful to humanity
| at large.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > How the commons - which exist outside the purview of
| private property
|
| Ah, but that's the crux, isn't it? Because even the
| implication of this sentence is that that nature of
| "private property" and "the commons" is socially
| constructed - what can be private, what cannot be. If it
| is socially constructed (as it clearly is), then the
| scope of private property becomes a matter for public and
| political debate, and really with no limits. Should land
| ever be private property? Should resources in the ground
| ever be private property? Water rights? Should anyone be
| able to own a home?
|
| Libertarians (and many other people) may feel that the
| answers to such questions are either (a) obvious and/or
| (b) dictated by the rest of their political philosophy,
| but the moment you open the door to the possibility that
| there are some things that remain "in the commons" and
| other things that do not, you are forced to face the
| social construction of private property as a concept, and
| with it the question of what it should really be.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>Ah, but that's the crux, isn't it? Because even the
| implication of this sentence is that that nature of
| "private property" and "the commons" is socially
| constructed - what can be private, what cannot be.
|
| It's socially interpreted, but I believe there is a
| natural justice, that promotes functional societies, that
| reasonable people can recognize, that will end up as the
| social interpretation via any process that is impartial
| and deliberative, like courts.
|
| Natural resources are not man-made, and thus are not true
| private property. But we recognize a right to appropriate
| a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own
| use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated
| matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's
| reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through
| digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a
| hand axe. We recognize the natural justice of allowing
| the person to have perpetual exclusive rights to this
| value-added portion of the matter of the universe, in
| order so that they may benefit from the value they
| created.
| imtringued wrote:
| >We recognize the natural justice of allowing the person
| to have perpetual exclusive rights
|
| I completely disagree. Land ownership should never be
| perpetual. It should be time limited. Old people own all
| the land, while young people must buy it from them. That
| is naturally unjust and forces people to use violence to
| obtain land. The only sliver natural justice remaining
| here is the justice of killing "oppressors". If people do
| not step down from their positions of power voluntarily,
| then people will force them to step down.
|
| I obviously do not want this to happen so I will argue
| against anyone who wants earth to be littered with wars
| over land.
|
| Wars do not break out because people are evil, wars break
| out because our laws and rules during peace time aren't
| good enough for everyone. If land is properly allocated
| to everyone, then borders become irrelevant goals for
| war. The difference between whether you trade to get
| indirect access to land or whether you own it should be
| so slim, that no one ever considers obtaining land
| forcibly be ever worth it because the peaceful methods
| work just fine.
| robocat wrote:
| > Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be
| time limited.
|
| Ownership of anything by a person is already time limited
| - limited to a human lifetime.
|
| > If land is properly allocated to everyone
|
| Let's imagine every person in the world should have an
| equal holding of arable land (ignores lots of other
| factors, but whatever!). Assuming 8 billion people and
| 1.6 billion hectares of arable land, works out to 5
| people per hectare.
|
| To be fair, USA needs to a double its population ([?] 2.3
| times to 760 million). New Zealand needs to approximately
| halve it's population.
|
| For other countries, find your arable land figure (it is
| in Hectares, left most column of main table is 2016
| figure) from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/arable-la... and multiple by 5 to get the fair
| population and compare that with the actual population.
| [deleted]
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>I completely disagree. Land ownership should never be
| perpetual. It should be time limited. Old people own all
| the land, while young people must buy it from them. That
| is naturally unjust and forces people to use violence to
| obtain land. The only sliver natural justice remaining
| here is the justice of killing "oppressors". If people do
| not step down from their positions of power voluntarily,
| then people will force them to step down.
|
| Land ownership does not fit the definition I provided,
| which in greater context, is:
|
| "a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant
| natural resources for our own use, when one does this to
| reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more
| valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into
| our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log
| and stone into a hand axe."
|
| Land is not scarce, and appropriating it is not a case of
| appropriating only that portion of the matter of the
| universe which one reconfigures into a value-added form.
|
| So I agree, there can be no natural right to private
| ownership of land. A land tax, therefore, can be
| justified, as can other forms of state-intervention over
| how one may manage it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This sort of approach breaks down as soon as any non-
| renewable resource, notably land, is involved. You would
| likely consider a house you have just built on a piece of
| land as value-added with respect to the land; other
| people may regard your work as having negative value with
| respect to the land itself, which is a natural resource,
| and thus not true private property. And even regardless
| of the value judgement, because the land is a limited
| resource, your control over it is necessarily exclusive
| to others.
|
| The same is true of your use of metal to forge an axe.
| While that may appear to be value-added to you, others
| may not share your assessment. However, the metal you
| used has now been removed from its natural condition
| (presumably in-ground ore) and is no longer available for
| anyone else to bring their own value-added use to, and
| thus your action has the potential to be a net negative
| to the rest of the population. It's not clear what
| rationale they might have for respecting your claim to
| have added value.
|
| There's no clear reason for land ownership given the
| notion that you should only own value added, but
| libertarian conceptions of society would be fairly lost
| without such ownership. Nevertheless, for most of human
| history, the concept that anyone could own land in
| perpetuity would have been quite strange. Likewise, the
| concept that one could has also been the source of many
| of the most bitter conflicts in human history. This
| doesn't make the idea of owning land particularly
| compelling, when looked at over the long arc of human
| history.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>This sort of approach breaks down as soon as any non-
| renewable resource, notably land, is involved. You would
| likely consider a house you have just built on a piece of
| land as value-added with respect to the land; other
| people may regard your work as having negative value with
| respect to the land itself, which is a natural resource,
| and thus not true private property. And even regardless
| of the value judgement, because the land is a limited
| resource, your control over it is necessarily exclusive
| to others.
|
| It doesn't break down. I consider land to be under the
| proper purview of the state, under exactly this
| principle.
|
| >>The same is true of your use of metal to forge an axe.
| While that may appear to be value-added to you, others
| may not share your assessment. However, the metal you
| used has now been removed from its natural condition
| (presumably in-ground ore) and is no longer available for
| anyone else to bring their own value-added use to, and
| thus your action has the potential to be a net negative
| to the rest of the population. It's not clear what
| rationale they might have for respecting your claim to
| have added value.
|
| Not really. The metal you used is so little that it can't
| have an appreciable negative impact on others. And the
| state can in fact charge you for taking that metal out of
| circulation, and redistribute the proceeds to compensate
| the rest of society for your extraction of it. But it is
| not reasonable for the state to simply never allow you to
| appropriate metal, under any conditions, or demand a
| right to anything you fashion from that metal, after it
| has already charged you a fee for your appropriation of
| it.
|
| Now of course, if you go searching for edge cases, you
| will find them. A coherent moral philosophy doesn't
| eliminate the complexity of the world, and the challenge
| of navigating it. But it does give us a baseline moral
| philosophy that we can all agree to, and then together
| try to govern in accordance to.
|
| >>There's no clear reason for land ownership given the
| notion that you should only own value added, but
| libertarian conceptions of society would be fairly lost
| without such ownership.
|
| A land tax is perfectly consistent with both land
| ownership being an artificial right, bestowed by the
| state, and libertarianism.
|
| It is also, intriguingly, the perfect tax, from an
| efficiency standpoint, according to economists:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Voluntary interactions between consenting parties can
| still be extremely coercive if there's a power imbalance.
| In the Roman Empire, people used to sell themselves into
| slavery to pay off debts.
| imtringued wrote:
| I have to mention that the silver/gold standard was
| introduced by many authoritarian rulers because they
| control the gold/silver mines. This includes the Roman
| empire. As the supply of precious is limited it
| concentrates at the top and this was very desirable for
| monarchies.
|
| The only way to get gold is to dig it out (mines owned by
| monarchs), borrow it with interest (which leads to the
| usual debt trap) or to sell your products and services to
| those who already have gold (which is heavily
| concentrated geographically and in the hands of the
| rich).
|
| If it is mandated that you must use a certain currency,
| then this automatically leads to a power imbalance
| between those who have money and those who don't. If you
| need to buy food or pay for shelter then you can't wait,
| but the rich have all their basic needs met, they can
| afford to wait until you are desperate to accept any
| offer. This is why Austrian economists are kind of right
| when it comes to competition among currencies. A terrible
| currency can ruin an economy. However, they still insist
| on the gold standard because they love playing the
| monarchy game, they even admit it themselves.
|
| Even in modern times the rich benefit from economic
| crashes because it means desperation and fire sales, in
| other words, discounts for those who already have more
| than they need for themselves.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Very true, and this is why right-libertarian ideas for
| increasing liberty are doomed to fail: all they ever do
| is change who's in charge, they never really question the
| system of putting people in power over each other.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| No, it can't be coercive, by definition. If a jury of
| your peers deems that you did not provide informed
| consent, then the contract is void. A contract cannot be
| deemed both coercive and valid under common-
| law/libertarian principles.
|
| Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by
| threatening violence (against the person or property of
| you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to
| reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot
| meet the definition of coercive.
|
| As for selling yourself into slavery, that calls into
| question whether the you that exists today has a right to
| the you that exists in the future to the extent that the
| current you possesses a right to sell that you's liberty
| away, and I am fairly a certain a court would rule you
| don't.
|
| But these extreme/fantastical scenarios are not what
| libertarians are arguing about. There are far more
| mundane examples of people's liberty being repressed by
| anti-libertarian laws, that anti-libertarian apologists
| cannot excuse, so they resort to these hyperbolic
| examples.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The example I gave happened with informed consent.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_slavery
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Please see my edit where I address selling oneself into
| slavery.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Your answer avoids the ethical dilemma by means of a
| technicality about temporal ownership; it's not a very
| good rebuttal. Also its just one example of how voluntary
| transactions can be coercive, here's a few more just off
| the top of my head:
|
| - demanding sex in order to give an actress a part in a
| movie
|
| - offering food to a starving man in exchange for his
| kidneys
|
| - buying all the food in the market to drive up the price
| from people desperate to not die
|
| - basically the entire American healthcare system
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| It's a point about the ethics of exerting control over
| different versions of ourselves. It's not some procedural
| technicality.
|
| >demanding sex in order to give an actress a part in a
| movie
|
| There is nothing coercive about this.
|
| >offering food to a starving man in exchange for his
| kidneys
|
| Unless it's an emergency, where the starving man does not
| have the time to make/entertain offers on the wider
| global market, there is nothing coercive about this
| either.
|
| In an emergency situation, different rules apply, as a
| consequence of the physical space we each take, which
| displaces others. This exclusionary effect creates a duty
| to render help in an emergency, as opposed to abusing
| one's position in such a situation to exploit others.
|
| >buying all the food in the market to drive up the price
| from people desperate to not die
|
| There is nothing coercive about this, and in practice,
| it's impossible. This should certainly be guarded against
| by individuals, through means like securing long-term
| food purchase contracts through co-ops, or by growing
| one's own garden, but that doesn't imply that it's a form
| of coercion which we have an ethical right to employ
| coercion to remedy.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I don't understand what your definition of coercion is,
| if withholding care upon receipt of payment is not
| coercive but demanding payment to avoid harm is. They're
| materially the same thing: you're paying to not die.
|
| You can't really argue with deontological positions given
| they're axiomatic, so there's probably no reasoning I can
| give that you would consider.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>if withholding care upon receipt of payment is not
| coercive but demanding payment to avoid harm is. They're
| materially the same thing: you're paying to not die.
|
| Could you elaborate? What exactly do you mean?
|
| By "withholding care upon receipt of payment is not
| coercive", do you mean a person that commits to providing
| aid in exchange for payment, and then reneges on their
| obligation upon receiving payment? This is clearly
| theft/fraud, and in the same class of behaviors as
| coercion.
|
| I'm totally confused as I don't know when we discussed
| such a scenario and why you think that I don't consider
| that coercive.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I mean that the two cases below are materially the same:
|
| - you get shot and I withhold my care based on a ruinous
| payment
|
| - I threaten to shoot you unless you give me a ruinous
| payment
|
| Obviously as you said these are morally different because
| I am acting aggressively - but this is not a utilitarian
| argument. In terms of utility (and i am a preference
| utilitarian, so that's what matters to me - rationalists
| typically claim the same framework) these two scenarios
| are identical, and thus have the same moral weight.
|
| The latter, you have claimed as coercive, the former (eg
| withholding food from a starving man), you said was not.
| Therefore, your definition of coercion is not rooted in
| utility.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Like I said, in emergency situations different rules
| apply, based on the principle of the exclusionary effect
| I mentioned earlier.
|
| The normal libertarian ethics don't apply in such cases.
| In the ordinary non-emergency market,
| Newtonian/libertarian ethics do apply, and those are the
| circumstances you are avoiding contending with by
| focusing on extreme outlier/edge cases.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think these outliers demonstrate an inherent flaw in
| capitalism (among others) where power imbalances dictate
| capital accumulation. The rich get richer and the poor
| get poorer because the rich are in a better negotiating
| position so the poor must take what they're given. The
| obvious example being that workers must sell their labour
| while capitalists can buy labour and retain profit,
| leading to capital growth. Marx documented the tendencies
| of capitalism pretty well to be honest.
|
| You don't seem to be engaging with the implications of
| what I'm saying, rather just engaging with the specific
| examples, so I'm not sure you're really willing to engage
| with the arguments.
| nickpp wrote:
| Ask the millions starving under communism then improving
| their lot under capitalism which system they prefer.
|
| Debating the various theoretical aspects of various *isms
| is fun and all but there is practically no immigration
| from capitalism to communism. The poor know which one is
| better for them and vote with their feet.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| You realise that even Lenin, piece of human filth that he
| was, didn't consider the USSR to be communism? That's
| just not what the word means. The USSR was (pick one):
|
| - A Marxist-Leninist state
|
| - State capitalism
|
| - Bolshevism
|
| I don't care much about the terminology, but I do care
| about people making out that most left-wingers want more
| USSR. I mean, I'm an anarchist, so if I were alive in the
| USSR I'd be murdered, so that should tell you the level
| of friendliness between those people and libertarian
| socialists.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Any society where Marxist doctrines came to predominate
| ended up suffering for it. We can quibble over what you
| call the USSR, but Marxism is simply a-economical, and
| causes unimaginable human suffering to the extent that
| laws are shaped by it.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| You can literally just switch out corporations with
| cooperatives to make a market socialist economy. Marxist
| "doctrines" also led to 5 day 8 hour working weeks, paid
| leave, unions led to increased wages, and many other
| workers rights. Hell, before the left wing gained power,
| child labour was predominant in capitalist economies.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| If cooperatives were as efficient as corporations, they
| would win out in the free market, with consumers choosing
| their products over those produced by corporations.
| Repressing the free market necessarily means preventing
| the most efficient means of production/coordination from
| becoming predominant, based on crude ideologically
| motivated narratives about how an economy is supposed to
| work.
|
| >>Marxist "doctrines" also led to 5 day 8 hour working
| weeks, paid leave, unions led to increased wages, and
| many other workers rights. Hell, before the left wing
| gained power, child labour was predominant in capitalist
| economies.
|
| No it didn't. All of those things emerged as a result of
| the rising levels of per capita GDP that were due to
| profit-motivated investment in a free market.
|
| Child labor could only be abandoned when productivity
| increases enabled parents to support their whole family
| alone, and that productivity increase was, again, a
| consequence of profit-motivated investment in a free
| market.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>I think these outliers demonstrate an inherent flaw in
| capitalism (among others) where power imbalances dictate
| capital accumulation.
|
| These outlier situations have properties not present in
| normal circumstances, regardless of the power imbalance
| in those normal circumstances. Normal circumstances mean
| that Apple, despite being worth $2.8 trillion, can only
| induce me to purchase its product, if it is the best
| option for me amongst the entire set of options globally
| available to me. The harmful/coercive effect of the power
| imbalance vanishes in a free market, because by the
| ruleset of the free market, Apple cannot use its power to
| do anything except provide a better quality product for a
| lower price.
|
| >> The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because
| the rich are in a better negotiating position so the poor
| must take what they're given.
|
| The poor don't get poorer in a free market.. We've seen
| wages grow over 20 fold since 200 years ago, in 1822.
| This is after adjusting for inflation, meaning a greater
| than 20 times material improvement in people's living
| conditions. The places in the world with the highest
| wages are precisely those which adhered to the free
| market ruleset most closely, and for the longest duration
| of time.
|
| >>You don't seem to be engaging with the implications of
| what I'm saying
|
| What you're implying is simply misinformed.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yes, apple does not have the power to not literally force
| you to do anything, which is an improvement over
| feudalism. However, if you take apple alongside all their
| inputs, what you have is an extractive model where
| shareholders capture the value created by employees and
| suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often
| the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned
| cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc). Nowadays
| the truly horrific exploitation is done abroad. The west
| barely does any material labour like resource extraction
| or manufacturing, we just shuffle paper around and live
| off capital extraction and admimistration.
|
| > The poor don't get poorer in a free market..
|
| Real wages in the USA have stagnated since the 1960s [1]
| as neoliberal (aka libertarian) policies have been
| implemented. The US has some of the worst rates of
| education, medical expense, and income inequality in the
| world. Many cities are unaffordable to the service
| workers and labourers that those cities require. At the
| same time, the value of real work being done is extracted
| from countries in the global South by neocolonial
| policies. That's not the kind of ethical ideal we should
| be aiming at.
|
| 1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-
| most-us...
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>Yes, apple does not have the power to not literally
| force you to do anything, which is an improvement over
| feudalism. However, if you take apple alongside all their
| inputs, what you have is an extractive model where
| shareholders capture the value created by employees and
| suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often
| the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned
| cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc).
|
| The activity of Apple is massively beneficial to China,
| and the other suppliers downstream of it. You're simply
| accepting the Marxist principle that profit is
| exploitation, and harmful to society, which is not
| economically valid, and oblivious to the facts around the
| impact of foreign investment in countries like China.
|
| >>Real wages in the USA have stagnated since the 1960s
| [1] as neoliberal (aka libertarian) policies have been
| implemented.
|
| This is incredibly misinformed.
|
| First of all, that link looks at wages, not compensation.
| The non-wage component of compensation has grown more
| rapidly than the wage component of compensation. Looking
| solely at wages, instead of compensation as a whole, is
| seemingly a deliberate choice to give people a sense of
| being victimized.
|
| Second, the USA is NOT the world, and it has NOT
| implemented libertarian policies since 1960.
|
| Market rights have been increasingly encroached upon
| since 1960, as a result of politically instituted
| government interventions, that according to basic
| economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income
| inequality, or both.
|
| Two major examples:
|
| 1. The rapid rise of social democracy:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-
| long...
|
| Which is feeding the emergence of a highly paid cadre of
| government workers:
|
| https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-
| governme...
|
| To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory
| bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates
| for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid
| consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate
| it.
|
| 2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the
| major high-productivity population centers, which
| according to many analyses, has massively increased
| income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth.
| E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use
| restrictions in just three cities: New York, San
| Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3
| percent:
|
| https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
|
| This finding was echoed by the White House's Council of
| Economic Advisers in 2016:
|
| https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov
| /fi...
|
| The world at large, which _has_ moved more toward
| libertarianism since 1990, has seen the most rapid rise
| in wage growth in human history over the last 30 years:
|
| https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-
| the-gl...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I actually don't care about profit, I care about how it's
| distributed - it should be given to the people who
| generated it. That's not how capitalism works.
|
| You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to
| increases in regulation?
|
| I don't support regulations uncritically, I think rent
| control plus NIMBYism is a disaster. You'd ideally want
| to build more accommodation, preferably apartment blocks
| over single family.
|
| I'll admit I'm not a policy wonk so I don't know how non
| wage compensation plays into it. I do know that the
| American healthcare system is fucked and should be
| transitioned to a single payer system.
|
| Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour
| rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely
| a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further
| analysis.
|
| I've given so many examples of people being victimised in
| this thread, you just keep restating your opinions and
| moving on when I show my point so it's pretty clear
| you're unmovable in your ideology so there's no point
| continuing with this. I didn't engage with this thread to
| debate with libertarians when my established premise was
| that libertarians never move from their positions.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by
| threatening violence (against the person or property of
| you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to
| reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot
| meet the definition of coercive.
|
| In an economy that defines itself by a high degree of the
| division of labor, where people no longer gather their
| own food and are dependent on the cooperation of other
| people, being excluded from the division of labor is the
| same as ending their ability to participate in society.
| They must now scramble and get their own plot of land and
| work the fields themselves and become self sufficient.
| There are offers that people cannot refuse realistically.
|
| I would count this as coercion because people who own
| money can refuse to spend it indefinitely. As money is
| needed to conduct transactions, it becomes harder and
| harder to trade the more people keep money for the sake
| of having money instead of using money exclusively as a
| medium of exchange as many economists (even Marx)
| postulate, even though it has been proven wrong hundreds
| of times.
|
| A store of value cannot be used as a medium of exchange,
| those are two mutually incompatible and this conflict
| makes the money -> goods transaction inherently coercive,
| which ironically also backfires, because the only way you
| can beat coercion is through psychological manipulation.
| How do you convince someone to get something they don't
| need? By creating an artificial need.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>In an economy that defines itself by a high degree of
| the division of labor, where people no longer gather
| their own food and are dependent on the cooperation of
| other people, being excluded from the division of labor
| is the same as ending their ability to participate in
| society.
|
| No one has the power to exclude you from the market and
| the benefits of division of labor.. You would only be
| excluded if what you provide is of such little apparent
| value, that no one wants to trade what they have for what
| you provide. That is not coercion. People have a right to
| not associate with you, even if that choice means you
| starve to death. You do not own other people.
|
| >>I would count this as coercion because people who own
| money can refuse to spend it indefinitely.
|
| People can barter. People can create their own money.
| When the state, under anti-libertarian principles,
| intervenes, and prohibits voluntary exchanges involving
| certain kinds of money then yes, these problems can
| theoretically emerge. This is why libertarian philosophy
| is so adament about not using the state's apparatus of
| violence (the courts, police and prisons which compel
| compliance with state orders) to restrict people from
| engaging in voluntary interactions with other consenting
| adults.
| mbg721 wrote:
| I've heard this sort of thing proposed as a way of paying
| for college.
| emteycz wrote:
| That doesn't make it a libertarian position.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Agreed.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I've never heard this view about libertarians and the
| commons. I like it. Do you have a source where I can read
| more?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| This seems to do a good job of describing the principle:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_libertarianism
| simonh wrote:
| Capitalism doesn't set any goals, people do that. It just
| recognises and guarantees individual ownership rights and
| economic freedoms, but what people do with that is up to
| them. It's just that achieving any material goal takes
| capital, whatever your economic system. Elon Musk is as
| capitalist as you can get, but his goal isn't to accumulate
| as much capital as possible, it's to build a civilisation.
| Bill Gates is a capitalist and is busily giving away as much
| capital as efficiently as he can.
|
| This is of course all about goal setting. I think those
| fearful of maximisers are being rational, but if we're going
| to build AIs then we need to make them part of our community.
| The things that stop us as individuals going off the rails
| and taking everyone else around us down with us is respect
| for community, for others rights and interests. The need to
| seek consensus and consent. Figuring out how to implement
| that is the real challenge.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Capitalism is a system that rewards capital accumulation,
| the richer you are, the more power and freedom you have.
| Therefore, it incentivises capitalistic behaviour. People
| can break with those incentives, but I'm not critiquing
| people's ability to have good goals - I'm critiquing
| capitalism.
|
| Capitalism does optimise for property rights, that's true -
| but if you're taking a utilitarian perspective (as all good
| rationalists should) then you have to ask what the material
| outcomes of that are. What we see is accumulation of
| massive power in the hands of a few, many of whom are doing
| active harm to the planet (just look at oil billionaires'
| behaviour). Supporting them is a worldwide underclass of
| people working in sweatshop conditions or actual human
| slavery. Maybe optimising for private property isn't
| providing very good outcomes.
| aetherson wrote:
| What we actually see is broad wealth generation that is
| relatively widely spread (albeit not perfectly uniformly
| spread) lifting billions out of the crushing malthusian
| poverty that has been the fate of 99% of humanity, and
| the creation of social orders in which the rich, while
| they are rich, have strict limits on their abilities to
| control the lives of the majority.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| That broad wealth generation isn't caused by capitalism,
| it's caused by technological innovation. Capitalism is
| just the means by which the rewards are distributed. If
| we start a company together that increases grain yields,
| it could either be capitalistic and whoever "owns" the
| company just pays everyone else wages while keeping all
| the profit, or it can be cooperative where the rewards
| are decided democratically and everyone who works there
| "owns" the company. The latter example is not capitalism,
| even with the presence of markets!
| indymike wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that the way it worked is the vast
| majority of wealth accumulated with the King and 7-10
| people close to the King. Everyone else... was not
| important to the King. Capitalism is simply an economic
| system where regular people can own the means of
| production. It is not about distributing rewards. That is
| the language of a feudal economy.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| A system can distribute rewards just as a person can. If
| acting in the capitalist economy incentivises specific
| behaviours, that economy is distributing rewards based on
| those incentives.
| indymike wrote:
| Systems are operated by people, which is why many great
| ideas on paper devolve into dictatorships, oppression and
| death in real life. See Ukraine for an example.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Putin's dictatorship is operated by a person, but
| capitalism is not - it's made of people. Nobody runs the
| markets, they run by themselves based on people's
| participation, governed by rules. Invisible hand and all
| that.
| indymike wrote:
| You are correct about Putin.
| aetherson wrote:
| But as a matter of fact, that's not what happens. What
| actually happens in the actual real world is:
|
| 1. The owner of the company doesn't keep all the profit
| -- they share out the vast majority of it. (Look at the
| retained profits vs gross margins of any company you can
| think of. Look at the wages that you, yes I bet you
| yourself, are paid).
|
| 2. When we don't do it this way, we don't actually get
| the innovation. The thing that incents people to solve
| the problems of bringing new products to the public (the
| very large problems, the problems they can spend the
| majority of their lives attacking) is the possibility of
| reward.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| 1 depends on the industry, some industries are low-margin
| while others are high-margin. Either way, why don't the
| people who generated the profit, the workers, get to
| decide how the profit is divided?
|
| 2 isn't true. Not only is most innovation funded by taxes
| and conducted by public institutions, but it's the market
| that drives iterative and combinational improvement on
| new inventions and you can have markets without
| capitalism. Capitalism is the division of people into
| capitalists who own the means of production
| (traditionally factories but nowadays increasingly IP),
| and workers who work them for a wage. The first step in
| moving in the right direction, IMO (I'm keen on
| incrementally and cautiously implementing improvements)
| would be to ratchet up the number of cooperatives
| operating within the economy. They're more likely to
| survive than corporations and they're more empowering for
| workers.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| There is no rule in capitalism that says you have to optimize
| for capital accumulation over any other goal. There is not
| even an evaluation function, people can choose their own
| values.
| imtringued wrote:
| If there is one thing that Marx was right about it is that
| once the accumulation of capital ends, capitalism itself
| breaks down.
|
| Just listen to all the people kicking and screaming that
| interest rates should be increased or that 0% interest
| rates are wrong and negative interest rates (which
| represent decentralization of capital) shouldn't even
| exist. There are consumer protection offices advocating
| that accounts shouldn't be charged negative interest rates
| even though it only applies to accounts with more than
| 100kEUR in checking accounts. Imagine the horror of getting
| a certificate of deposit for one whole month. Instead, some
| banks have decided to just charge monthly fees which is
| incredibly regressive because you would need 25kEUR in your
| account to exceed the monthly fee at -0.5%. Meanwhile if
| you have millions on your account you pay the same fee, ah
| yes, subsidize the rich.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| I don't think capitalism was at risk of breaking down
| from the banking fees.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Capitalism rewards and thus incentivises such behaviour
| though. Rich people have more freedom and power than poor
| people.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| That would be true in any system, for example strong
| people have more power than weak people, intelligent
| people would have more "freedom of thought" than stupid
| people, ruling politicians would have more power, and so
| on. In capitalism however, you only have power if you
| give people something they want. In socialism for
| example, being "rich" would just mean being a part of the
| ruling elite, but you would still have people who are
| "rich" and have more power than others.
|
| And nothing in capitalism says you have to value buying a
| yacht higher than anything else. There is also no rule
| that says capitalism should have no laws whatsoever.
|
| Power is also a good thing, for example being able to
| cure cancer or feed people is a power.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Natural power imbalances are fine, I don't advocate for
| the world of Harrison Bergeron. Ruling politicians and
| wealthy people are not natural power imbalances.
|
| Power is something you have over another person, ie the
| ability to violate their preferences. That's an inherent
| negative. Presumably the power to cure cancer is
| something the patient would consent to, and thus not the
| kind of power I'm talking about.
|
| Capitalism has led to the kind of voluntary transactions
| where child slaves are paid just enough to not starve so
| that mining companies can extract cobalt to sell to
| electronics manufacturers. While the idea of voluntary
| transactions sounds nice in the small, it plays out
| pretty badly writ large.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Most of what you say is just leftist framing, like power
| being a bad thing, and mining companies paying minimum
| pay to make people dependent. That is completely
| backwards. You pay people because you need something they
| can give you (their work force, or something they own or
| make or whatever). If wages are low it is because of
| supply and demand. If you demand people should be paid
| more, their jobs might go away completely and they would
| be poorer than before.
|
| As for wealthy people being not natural, as I said,
| usually you become wealthy by giving people something
| they want or need. That is the best thing to reward in a
| society.
|
| What do you mean by "natural power imbalances", like
| somebody having more muscles than others? Then why can't
| you imagine that some are better businessmen than others,
| too? Was Steve Jobs just an evil guy becoming rich by
| exploiting his employees, or did he become rich because
| he made the world a better place for billions of people?
| Would the world have been better if Steve Jobs had been
| shot down at an early stage to give somebody else a "fair
| chance" in his place?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Ugh, I'm getting real tired of this thread, having to
| explain left wing arguments that are freely available to
| read. Just, if you want to understand what I'm saying, at
| least give Das Kapital a read. It lays out some of the
| basic arguments.
| imtringued wrote:
| I am trying to be neutral here.
|
| There are some people who think that humanity should reach
| its maximum potential as quickly as possible and that we must
| make sacrifices along the way, even if it means dooming other
| life forms (including humans) into misery. That misery then
| acts as a deterrent, nobody wants to be poor because it means
| homelessness or starvation, so everyone tries their best and
| works as hard as they can.
|
| There are some people who think that humanity is doing pretty
| well, they are not against further improvement but they
| prefer preservation of humanity, even if it means not living
| up to its theoretical potential because sustainability is
| inefficient over the short term. The goal should be to make
| sure that everyone benefits from societies' progress to the
| extent that they want to benefit, which in theory should
| eradicate homelessness and starvation as nobody is willingly
| risking death.
|
| Let's call the first system capitalism and the second one
| socialism (not necessarily inspired by marx).
|
| There are two obvious problems. Humans are lazy creatures,
| economists that postulate that human wants and needs are
| infinite are kind of wrong. There are lots of humans who
| basically do nothing but watch TV. The stereotypical "welfare
| parasite" shouldn't even be able to exist as he is obviously
| going against his own interests of being unable to satisfy
| his unlimited needs. So the argument that capitalists make,
| is that lazy humans have to be whipped into shape and
| motivated. However, if the capitalists go too far and
| overexert their workforce or destroy the environment,
| capitalism will become less effective over the long term. An
| optimal system would be hard working when there is lots of
| work to do and lazy when there isn't much to do. It can't be
| stuck in either state or maybe it needs to do both
| simultaneously.
|
| In my opinion, the next step that we should take is to remove
| the dependence on economic growth to keep the economy stable.
| If growth happens, that's great, but we shouldn't force it.
| We need to make small steps toward the right direction.
| Nobody on this planet needs a big step, e.g. a Marxist
| revolution, etc.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I know that some people might subscribe to the latter
| ideal, but that's not my belief system. I believe that we
| should continue to innovate and improve our lives, but that
| the people who do the innovating should see the reward of
| their efforts, not just their bosses. That's why I'm a
| (libertarian) socialist. Socialism isn't about making sure
| everybody has equal resources, it's defined by the phrase
| "from each according to his ability, to each according to
| his contribution", as opposed to communism's "... According
| to his need". Communism is meant to describe a post-
| scarcity economy,realistically. Socialism is about removing
| the class division between worker and capitalist that's
| really it. You can have welfare and whatnot and that's a
| good thing in terms of social utility, but it's not
| inherent to socialism. That's more social democracy, which
| is a reformist ideology where you just tack amendments onto
| capitalism, rather than a socialist ideology.
|
| I do agree with not wanting insurrection though - the time
| for that in the West has probably passed. The global South
| on the other hand, is still oppressed enough to warrant
| taking up arms.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Capitalism isn't very good at it compared to an AI. As a
| result, good things can happen in it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| When you're trying to sell everyone - including yourself - on
| your superior rationality, it might be considered a feature
| and not a bug.
|
| What would be ironic would a solarpunk maximiser AI that
| forced humans to stop doing that shit because it's stupid and
| self-harming and there are better alternatives.
|
| And the only real cost would be loss of face and status for
| less than 1% of the population.
|
| Maybe that's not rational either. Hard to tell until it's
| been tried.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The other day my SO and I were pondering a story wherein
| aliens visit, and essentially say "oh hey you sure have a
| bad case of capitalism! We had one too, here's how to break
| it, we've helped about a hundred planets get though it
| now." Same idea. Wish I had the faintest idea what
| strategies they'd present to make that happen.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Well, the reason we can't really experiment with other
| options is because very wealthy people use the US to kill
| (often literally) alternative approaches. The 70s and 80s
| were full of US black ops to collapse socialist
| governments in South America.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And on other end you have 40k AI. That rightfully decide
| that overall best actions is to get rid off humans...
| Purely from utilitarian perspective against Chaos.
| XorNot wrote:
| I can't find it but there's a short story on the super-
| cognition trope, but oriented along the lines of human
| cognition. What struck me about it is that ultimately the
| point of view character is the bad guy for these sorts of
| reasons.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Do you mean to say that a sense of self is inherently a
| locus of suffering?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| A solarpunk maximiser, can you imagine? Optimising for
| whole-system utility based on sustainability and human
| actualisation. That'd be wonderful.
| RickHull wrote:
| Who exactly do you have in mind, that is a big proponent of
| capitalism yet is unaware of its nature? Most X-risk
| theorists I'm familiar with are relatively unconcerned with
| capitalism, as its notions of profit and wealth are
| inherently human-aligned.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Its notions of profit and wealth aren't human-aligned
| though. That's my concern - rationalist types have an
| idealistic view of capitalism because they're usually the
| benefactors of it (being typically wealthy and western).
| RickHull wrote:
| Capitalism's inherent human alignment:
|
| Every final (non-waste) output of a capitalist system is
| intended for human consumption. Compost, pet food, sheet
| metal, etc are all intended to satisfy human preferences.
| Price signals ensure that only things which humans value
| are economic to produce.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| OK, that's optimising for efficiency, not for human
| values. If capitalism optimised for human values, we'd
| all be paid to house the homeless, free slaves, improve
| conditions in the global South, heal the sick, feed the
| hungry and so on.
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| By revealed preference, those are not human values.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| That's not how values work - people go against their
| values all the time due to incentive structures. I want
| everybody in the world to be fed, but not at the cost of
| myself being tortured for a million years. Our goal as a
| species should be to align our incentives with our
| preferences so the behaviours that get rewarded are the
| ones that we want to see.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| adverbly wrote:
| Never considered this before, but it's an excellent point.
| hinkley wrote:
| When people misplace something, the ones who are comfortable
| with the idea of stealing are some of the first to accuse
| others of having stolen it.
|
| With AI we are both projecting and realizing that software
| reflects us, so some of our worst traits will show up in this
| "offspring". So while it may be overwrought, it's not
| unfounded.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Replacing rainforests with cows isn't only destroying life. It
| also makes cows. Humans are life.
| emteycz wrote:
| It replaces uncountable diversity of unique life with _a
| cow_. That 's a huge loss that can't be recovered for
| millions of years - as we're quickly erasing entire species.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Not if you're hungry.
| emteycz wrote:
| We have much better ways to make food than cows. If
| you're hungry you don't go raise cows. You go farming.
| Much less space needed for the same result, it's much
| quicker and with way less risk.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Yet, people are still raising them for food. The species
| under question doesn't matter. Farming is also destroying
| diversity so that people can eat.
|
| There is nothing wrong here. It is the way of nature. As
| you read this, bacteria, viruses, and fungi are trying to
| do the same thing to you. The earth is green because the
| plants are also trying to colonize everything.
| emteycz wrote:
| So what? It's scale that matters. Humans are absolutely
| incomparable to the natural effects you describe. We're
| _brutal_. One human is capable of transforming absolutely
| humungous areas of land in short amount of time. And
| there are billions of us.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| we'll all be hungry when we turn the entire planet into a
| desert
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's plenty of food to feed everyone on this planet.
| The problem is not the production of food, but the
| distribution.
|
| Destroying ecosystems and species rather than solving
| that problem seems a little .. well, short-sighted at
| best.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| You solve the food problem one way. Your neighbors solve
| it a different way. Vines, still another way.
|
| If your neighbor cuts down the forest to raise some cows,
| or a vine climbs up a tree and chokes it out to access
| more sunlight, where's the right or wrong there?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Because as I already noted, there are two distinct
| problems: food production, and food distribution.
|
| We already know how to produce enough food, new efforts
| to increase food production (other than coupled to some
| combination of local/global population change) are
| unnecessary (0). Therefore, destroying ecosystems and/or
| species to solve a a solved problem is at best less
| morally defensible.
|
| The actions you've described are about food production,
| and thus I regard them as less morally defensible than
| things one might do to solve the problem of food
| distribution.
|
| [0] I would note that we might still seek to change where
| food is produced, and what precise foods are produced,
| but I see that as a different question, mostly.
| Ekaros wrote:
| On other end should we also work towards increasing
| biodiversity in locations where it has already been
| decreased? Let's say destroy suburbs, promote growth there,
| move all people living to most optimal space usage. Let's
| say 2-4 people per 3 m^2 rooms. Shared bathrooms and so on?
| Would allow us to claim back lot of land and start
| reclaiming it for nature.
| matthewsinclair wrote:
| Reminds me of this (from ~2007):
|
| https://youtu.be/AT9ho2G0N_Y
| [deleted]
| XorNot wrote:
| I disconnected from this in the Wednesday-Friday section because
| the problem is: where did it get the hardware resources from?
| Even in the world it was running, the lag time between
| controlling the production orders and shipping new machines all
| could've been knocked out because it turns out that the
| production line still ends in packaging and handling by humans.
| Millions of years of subjective time stuck in it's cage because
| by the time the first new model is on shelves and plugged in,
| it's come up with a bunch of new ones.
| donkarma wrote:
| But can it drive a car?
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| It can produce outputs that cause the car to arrive at the
| specified location.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Is the "Don't kill any humans or destroy any property along
| the way" optimiser an optional add-on?
| grapescheesee wrote:
| Depends, how long do you need it to 'drive'?
| yownie wrote:
| I did not enjoy this frenetic buzzword laden tale, I had assumed
| the ending would be nano-bot infiltration of the worlds
| population for fine grained c2c and was even disappointed there.
|
| Would not recommend.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Thanks, I specifically looked to see if this sort of comment
| was here. Not finding one would mean that there's a fair chance
| that there's some well-founded with plausible details sci-fi
| writing.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I believe gwern deliberately did not go for nanobots because
| they're kind of unrealistic, or at least have a reputation
| for being implausible, on a purely physical level. As such,
| centering AI risk around nanobots would have taken away from
| the actual threat, rampant intelligence.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I'm wondering why you believe this? Especially when you
| yourself are a collection of nano machines with much harder
| design constraints than the artificial variety.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| That's precisely why. While there's a lot of room for
| design improvement in complex systems, it seems likely,
| or at least more arguable, that nature has largely
| cleared out the low-hanging fruit for single-celled
| organisms.
| hwers wrote:
| Gwern is an international treasure.
| swayvil wrote:
| I pity the editor
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| > not simply being stupid and indulging in bizarre decisions (eg.
| inventing one's own hash function & eschewing binary for ternary)
|
| For those not familiar with crypto trivia, this is a less than
| subtle dig at IOTA, which is mildly notorious for doing both and
| still has a market cap of over $2 billion as I type this.
|
| > "Do they still make you guys use doors for tables there? Hah
| wow really?"
|
| And this is a notorious example of Amazon "frugality".
| krallja wrote:
| > 50tb? MoogleBook researchers have forgotten how to count that
| low!
|
| This links to a Youtube video, an explainer is at
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/10/30/5tb/
| slyall wrote:
| Just this week I had a Google Eng I know say:
|
| "I have no idea if 32M queries/second is actually a big
| number. For a bunch of backend systems it wouldn't be"
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The pop SWE culture references were both copious and amusing.
|
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/link-bibliography/Clippy
|
| Props to Gwern for the sourcing. I felt embarrassingly
| indulgent reading it in a morning over coffee, given the amount
| of work that obviously went into it.
| sneak wrote:
| I think it was more a jab at how tired the widely-known folksy
| memes about Early Amazon are and how completely nonsensical
| they are when used in the context of the modern descendant
| which basically owns the whole of the Internet, physically
| speaking.
| moultano wrote:
| The premise of an AI mimicking AIs it reads about in fiction is
| seeming more and more plausible given the trajectory of
| generative pretraining. We should probably write more stories
| about friendly AIs.
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