Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people.
Too-low fertility concerns me deeply. My current preferred strategy had been something financial along the lines of this proposal, but on reflection, I think I need to update.
The main reasons that I see driving the people around me to defer/eschew children are, in rough decreasing order of prevalence:
The third point above is, in my social circle, usually downstream of needing to spend too much time working, not being able to afford childcare services, not being able to afford college, etc.
These issues could be lessened by financial interventions with the net effect of offsetting the burdens of child raising (obviously, implementation details matter a great deal.)
...I had previously assumed that "expectation of incompetence" was the primary issue because it's my primary issue (in the sense of looming large in my mind). ...but having taken an inventory of the childless adults in my social network, I now see that "inability to find a suitable partner" and "infertility" are much bigger issues.
"Inability to find a suitable partner" seems risky to fix, because it looks easy to create horrible side-effects. Many in my social network are in relationships but aren't having children because they're abusive relationships. Others have successfully escaped abusive relationships and subsequently given up on finding a partner; being alone is less painful, and they expect to find another abuser with nontrivial probability if they go looking for another partner. Still others lost a suitable partner to a treatable disease, due primarily to insurance companies ending up de facto in charge of healthcare decisions, and rendering decisions without the patient's health as the priority.
I don't see a good solution. (Well, except for "don't allow insurers to drive healthcare decisions".) All attempts to "solve" this issue I see being promoted in real life seem on-net harmful. My home state of Texas thinks the best solution is to ban divorce, and we expect that to be implemented within the next year. I don't see that as being a net good, even if it may compel additional births in the short term on net. Trapping people in abusive relationships seems incredibly dystopian. I also foresee this making young women even more afraid of getting into the wrong relationship than they already are, which runs the risk of making the "finding suitable partners" problem worse in the long run.
"Lack of fertility" seems challenging to fix, but far less fraught. I was born without a uterus, and wish to bear a child if the medical technology were developed to allow me to grow a uterus. I have a sibling on life-saving medication, a side-effect of which is extremely low sperm count -- a better drug to treat the condition (or an actual cure) could resolve this issue. Multiple of my sisters-in-law have simply failed to conceive for years, due to unknown-to-me causes, and I suspect the issues are similarly fixable via continued medical innovation.
Question: is it actually possible to cryptographically obfuscate goals/plans/precomittments (or other elements of "deception" as mentioned in your second bullet point) against something inspecting your algorithm and working memory?
In particular, it seems to me that anything properly able to inspect you can, at a minimum, discover the use of encryption, and find where the encryption key is read from, and then read the encrypted content. Or fail the model once encryption is detected at all.
I'm not saying it will be easy to build such transparency tools -- in fact, that must be a herculean challenge, since selecting against interpreted thoughts selects for uninterpretable thoughts, and a superintelligence might use principles not yet known to humanity -- I just mean that, from the perspective of the AI itself, I think perfect obfuscation against ideal logically-possible interpretability tools might be impossible.
Edit:
Nevermind, I answered my own question. There is no such logically-possible interpretability tool. For any such tool we logically-counterfactually assume could exist, then the AI could implement that tool, and utilize encryption if and only if that tool asserts that the AI doesn't use encryption. ...therefore no algorithm exists which can verify the use of encryption in the general case.
This argument has roughly the same shape as my reasoning regarding why prediction markets are likely to have much worse predictive power than one would naively guess, conditional on anyone using the outputs of a prediction market for decisions of significance: individual bettors are likely to care about the significant outcomes of the prediction. This outcome-driven prediction drive need not outweigh the profit/accuracy-driven component of the prediction market -- though it might -- in order to alter the prediction rendered enough to alter the relevant significant decision.
Perhaps the prediction market concept can be rescued from this failure mode via some analogue of the concept of financial leverage? That is, for predictions which will be used for significant decision purposes, some alteration may be applied to the financial incentive schedule, such that the expected value of predictive accuracy would remain larger than the value to predictors realizable by distorting the decision process. Alas, I find myself at a loss to specify an alternate incentive schedule with the desired properties for questions of high significance.
If there's any reason to suspect grant-givers to be uninformed on the topic, or biased against it, crowd-sourcing a sum of that size sounds possible.
Agreed.
...which would imply that dangers should be minimal from either slow augmentation which has time to become ubiquitous in the gene pool, or from limited augmentation that does not exceed a few standard deviations from the current mean. Assuming, of course, that our efforts don't cause unwanted values shift.
I think all currently progressing human enhancement projects of which I am aware are not expecting gains so large as to be dangerous, and therefore worthy of support.
I'd imagine that could be arranged. I live with an unusually fast rate of forgetting. With effort, I suspect my condition could be reverse-engineered and replicated.
After a couple years, I can re-experience something not knowing where the whole plot goes, but always knowing where the current scene will go. In games, I experience that with the plot, but still have my muscle memory. Great time for re-plays on hard mode; by this time I have almost all the skills, and almost none of the plot spoilers.
After about 5 years, I'll remember roughly how something made me feel overall, but little else. This is often about the time when I seek out a re-exposure for the things I remember as being unusually high quality.
It's unclear how long it takes exactly -- matters are often unclear for me where they rely on my memory as a key input -- but after some amount of time, my level of recall fades to "vaguely familiar" and then I completely forget that I've seen a thing at all. I'd estimate on the order of a decade or so.
I have the exact superpower people so often jokingly wish for around great media. As you can imagine from the nature of memory loss, I completely fail to appreciate my situation.
Wow, thanks for sharing! I had been taking my ability to imagine sounds completely for granted and now I find myself appreciating this ability.
It's semi-fictional evidence, but there's a rule in the Neverworld tabletop roleplaying game core rules that says something to the effect of success restores willpower points. This implies that at least someone else long ago had the same observation.
I do have that problem with swimming. I share the tendency that Eliezer points out, but I think we are both atypical in this shared way, rather than that Eliezer is on to a new explanation for a ubiquitous mental phenomenon.
I can see some sense in this take; I've personally succumbed to predatory gambling services in years past, and can attest from personal experience that successfully quitting one addiction leaves me exceedingly vulnerable to pick up a different one. I rotated through six different highly-damaging vices, before settling into a relatively less-harmful vice, and I was grateful to find myself there.
And that's my point: you are in expectation doing someone who is inclined to addiction a favor by forcing them off of a particularly bad addiction.
You would be doing them a slightly bigger favor if you provide a much less-harmful replacement addiction at the same time. For me, the holy grail was to find a net-positive activity to slot into the addiction-shaped hole in my brain, and after a lifetime of struggle, I finally got "reading pop nonfiction books" to replace "scrolling social media", the first real Good in a long line of Lesser Evils.