quila's Shortform — LessWrong

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I was looking at this image in a post and it gave me some (loosely connected/ADD-type) thoughts.

In order:

The entities outside the box look pretty scary.
I think I would get over that quickly, they're just different evolved body shapes. The humans could seem scary-looking from their pov too.
Wait.. but why would the robots have those big spiky teeth? (implicit question: what narratively coherent world could this depict?)
Do these forms have qualities associated with predator species, and that's why they feel scary? (Is this a predator-species-world?)
Most humans are also predators in a non-strict sense.
I don't want to live in a world where there's only the final survivors of selection processes who shrug indifferently when asked why we don't revive all the beings who were killed in the process which created the final survivors. (implicit: related to how a 'predator-species-world' from (4) could exist)
There's been many occasions where I've noticed what feels like a more general version of that attitude in a type of current human, but I don't know how to describe it.

(I mostly ignored the humans-are-in-a-box part.)

4Matthew Barnett2y

I'm curious why you seem to think we don't need to worry about things like conflict or selection processes post-singularity.

3[anonymous]2y

Because a benevolent ASI would make everything okay. (In case worrying about those is something you'd find fun, then you could choose to experience contexts where you still would, like complex game/fantasy worlds.)

To be more precise: extrapolated over time, for any undesired selection process or other problem of that kind, either the problem is large enough that it gets exarcerbated over time so much that it eats everything — and then that's just extinction, but slower — or it's not large enough to win out and aligned superintelligence(s) + coordinated human action is enough to stamp it out in the long run, which means they won't be an issue for almost all of the future.

It seems like for a problem to be just large enough that coordination doesn't stamp it away, but ... (read more)