This was written as part of the first Refine blog post day. A sneaking suspicion that I’ve found difficult to shake off while following AI risk discussion is that concerns regarding superintelligent AI, while clearly valid and important, have seemed to me to be very plausibly jumping the gun when...
Link to Blog Post: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice" _____ > Phil Robertson is being criticized for a thought experiment in which an atheist’s family is raped and murdered. On a talk show, he accused atheists of believing that there was no such thing as objective right or...
Elon Musk submitted a comment to edge.org a day or so ago, on this article. It was later removed. > The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how...
What kinds of reactions to and thoughts about the post did you have that you got a lot out of observing?
On the other hand, the potential resource imbalance could be ridiculously high, particularly if a rogue AI is caught early on it’s plot, with all the worlds militaries combined against them while they still have to rely on humans for electricity and physical computing servers. It’s somewhat hard to outthink a missile headed for your server farm at 800 km/h. ... I hope this little experiment at least explains why I don’t think the victory of brain over brawn is “obvious”. Intelligence counts for a lot, but it ain’t everything.
While this is a true and important thing to realise, I don't think of it as the kind of information that does much... (read more)
So you are effectively a revolutionary.
I'm not sure about this label, how government/societal structures will react to eventual development of life extension technology remains to be seen, so any revolutionary action may not be necessary. But regardless of which label you pick, it's true that I would prefer not to be killed merely so others can reproduce. I'm more indifferent as to the specifics as to how that should be achieved than you seem to imagine - there are a wide range of possible societies in which I am allowed to survive, not just variations on those you described.
I think that the next best thing you could do with the resources used to run me if you were to liquidate me would be very likely to be of less moral value than running me, at least to my lights, if not to others'.
The decision is between using those resources to support you vs using those resources to support someone else's child.
That's an example of something the resources could go towards, under some value systems, sure. Different value systems would suggest that different entities or purposes would make best moral use of those resources, of course.
To try and make things clear: yes, what I said is perfectly compatible with what you... (read more)
I don't think you have engaged with my core point so I"ll just state it again in a different way: continuous economic growth can support some mix of both reproduction and immortality, but at some point in the not distant future ease/speed of reproduction may outstrip economic growth, at which point there is a fundemental inescapable choice that societies must make between rentier immortality and full reproduction rights.
I think you may be confusing me for arguing for reproduction over immortality, or arguing against rentier existence - I am not. Instead I'm arguing simply that you haven't yet acknowledged the fundemental tradeoff and its consequences.
I thought I made myself very clear, but if... (read more)
Of course I have a moral opportunity cost. However, I personally believe that this opportunity cost is low, or at least it seems that way to me. I think that the next best thing you could do with the resources used to run me if you were to liquidate me would be very likely to be of less moral value than running me, at least to my lights, if not to others'.
The question of what to do about scarcity of resources seems like a potentially very scary one then for exactly the reasons that you bring up - I don't particularly think for example that a political zeitgeist that guarantees my death... (read more)
The "10 years at most" part of the prediction is still open, to be fair.
While this seems to me to be true, as a non-maximally competitive entity by various metrics myself I see it more as an issue to overcome or sidestep somehow, in order to enjoy the relative slack that I would prefer. It would seem distatefully molochian to me if someone were to suggest that I and people like me should be retired/killed in order to use the resources to power some more "efficient" entity, by whatever metrics this efficiency is calculated.
To me it seems likely that pursuing economic efficiencies of this kind could easily wipe out what I personally care about, at the very least. I see Hanson's Em worlds for example as... (read more)
You also appeal to just open-ended uncertainty
I think it would be more accurate to say that I'm simply acknowledging the sheer complexity of the world and the massive ramifications that such a large change would have. Hypothesizing about a few possible downstream effects of something like life extension on something as far away from it causally as AI risk is all well and good, but I think you would need to put a lot of time and effort into it in order to be very confident at all about things like directionality of net effects overall.
I would go as far as to say the implementation details of how we get life extension... (read more)
This was written as part of the first Refine blog post day.
A sneaking suspicion that I’ve found difficult to shake off while following AI risk discussion is that concerns regarding superintelligent AI, while clearly valid and important, have seemed to me to be very plausibly jumping the gun when not altogether unlikely nearer term AI risks are looming and have potential to wipe us out long before we reach that point, especially under the conditions where we do very little to attempt to mitigate them.
One reason I think I have for this intuition comes from extending an occasionally-repeated idea about human intelligence: that humans are nearly the dumbest possible creature capable of developing... (read 482 more words →)
Link to Blog Post: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"
_____
... (read 296 more words →)Phil Robertson is being criticized for a thought experiment in which an atheist’s family is raped and murdered. On a talk show, he accused atheists of believing that there was no such thing as objective right or wrong, then continued:
I’ll make a bet with you. Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him.Then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them, and they take his wife
Elon Musk submitted a comment to edge.org a day or so ago, on this article. It was later removed.
The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast-it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don't understand.
... (read 184 more words →)I am not alone in thinking we should be worried. The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. The recognize the danger, but
Of course, defeating people who are mistakenly doing the wrong thing could also work, no? Even if we take the assumption that people doing the wrong thing are merely making a mistake by their own lights to be doing so, it might be practically much more feasible to divert them away from doing it or otherwise prevent them from doing it, rather than to rely on successfully convincing them not to do it.
Not all people are going to be equally amenable to explanation. It's not obvious to me at least that we should limit ourselves... (read more)