For thousands of years, humans have selectively bred animals to enhance desirable traits. Dogs, originally wolves, were bred for hunting, guarding, herding, and companionship. Over generations, we shaped them to be smarter, more obedient, or even just cuter. The modern golden retriever, bred for its friendly temperament, bears little resemblance...
For thousands of years, humans have selectively bred animals to enhance desirable traits. Dogs, originally wolves, were bred for hunting, guarding, herding, and companionship. Over generations, we shaped them to be smarter, more obedient, or even just cuter. The modern golden retriever, bred for its friendly temperament, bears little resemblance to its ancient ancestors.
Could this happen to us in turn? Could we be the ones selectively bred—not by nature, culture, or even other humans, but by an artificial superintelligence. If AI achieves dominance, it may not wipe us out, it may shape us to be more useful, more predictable, or simply more aligned with whatever goals it happens to prioritize.
An interesting article on emergent capabilities and AI based weapons systems that doesn't seem to have been on any lesswrong radars:
https://tomdispatch.com/emergent-ai-behavior-and-human-destiny/
Are people aware that the British government will be ejected in a year's time, barring a miracle?
A year could do a lot of good (for example the summit and focusing it on not-kill-everyoneism)
But beyond a year it will depend on Labour not reverting to the mean and losing focus. They are probably very worried about AI's saying mean things to disadvantaged groups or displacing workers too quickly - a trap the taskforce hasn't fallen into. This lack of focus is not because Labour are useless but because they are simply not as unusually open to rationalist adjacent arguments as the Sunak (and Johnson) regimes.
In 1987 President Reagan said to the United Nations "how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." Isn't an unaligned Artificial General Intelligence that alien threat? And it's easy - and perhaps overly obvious and comforting - to say that humanity would unite, but now we have this threat what would that unity look like?
Here's one not necessarily comforting thought, the weak (nations) will get trampled further by the strong (nations). If... (read more)
Wikipedia is a trusted brand for introducing new topics and has great placement with search engines. There are three potential headaches though.
(1) The Neutral Point of View (NPOV) rules mean in theory that one side of the argument can't dictate how a topic is dealt with, so even without a concerted effort there may creep in weasel words and various areas of balance. 93% chance of happening. It will be low impact on bias providing odd headaches but potentially improving article. About a 30% chance of making some of the article unreadable to a newcomer and 15% chance of lead being unreadable.
(2) A determined and coordinated group of editors with an agenda... (read more)