I have some experience with handling a case where no standby service was available for my pet. I know pets are not humans, but I think there is some insight worth sharing.
If you can source dry ice, you can use this as a substitute for liquid nitrogen for about 6 months without suffering too much degradation compared to liquid nitrogen. Generally, you will want to opt for this if you cannot arrange for transport to a storage facility within 24 hours of clinical death. About half of all cryonics cases are "straight freeze" with no cryoprotectant, so there is a good chance methods will be invested in to revive those who... (read more)
I think the factors that determine your reference class can be related to changes over time in the environment you inhabit, not just how you are built. This is what I mean by not necessarily related to reproduction. If I cloned a billion people with the same cloning vat over 1000 years, how then would you determine reference class? But maybe something about the environment would narrow that reference class despite all the people being made by the same process (like the presence or absence of other things in the environment as they relate to the people coming out of the vat).
I think there is another assumption (or another way of framing your assumption, I'm not sure if it is really distinct), which is that all people throughout time are alike. It's not necessarily groundless, but it is an assumption. There could be some symmetry breaking factor that determines your position that doesn't simply align with "total humans that ever exist", and thus renders using the "birth rank" inappropriate to determine what number you have. This thing doesn't have to be related to reproduction though.
It still seems slightly fuzzy in that other than check/mate situations no moves are fully mandatory and eg recaptures may occasionally turn out to be the wrong move?
Indeed it can be difficult to know when it is actually better not to continue the line vs when it is, but that is precisely what MCTS would help figure out. MCTS would do actual exploration of board states and the budget for which states it explores would be informed by the policy network. It's usually better to continue a line vs not, so I would expect MCTS to spend most of its budget continuing the line, and the policy would be updated during training... (read more)
In chess, a "line" is sequence of moves that are hard to interrupt. There are kind of obvious moves you have to play or else you are just losing (such as recapturing a piece, moving king out of check, performing checkmate etc). Leela uses the neural network more for policy, which means giving a score to a given board position, which then the MCTS can use to determine whether or not to prune that direction or explore that section more. So it makes sense that Leela would have an embedding of powerful lines as part of its heuristic, since it isn't doing to main work of search. It's more pattern recognition on... (read more)
The cited paper in Section 5 (Conclusion-Limitations) states plainly:
(2) We focus on look-ahead along a single line of play; we do not test whether Leela compares multiple different lines of play (what one might call search). ... (4) Chess as a domain might favor look-ahead to an unusually strong extent.
The paper is more just looking at how Leela evaluates a given line rather than doing any kind of search. And this makes sense. Pattern recognition is an extremely important part of playing chess (as a player myself), and it is embedded in another system doing the actual search, namely Monte Carlo Tree Search. So it isn't surprising that it has learned to look ahead in a straight line since that's what all of its training experience is going to entail. If transformers were any good at doing the search, I would expect a chess bot without employing something like MCTS.
My crux is that LLMs are inherently bad at search tasks over a new domain. Thus, I don't expect LLMs to scale to improve search.
Anecdotal evidence: I've used LLMs extensively and my experience is that LLMs are great at retrieval but terrible at suggestion when it comes to ideas. You usually get something resembling an amalgamation of Google searches vs. suggestions from some kind of insight.
To your question of what to do if you are outmatched and you only have an ASI at your disposal, I think the most logical thing to do is "do what the ASI tells you to". The problem is that we have no way of predicting the outcomes if there is truly an ASI in the room. If it's a superintelligence it is going to have better suggestions than anything you can come up with.
Then I wonder, at what point does that matter? Or more specifically, when does that matter in the context of ai-risk?
Clearly there is some relationship between something like "more compute" and "more intelligence" since something too simple cannot be intelligent, but I don't know where that relationship breaks down. Evolution clearly found a path for optimizing intelligence via proxy in our brains, and I think the fear is that you may yet be able to go quite further than human-level intelligence before the extra compute fails to deliver more meaningful intelligence described in your post.
It seems premature to reject the orthogonality thesis of optimizing for things that "obviously bring more intelligence" before they start to break down.
I find the subject of the emergence of language, culture, and society to be quite fascinating. I want to build a more comprehensive model of global prehistory from approximately 200,000 - 3,000 BCE than just "hunter-gatherer societies and spoken language".
I understand that the understanding of these eras is frequently in flux due to the high degree of interpretation required and the scarcity of archaeological evidence, so I am more expecting books that try to give accurate bounds on the events of those areas and not take too many liberties with the available evidence.
Some popular books, such as Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, cover the topics I want to learn more about but I think Sapiens is not really the level of rigor for which I'm looking.
The main thing you want to prevent is large scale ice crystal formation. Dry ice sits just below the temperature needed for water to crystalize when freezing, so it delays the crystal formation by a substantial amount. However, for extended periods the ice can still crystalize so that's why it's important to get to cryogenic temperatures.