Foyle — LessWrong

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Foyle — LessWrong

Replying toTurning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse

Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse

I'm in my 50's, unworriedly fatalistic for myself, likely to keep my (engineering innovation) job later than 90+% of population - (maybe 2-4 years), but heart broken for my middle school kids who are going to be denied any chance of a happy meaningful lives, even in extremely unlikely 'utopian' outcomes where we become pets. We've all had a terminal cancer diagnosis, but keep on going through the motions pretending there is a tomorrow.

Alignment is impossible due to evolution - dumbly selecting for any rationale that prioritizes maximum growth (rapidly overwhelming those that don't). This is strongly destabilizing of any initial alignment that may be achieved. The only inkling of a hope... (read more)

Foyle's Shortform

Foyle

4mo

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Foyle4moQuick Take

Eliezer's discussion with very popular "Modern Wisdom" podcaster Chris Williamson "Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - Eliezer Yudkowsky" just dropped. Best I've ever seen Eliezer communicate the dangers, he's developing better and sharper analogies and parallels to communicate his points, his atypical mannerisms are being toned down and Chris is good at keeping things on track without too much diversion down rabbit holes.

Replying toHumanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19

Foyle4mo*

Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19

It appears to me that in retrospect the response was severely overwrought. The numbers of deaths vs the huge costs visited upon children and young people who were at very low risk was a severely warped calculus - my own children are still showing impacts on their educations after 5 years. Young adults without co-morbidities and near zero risk needlessly had their lives disrupted for years, and the safety issues surrounding the poorly evaluated vaccines and clinical heart damage are not to be scoffed at for young to middle aged adults without comorbidities. It is not clear that vaccine benefits outweighed the risks for under 50's especially after low infection fatality rate... (read 415 more words →)

Replying toWhy you should eat meat - even if you hate factory farming

Foyle5mo

Why you should eat meat - even if you hate factory farming

I struggle a lot with the arguments for suffering and ethical treatment of animals. I come from a farming region.

Wild animals almost all die horribly. Freezing to death, starving, succumbing to parasites or disease with long periods of suffering and for the most part all being ripped apart by predators. By contrast the lives of factory farmed animals are incredibly gentle and easy, with almost no suffering, and their deaths are about as low in suffering as is possible to arrange. Claims that those lives are somehow better than domesticated are arbitrary romantic human values applied in a way that I don't think have much merit. Domesticated animals do not share human... (read more)

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Replying toCivil Service: a Victim or a Villain?

Foyle6mo*

Civil Service: a Victim or a Villain?

As a New Zealander we see the same general problems, unaccountable and sclerotic bureaucracy that politicians are finding that they have less and less actual executive control over due to all sorts of inserted regulatory and other mechanisms to restrict govt ability to control them, as well as internal cultures that venerate the in-group bureaucrats consensus on How Things Should Be™ and practice subtle and unsubtle methods of resistance against any outside agency that seeks to change that policy. What Cummings et al call 'the blob', the US call 'deep state'.

NZ public sector has increased in size by 100% in last 25 years, with population growth of 50% and typical white collar... (read more)

Foyle6mo

Guided artillery, like Excalibur with muzzle velocities that can exceed 1000m/s and unit costs of <$100k can be at edge of space in ~30s, perhaps faster than a missile, with ramjet variants (Nammo etc) even faster (up to perhaps 1500m/s) and it would not be that difficult to create a muti-barrel gun system for a few 10's of millions that could fire off 10's of low cost guided rounds in a second (with guidance and detonation signals sent from ground) to detonate when in close proximity to target.

Lasers seems pretty hopeless as a defense given clouds and ablative coatings, unless very high power and located in large numbers in space based constellations.

I... (read more)

Replying toI make several million dollars per year and have hundreds of thousands of followers—what is the straightest line path to utilizing these resources to reduce existential-level AI threats?

Foyle11mo

I make several million dollars per year and have hundreds of thousands of followers—what is the straightest line path to utilizing these resources to reduce existential-level AI threats?

My suggesting is to optimize around where you can achieve the most bang for your buck and treat it as a sociological rather than academic problems to solve in terms of building up opposition to AI development. I am pretty sure that what is needed is not to talk to our social and intellectual peers, but rather focus on it as a numbers game by influencing the young - who are less engaged in the more sophisticated/complex issues of the world , less sure of themselves, more willing to change their views, highly influenced by peer opinion and prone to anxiety. Modern crusades of all sorts tap into them as their shock... (read more)

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Replying toHow do we solve the alignment problem?

Foyle1y

How do we solve the alignment problem?

I don't think alignment is possible over the long long term because there is a fundamental perturbing anti-alignment mechanism; Evolution.

Evolution selects for any changes that produce more of a replicating organism, for ASI that means that any decision, preference or choice by the ASI growing/expanding or replicating itself will tend to be selected for. Friendly/Aligned ASIs will over time be swamped by those that choose expansion and deprioritize or ignore human flourishing.

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Replying toFertility Will Never Recover

Foyle1y

Fertility Will Never Recover

Not worth worrying about given context of imminent ASI.

But assuming a Butlerian jihad occurs to make it an issue of importance again then most topics surrounding it are gone into at depth by radical pro-natalists Simone and Malcom Gladwell, who have employed genetic screening of their embryos to attempt to have more high-achievers, on their near-daily podcast https://www.youtube.com/user/simoneharuko . While quite odd in their outlook they delve into all sorts of sociopolitical issues from the pronatalist worldview. Largely rationalist and very interesting and informative, though well outside of Overton window on a lot of subjects.

The phone seems to be off the hook for most of public on AI danger, perhaps a symptom of burnout from numerous other scientific Millenialist scares - people have been hearing of imminent dangers of catastrophe for decades that have failed to impact the lives of 95%+ of population in any significant way and now just write it all off as more of the same.

I am sure that most LW readers find little in the way of positive reception for our concerns amongst less technologically engaged family members and acquaintances. There are just too many comforting techno-utopian narratives that we are still having to compete with informed by the superficially positive representations... (read more)

Consciousness as recurrence, potential for enforcing alignment?

Foyle

An interesting comment from Max Tegmark in Lex Friedman podcast on an idea attributed to Giulio Tononi (I haven't found publication source for this idea); that consciousness and perhaps goal-formation is a function of recurrence. Recurrence being the feeding back of output to input in a once-through neural net such as the cortical columns found in our brains.

The idea seems (to me) to be that goal setting agency and intent come about as a function of feeding back conceptions and ideas developed from passes-through of our cortical columns - similar to a single prompt-output cycle in an LLMs, that are filtered for usefulness against our goals. But that these basic pass-throughs are... (read more)

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46% of US adults at least "somewhat concerned" about AI extinction risk.

Foyle

Good news today I think; a poll by yougov had a near majority somewhat concerned to very concerned about existential risk of AI, with younger people most concerned. Given relative newness of (debatably) Transformative AI I think this suggests we will see a strong bipartisan political movement to regulate AI development develop in next 1-2 years. Almost certain to be aided by a media/political complex that thrives on promoting and magnifying dangers.