Mitchell_Porter

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Sorted by

Is there someone you regard as the authority on why it can't be done? (Yudkowsky? Yampolskiy?) 

Because what I see, are not problems that we know to be unsolvable, but rather problems that the human race is not seriously trying to solve. 

So what's the impossible thing - identifying an adequate set of values? instilling them in a superintelligence? 

The denial of a self has long seemed to me a kind of delusion. I am very clearly having a particular stream of consciousness. It's not an arbitrary abstraction to say that it includes some experiences and does not include others. To say there is a self, is just to say that there is a being experiencing that stream of consciousness. Would you deny that, or are you saying something else? 

Do you perceive the irony in telling me my hope has "zero percent chance" of happening, then turning around and telling me to do the impossible? I guess some impossibles are more impossible than others. 

In fact I've spent 30 years attempting various forms of "the impossible" (i.e. things of unknown difficulty that aren't getting done), it's kind of why I'm chronically unemployed and rarely have more than $2000 in the bank. I know how to be audaciously ambitious in unpromising circumstances and I know how to be stubborn about it. 

You like to emphasize the contingency of history as a source of hope. Fine. Let me tell you that the same applies to the world of intellectual discovery, which I know a lot better than I know the world of politics. Revolutionary advances in understanding can and do occur, and sometimes on the basis of very simple but potent insights. 

I'm going to start keeping track of opaque or subtle outsiders who aren't very formal but who might have a piece of the ultimate alignment puzzle. At the very least, these are posts which an alignment theorist (whether AI or human) ought to be able to say something about, e.g. if there is a fallacy or omission, they should be able to identify it. 

Along with this post, I'll mention

the intent behind your question

I guess I'm expressing doubt about the viability of wise or cautious AI strategies, given our new e/acc world order, in which everyone who can, is sprinting uninhibitedly towards superintelligence. 

My own best hope at this point is that someone will actually solve the "civilizational superalignment" problem of CEV, i.e. learning how to imbue autonomous AI with the full set of values (whatever they are) required to "govern" a transhuman civilization in a way that follows from the best in humanity, etc. - and that this solution will be taken into account by whoever actually wins the race to superintelligence. 

This is a strategy that can be pursued within the technical communities that are actually designing and building frontier AI. But the public discussion of AI is currently hopeless, it's deeply unrealistic about the most obvious consequences of creating new intelligences that are smarter, faster, and more knowledgeable than any human, namely, that they are going to replace human beings as masters of the Earth, and eventually that they will simply replace the entire human race. 

What would their actual platform be?

Victory is the aim of war, not suffering. 

Every so often I'll declare something to be the state of the art in AI-takeover short fiction. It was @gwern's Clippy in 2022 and @Gabe M's "Scale Was All We Needed, At First" in 2024. I think we have a new leader. 

the pop-culture chakra model comes from modern Theosophical books, not ancient Indian scripture

Kind of true, although the core of it is a system of 6 or 7 chakras which the author acknowledges (way down in the comments) was dominant in India "by 1500". 

This made me curious about the credentials of Transcendental Meditation, the system espoused by David Lynch (RIP) and Jerry Seinfeld among others. Turns out their guru was a student of the head of one of the four big Vedic monasteries founded over 1000 years ago by the Kant of Hinduism (that's just my name for him), Adi Shankara. So at least in this case, there are no troubling Russian or British intermediaries. :-)  

Load More