No77e

Epistemic status: speculative, maybe confused, a bit disorderly. I still felt like posting this as a top-level post at least for consistency reasons, but it could have been posted as a Quick Take too. Suppose all the following things are true: 1. The transformer architecture allows introspection in some sense....

Summary: LLMs might be conscious, but they might not have concepts and words to represent and express their internal states and corresponding subjective experiences, since the only concepts they learn are human concepts (besides maybe some concepts acquired during RL training, which still doesn't seem to incentivize forming concepts related...

Noah Smith, in this article, argues that the Metaverse could enable economic growth to increase a lot and sharply decouple itself from real-world resource usage. By creating markets in which we buy and sell immaterial things, world GDP would grow. He also says, rightly, that GDP correlates with the well-being...

If Evolution was allowed to continue undisturbed, it could, conceivably, one day, produce a pure inclusive genetic fitness maximizer by reworking our base desires. So the path would have been: First replicator -> first brains -> base desires (roughly first reinforcement learners) -> first unaligned (by Evolution's standards) consequentialists ->...

In October 27th 2022, Eliezer Yudkowsky tweeted this: So far so good. I may ask myself when this happened and why the paperclips example was the one that actually sticked, but so far I have no reason to worry about my understanding of AI safety. But here's more of the...

Suppose an emulation of Eliezer Yudkowsky, as of January 2023, discovered how to self-modify. It's possible that the returns of capability per unit effort would start increasing, which would make its intelligence FOOM. The emulation starts with an interest in bringing about utopia rather than extinction in the form of...