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Referring to the quote-picture from the Nvidia GTC keynote talk: I searched the talk's transcript, and could not find anything like the quote.

Could someone point out time-stamps of where Huang says (or implies) anything like the quote? Or is the quote entirely made up?

That clarifies a bunch of thing. Thanks!

I'm not sure I understand what the post's central claim/conclusion is. I'm curious to understand it better. To focus on the Summary:

So overall, evolution is the source of ethics,

Do you mean: Evolution is the process that produced humans, and strongly influenced humans' ethics? Or are you claiming that (humans') evolution-induced ethics are what any reasonable agent ought to adhere to? Or something else?

and sapient evolved agents inherently have a dramatically different ethical status than any well-designed created agents [...]

...according to some hypothetical evolved agents' ethical framework, under the assumption that those evolved agents managed to construct the created agents in the right ways (to not want moral patienthood etc.)? Or was the quoted sentence making some stronger claim?

evolution and evolved beings having a special role in Ethics is not just entirely justified, but inevitable

Is that sentence saying that

  • evolution and evolved beings are of special importance in any theory of ethics (what ethics are, how they arise, etc.), due to Evolution being one of the primary processes that produce agents with moral/ethical preferences [1]

or is it saying something like

  • evolution and evolved beings ought to have a special role; or we ought to regard the preferences of evolved beings as the True Morality?

I roughly agree with the first version; I strongly disagree with the second: I agree that {what oughts humans have} is (partially) explained by Evolutionary theory. I don't see how that crosses the is-ought gap. If you're saying that that somehow does cross the is-ought gap, could you explain why/how?


  1. I.e., similar to how one might say "amino acids having a special role in Biochemistry is not just entirely justified, but inevitable"? ↩︎

I wonder how much work it'd take to implement a system that incrementally generates a graph of the entire conversation. (Vertices would be sub-topics, represented as e.g. a thumbnail image + a short text summary.) Would require the GPT to be able to (i.a.) understand the logical content of the discussion, and detect when a topic is revisited, etc. Could be useful for improving clarity/productivity of conversations.

One of the main questions on which I'd like to understand others' views is something like: Conditional on sentient/conscious humans[1] continuing to exist in an x-risk scenario[2], with what probability do you think they will be in an inescapable dystopia[3]?

(My own current guess is that dystopia is very likely.)


  1. or non-human minds, other than the machines/Minds that are in control ↩︎

  2. as defined by Bostrom, i.e. "the permanent and drastic destruction of [humanity's] potential for desirable future development" ↩︎

  3. Versus e.g. just limited to a small disempowered population, but living in pleasant conditions? Or a large population living in unpleasant conditions, but where everyone at least has the option of suicide? ↩︎

That makes sense; but:

so far outside the realm of human reckoning that I'm not sure it's reasonable to call them dystopian.

setting aside the question of what to call such scenarios, with what probability do you think the humans[1] in those scenarios would (strongly) prefer to not exist?


  1. or non-human minds, other than the machines/Minds that are in control ↩︎

non-extinction AI x-risk scenarios are unlikely

Many people disagreed with that. So, apparently many people believe that inescapable dystopias are not-unlikely? (If you're one of the people who disagreed with the quote, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this.)

(Ah. Seems we were using the terms "(alignment) success/failure" differently. Thanks for noting it.)

In-retrospect-obvious key question I should've already asked: Conditional on (some representative group of) humans succeeding at aligning ASI, what fraction of the maximum possible value-from-Evolution's-perspective do you expect the future to attain? [1]

My modal guess is that the future would attain ~1% of maximum possible "Evolution-value".[2]

If tech evolution is similar enough to bio evolution then we should roughly expect tech evolution to have a similar level of success

Seems like a reasonable (albeit very preliminary/weak) outside view, sure. So, under that heuristic, I'd guess that the future will attain ~1% of max possible "human-value".


  1. setting completely aside whether to consider the present "success" or "failure" from Evolution's perspective. ↩︎

  2. I'd call that failure on Evolution's part, but IIUC you'd call it partial success? (Since the absolute value would still be high?) ↩︎

Evolution has succeeded at aligning homo sapiens brains to date

I'm guessing we agree on the following:

  • Evolution shaped humans to have various context-dependent drives (call them Shards) and the ability to mentally represent and pursue complex goals. Those Shards were good proxies for IGF in the EEA[1].

  • Those Shards were also good[2] enough to produce billions of humans in the modern environment. However, it is also the case that most modern humans spend at least part of their optimization power on things orthogonal to IGF.

I think our disagreement here maybe boils down to approximately the following question:

With what probability are we in each of the following worlds?

  • (World A) The Shards only work[2:1] conditional on the environment being sufficiently similar to the EEA, and humans not having too much optimization power. If the environment changes too far OOD, or if humans were to gain a lot of power[3], then the Shards would cease to be good[2:2] proxies.

    In this world, we should expect the future to contain only a small fraction[4] of the "value" it would have, if humanity were fully "aligned"[2:3]. I.e. Evolution failed to "(robustly) align humanity".

  • (World B) The Shards (in combination with other structures in human DNA/brains) are in fact sufficiently robust that they will keep humanity aligned[2:4] even in the face of distributional shift and humans gaining vast optimization power.

    In this world, we should expect the future to contain a large fraction of the "value" it would have, if humanity were fully "aligned"[2:5]. I.e. Evolution succeeded in "(robustly) aligning humanity".

  • (World C) Something else?

I think we're probably in (A), and IIUC, you think we're most likely in (B). Do you consider this an adequate characterization?

If yes, the obvious next question would be: What tests could we run, what observations could we make,[5] that would help us discern whether we're in (A) or (B) (or (C))?

(For example: I think the kinds of observations I listed in my previous comment are moderate-to-strong evidence for (A); and the existence of some explicit-IGF-maximizing humans is weak evidence for (B).)


  1. Environment of evolutionary adaptedness. For humans: hunter-gatherer tribes on the savanna, or maybe primitive subsistence agriculture societies. ↩︎

  2. in the sense of optimizing for IGF, or whatever we're imagining Evolution to "care" about. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. e.g. ability to upload their minds, construct virtual worlds, etc. ↩︎

  4. Possibly (but not necessarily) still a large quantity in absolute terms. ↩︎

  5. Without waiting a possibly-long time to watch how things in fact play out. ↩︎

vast computation some of which is applied to ancestral simulations

I agree that a successful post-human world would probably involve a large amount[1] of resources spent on simulating (or physically instantiating) things like humans engaging in play, sex, adventure, violence, etc. IOW, engaging in the things for which Evolution installed Shards in us. However, I think that is not the same as [whatever Evolution would care about, if Evolution could care about anything]. For the post-human future to be a success from Evolution's perspective, I think it would have to be full of something more like [programs (sentient or not, DNA or digital) striving to make as many copies of themselves as possible].

(If we make the notion of "DNA" too broad/vague, then we could interpret almost any future outcome as "success for Evolution".)


  1. a large absolute amount, but maybe not a large relative amount. ↩︎

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