Wouldn’t there be even cheaper ways to satisfy preferences about living humans? A fake, cheap version which satisfies that preference would probably be possible in the same way that a preference for a pet can be satisfied by a plush toy. Wanting humans or uploads but not being able to satisfy that desire with something fake seems like it isn’t how many of our actual desires work

You can keep talking more. You can repeat the proper analysis for your vaccine, talk about your own behavior, talk about why other people analyzing your behavior is either good or bad. You don’t have to concede the public square to someone else because you’re concerned they will misinterpret things and in fact these examples seem like situations where you can and should talk your way out of them

Isn’t the theory that consultants add value by saying true obvious things? If you realize you’re surrounded by sycophants, you might need someone who you’re sure won’t just tell you that you’re amazing (unless the consultant is also a yes man and dooms you even harder)

Thanks for writing this. I’m not sure I’d call your beliefs moderate, since they involve extracting useful labor from misaligned AI by making deals with them, sometimes for pieces of the observable universe or by verifying with future tech. 

On the point of “talking to AI companies”, I think this would be a healthy part of any attempted change although I see that PauseAI and other orgs tend to talk to AI companies in a way that seems to try to make them feel bad by directly stating that what they are doing is wrong. Maybe the line here is “You make sure that what you say will still result in you getting invited to conferences” which is reasonable but I don’t think that talking to AI companies gets at the difference between you and other forms of activism.

I think you’re pretty severely mistaken about bullshit jobs. You said

At the start of this post we mentioned “bullshit jobs” as a major piece of evidence that standard “theory of the firm” models of organization size don’t really seem to capture reality. What does the dominance-status model have to say about bullshit jobs?

But there are many counter examples of this not being a real concept. See here for many of them: https://www.thediff.co/archive/bullshit-jobs-is-a-terrible-curiosity-killing-concept/

How would a military which is increasingly run by AI factor into these scenarios? It seems most similar to organizational safety a la google building software with SWEs but the disanalogy might be that the AI is explicitly supposed to take over some part of the world and maybe it interpreted a command incorrectly. Or does this article only consider the AI taking over because it wanted to take over?

Huh, did you experience any side effects?

I think discernment is not essential to entertainment. If people really want to learn what a slightly off piano sounds like and also pay for expert piano tuning, then that’s fine, but I don’t think people should be looked down upon for not having that level of discernment.

How would the agent represent non-coherent others? Like humans don’t have entirely coherent goals and in cases where the agent learns that it may satisfy one or another goal, how would it select which goal to choose? Take a human attempting to lose weight, with goals to eat to satisfaction and to not eat. Would the agent give the human food or withhold it?

One thing I find weird is that most of these objects of payment are correlated. The best paying jobs also have the best peers also have the most autonomy also have the most fun. Low paid jobs were mostly drudgery along all axes in my experience