irrational reaction to anything “sex” and it is useful to give people space to talk about gender variance without it being inherently sexual
Yeah, "sex" itself is also problematic of course, referring both to essential characteristics of individuals and to complicated social interactions.
My biggest problem with "transgender" is that it implies the desirability of grave, not-entirely-reversible hormonal/surgical transition to people that are only uncomfortable with their gender role, but have no body map issues. I'd say that decoupling (temporary, reversible) social transition from HRT/surgery should be in the interest of large swathes of the political spectrum, only excluding extremists on both sides.
There is evidence of a biological basis for trans identity.
It's plausible that there is a biological basis for feelings of body-map mismatch, but categorizing all of this under the rubric of "trans identity" continues to seem like a horrible civilization-wide confusion-inducing mistake to me.
The deprecated term "transsexual" also had its issues, of course (the confusion about whether the "sexual" part refers to your sex or the sex of people you are attracted to, like it does in e.g. "homosexual"), but it at least clearly pointed to the fact that it isn't entirely about "gender identity" qua social role-play.
I would still use an actual mp3 player, but ReplayGain (volume adjustment) has irrevocably spoiled me. And also, wireless earbuds have finally gotten good since then. So, phone-as-a-mp3-player it is.
For the former-maids now working in the modern service sector, this was a major step up.
Seems doubtful tbh. I think that being a maid/manservant to a one-percenter could in theory be a much better gig, but society apparently collectively decided that such jobs are inherently degrading and fundamentally conflict with the Egalitarian Spirit, and abolished them on moral grounds instead of economic ones.
Yeah, it's not the gramophone that displaced in-person socializing. TV struck first, and then the internet dealt the killing blow.
Even humans have pretty much succeeded at taking over the world.
Coalitions of humans have. It's plausible that a slightly smarter in relevant ways AI might soon end up heading one, but I don't expect it to get away with acting egregiously misaligned.
The issue is that nobody is sure how things are going to go.
Well, they aren't behaving accordingly. Pessimists are super doomy, optimists expect "loving grace" around the corner, and neither side is at all discomfited by the vast gulf of confident disagreement in between.
This inclines me toward caution
A widely agreeable notion, surely, until elaborated on.
will future powerful AGI / ASI “by default” lack Approval Reward altogether?
I'd say that pessimists are similar to LLM optimists in their conviction that it would be pretty easy to match and then greatly surpass general human intelligence, trusting their own intuitions far too much. Of course, once that assumption is made, everything else straightforwardly follows.
If you define wireheading as hacking the brain to do something weird that makes you feel better
There are similarities, but the space of hardware solutions is much bigger.
stimulated their reward system which, under RTB, is unlikely to solve the problem of chronic suffering
But surely something in the vicinity should work? In any case, I'm pretty sure that most people don't want to exist in a permanent state of pure bliss, whatever it means, and wouldn't take a drug to that effect, so the problem description seems lacking. I'm not claiming to be able to produce a better one, though.
Absolute-zero-based suffering.
Does this imply that wireheading perfectly solves the problem, absent traditional Buddhist worries like reincarnation, which RTB presumably eschews?
But doesn't increasing the accuracy of DL outputs require exponentially more compute? It only "works" to the extent that labs have been able to afford exponential compute scaling so far.