If I may don my Evil Hansonian hat for a moment, conventional politics isn’t so much about charting the future of our society as about negotiating the power relationships between tribal alignments. Values and ethical preferences and vague feelings of ickiness go into those alignments (and then proceed to feed back out of them), but it’s far rarer for people to support political factions out of de-novo ethical reasoning than you’d guess from talking to them about it. The mind-killer meme is fundamentally an encouragement to be mindful of that, especially of the nasty ideological feedback loops that it tends to imply, and a suggestion to focus on object-level issues where the feedback isn’t quite so intense.
One consequence of this is that political shifts happen at or above human timescales, as their subjects become things that established tribes notice they can fight over. If you happen to be a singularitarian, then, you probably believe that the kinds of technological and social changes that LW talks about will at some point—probably soon, possibly already—be moving faster than politics can keep up with. Speaking for myself, I expect anything that conventional legislatures or political parties say about AI to matter about as much as the RIAA did when they went after Napster, and still less once we’re in a position to be talking seriously about strong, friendly artificial intelligence.
More importantly from our perspective, though, anything conventional politics doesn’t care about yet is also something that we have a considerably better chance of talking about sanely. We may be—in fact, we’re certainly—in the territory of politics in the sense of subjects relevant to the future of the polis, but as long as identity considerations and politics-specific “conventional wisdom” stay relatively distant from our reasoning, we can expect our minds to remain relatively happy and unkilled.
If I may don my Evil Hansonian hat for a moment, conventional politics isn’t so much about charting the future of our society as about negotiating the power relationships between tribal alignments. Values and ethical preferences and vague feelings of ickiness go into those alignments (and then proceed to feed back out of them), but it’s far rarer for people to support political factions out of de-novo ethical reasoning than you’d guess from talking to them about it. The mind-killer meme is fundamentally an encouragement to be mindful of that, especially of the nasty ideological feedback loops that it tends to imply, and a suggestion to focus on object-level issues where the feedback isn’t quite so intense.
One consequence of this is that political shifts happen at or above human timescales, as their subjects become things that established tribes notice they can fight over. If you happen to be a singularitarian, then, you probably believe that the kinds of technological and social changes that LW talks about will at some point—probably soon, possibly already—be moving faster than politics can keep up with. Speaking for myself, I expect anything that conventional legislatures or political parties say about AI to matter about as much as the RIAA did when they went after Napster, and still less once we’re in a position to be talking seriously about strong, friendly artificial intelligence.
More importantly from our perspective, though, anything conventional politics doesn’t care about yet is also something that we have a considerably better chance of talking about sanely. We may be—in fact, we’re certainly—in the territory of politics in the sense of subjects relevant to the future of the polis, but as long as identity considerations and politics-specific “conventional wisdom” stay relatively distant from our reasoning, we can expect our minds to remain relatively happy and unkilled.