Connor is correctly making a very legit point here. There are no do-overs. If you draw the black marble before you’re prepared for it, then everybody dies. If you refuse to even think about how to prepare for it and not only keep drawing marbles but try to draw them faster and faster, then by default you die, and sooner and sooner! This is not unfair and this is not a bad argument. This is legitimately Connor’s position (and mine and Bostrom’s).
So just to make this clear: a “black marble” is some kind of asymmetric technology. For example, a machine gun isn’t a black marble because for every gun that a person could buy or build themselves, large governments will have 100. A pandemic virus that with a high fatality rate after a lengthy delay and didn’t mutate to become less deadly* would be a black marble, because current technology makes it cheap and easy to build any string of RNA you want, while the hospital care to save one person is extremely labor and material intensive, and often fails. *(evolutionary forces want to make the virus shorter, removing it’s ability to kill after a delay, which is why this likely won’t work)
You feel confident that inside the total number of “marbles” between (1) right now and (2) humans develop off planet or interstellar colonies contains at least one black marble. And therefore if humans draw the marbles faster and faster, planning to leave the planet soon, they will pull a black one.
Ok. And then the counter argument would be that you’re probably wrong, because no black marbles have been drawn yet, and you would need to prove they exist before any action is taken about them? (and not to get sucked too far into the weeds, but most claims about a “superintelligence” are kinda like a fictional black marble that may simply not be that effective)
Beff’s whole love story to capitalism and thermodynamics to me seems like simply an argument that since the start of the industrial revolution, technology has been net good and no black marbles were drawn, therefore the right choice is to continue. And it’s a good argument without all the baggage, because it’s empirical. (and a fair counter would be how technology has only been ‘net good’ when various actions, mostly government, stopped it from only enriching the owners of coal mines while the miners lost their limbs and died from lung disease...)
So just to make this clear: a “black marble” is some kind of asymmetric technology. For example, a machine gun isn’t a black marble because for every gun that a person could buy or build themselves, large governments will have 100. A pandemic virus that with a high fatality rate after a lengthy delay and didn’t mutate to become less deadly* would be a black marble, because current technology makes it cheap and easy to build any string of RNA you want, while the hospital care to save one person is extremely labor and material intensive, and often fails. *(evolutionary forces want to make the virus shorter, removing it’s ability to kill after a delay, which is why this likely won’t work)
You feel confident that inside the total number of “marbles” between (1) right now and (2) humans develop off planet or interstellar colonies contains at least one black marble. And therefore if humans draw the marbles faster and faster, planning to leave the planet soon, they will pull a black one.
Ok. And then the counter argument would be that you’re probably wrong, because no black marbles have been drawn yet, and you would need to prove they exist before any action is taken about them? (and not to get sucked too far into the weeds, but most claims about a “superintelligence” are kinda like a fictional black marble that may simply not be that effective)
Beff’s whole love story to capitalism and thermodynamics to me seems like simply an argument that since the start of the industrial revolution, technology has been net good and no black marbles were drawn, therefore the right choice is to continue. And it’s a good argument without all the baggage, because it’s empirical. (and a fair counter would be how technology has only been ‘net good’ when various actions, mostly government, stopped it from only enriching the owners of coal mines while the miners lost their limbs and died from lung disease...)