I don’t particularly blame humans for this world being full of suffering. We didn’t invent parasitoid wasps. But we have certainly not used our current powers very responsibly. We did invent factory farms. And most of us do not particularly care.
I am very afraid more powerful humans/human-aligned beings will invent even worse horrors. And if we tolerate factory farming it seems possible we will tolerate the new horrors. So I cannot be confident that humans gaining more power, even if it was equitably distributed among humans, would actually be a good thing.
I fear this has already happened and I am already at the mercy of those vastly more powerful humans. In that sense, I fear for myself! But even if I am safe I fear for the many beings who are not. We can’t even save the pigs, how are we going to save the ems!
But don’t you share the impression that with increased wealth humans generally care more about the suffering of others? The story I tell myself is that humans have many basic needs (e.g. food, safety, housing) that historically conflicted with ‘higher’ desires like self-expression, helping others or improving the world. And with increased wealth, humans relatively universally become more caring. Or maybe more cynically, with increased wealth we can and do invest more resources into signalling that we are caring good reasonable people, i.e. the kinds of people others will more likely choose as friends/mates/colleagues.
This makes me optimistic about a future in which humans still shape the world. Would be grateful to have some holes poked into this. Holes that spontaneously come to mind:
influence-seeking people are more likely uncaring and/or psychpathic
the signals that humans use for determining who is a caring good person are not strongly correlated with actually caring about reducing suffering in the world
I don’t know how it will all play out in the end. I hope kindness wins and I agree the effect you discuss is real. But it is not obvious that our empathy increases faster than our capacity to do harm. Right now, for each human there are about seven birds/mammals on farms. This is quite the catastrophe. Perhaps that problem will eventually be solved by lab meat. But right now animal product consumption is still going up worldwide. And many worse things can be created and maybe those will endure.
People can be shockingly cruel to their own family. Scott’s Who by Very Slow Decay is one of the scariest things I ever read. How can people do this to their own parents?
After a while of this, your doctors will call a meeting with your family and very gingerly raise the possibility of going to “comfort care only”, which means they disconnect the machines and stop the treatments and put you on painkillers so that you die peacefully. Your family will start yelling at the doctors, asking how the hell these quacks were ever allowed to practice when for God’s sake they’re trying to kill off Grandma just so they can avoid doing a tiny bit of work. They will demand the doctors find some kind of complicated surgery that will fix all your problems, add on new pills to the thirteen you’re already being force-fed every day, call in the most expensive consultants from Europe, figure out some extraordinary effort that can keep you living another few days.
Robin Hanson sometimes writes about how health care is a form of signaling, trying to spend money to show you care about someone else. I think he’s wrong in the general case – most people pay their own health insurance – but I think he’s spot on in the case of families caring for their elderly relatives. The hospital lawyer mentioned during orientation that it never fails that the family members who live in the area and have spent lots of time with their mother/father/grandparent over the past few years are willing to let them go, but someone from 2000 miles away flies in at the last second and makes ostentatious demands that EVERYTHING POSSIBLE must be done for the patient.
With increased wealth, humans relatively universally become more caring? Is this why billionaires are always giving up the vast majority of their fortunes to feed the hungry and house the homeless while willingly living on rice and beans?
If you donate to AI alignment research, it doesn’t mean that you get to decide which values are loaded. Other people will decide that. You will then be forced to eat the end result, whatever it may look like. Your mistaken assumption is that there is such a thing as “human values”, which will cause a world that is good for human beings in general. In reality, people have their own values, and they include terms for “stopping other people from having what they want”, “making sure my enemies suffer”, “making people regret disagreeing with me”, and so on.
When people talk about “human values” in this context, I think they usually mean something like “goals that are Pareto optimal for the values of individual humans”- and the things you listed definitely aren’t that.
If we are talking about any sort of “optimality”, we can’t expect even individual humans to have these “optimal” values, much less so en masse. Of course it is futile to dream that our deus ex machina will impose those fantastic values on the world if 99% of us de facto disagree with them.
I’m not sure they mean that. Perhaps it would be better to actually specify the specific values you want implemented. But then of course people will disagree, including the actual humans who are trying to build AGI.
It’s pretty obvious to me, but then I am a human being. I would like to live in the sort of world that human beings would like to live in.
I don’t particularly blame humans for this world being full of suffering. We didn’t invent parasitoid wasps. But we have certainly not used our current powers very responsibly. We did invent factory farms. And most of us do not particularly care.
I am very afraid more powerful humans/human-aligned beings will invent even worse horrors. And if we tolerate factory farming it seems possible we will tolerate the new horrors. So I cannot be confident that humans gaining more power, even if it was equitably distributed among humans, would actually be a good thing.
I fear this has already happened and I am already at the mercy of those vastly more powerful humans. In that sense, I fear for myself! But even if I am safe I fear for the many beings who are not. We can’t even save the pigs, how are we going to save the ems!
But don’t you share the impression that with increased wealth humans generally care more about the suffering of others? The story I tell myself is that humans have many basic needs (e.g. food, safety, housing) that historically conflicted with ‘higher’ desires like self-expression, helping others or improving the world. And with increased wealth, humans relatively universally become more caring. Or maybe more cynically, with increased wealth we can and do invest more resources into signalling that we are caring good reasonable people, i.e. the kinds of people others will more likely choose as friends/mates/colleagues.
This makes me optimistic about a future in which humans still shape the world. Would be grateful to have some holes poked into this. Holes that spontaneously come to mind:
influence-seeking people are more likely uncaring and/or psychpathic
the signals that humans use for determining who is a caring good person are not strongly correlated with actually caring about reducing suffering in the world
I don’t know how it will all play out in the end. I hope kindness wins and I agree the effect you discuss is real. But it is not obvious that our empathy increases faster than our capacity to do harm. Right now, for each human there are about seven birds/mammals on farms. This is quite the catastrophe. Perhaps that problem will eventually be solved by lab meat. But right now animal product consumption is still going up worldwide. And many worse things can be created and maybe those will endure.
People can be shockingly cruel to their own family. Scott’s Who by Very Slow Decay is one of the scariest things I ever read. How can people do this to their own parents?
With increased wealth, humans relatively universally become more caring? Is this why billionaires are always giving up the vast majority of their fortunes to feed the hungry and house the homeless while willingly living on rice and beans?
If you donate to AI alignment research, it doesn’t mean that you get to decide which values are loaded. Other people will decide that. You will then be forced to eat the end result, whatever it may look like. Your mistaken assumption is that there is such a thing as “human values”, which will cause a world that is good for human beings in general. In reality, people have their own values, and they include terms for “stopping other people from having what they want”, “making sure my enemies suffer”, “making people regret disagreeing with me”, and so on.
When people talk about “human values” in this context, I think they usually mean something like “goals that are Pareto optimal for the values of individual humans”- and the things you listed definitely aren’t that.
If we are talking about any sort of “optimality”, we can’t expect even individual humans to have these “optimal” values, much less so en masse. Of course it is futile to dream that our deus ex machina will impose those fantastic values on the world if 99% of us de facto disagree with them.
I’m not sure they mean that. Perhaps it would be better to actually specify the specific values you want implemented. But then of course people will disagree, including the actual humans who are trying to build AGI.