i think analogies to relatively well known intuitive everyday things, or historical events, are a good way to automatically establish some baseline level of plausibility, and also to reduce the chances of accidentally telling completely implausible stories. the core reason is basically that without tethering to objective things that actually happened in reality, it’s really easy to tell crazy stories about a wide range of possible conclusions.
for hacking, we can look at stuxnet as an example of how creative and powerful a cyberattack can be, or the 2024 crowdstrike failures as an example of how lots of computers can fail at the same time. for manipulation/deception, we can look at increasing political polarization in america due to social media, or politicians winning based on charisma and then betraying them once in office, or (for atheists) major world religions, or (for anyone mindkilled by politics) adherents of their dispreferred political party. most people might not have experienced humiliating defeat in chess, or experienced being an anthill on an active construction site, but perhaps they have personally experienced being politically outmaneuvered by a competitor at work, or being crushed beneath the heel of a soulless bureaucracy which, despite being composed of ensouled humans, would rather ruin people’s lives than be inconvenienced with dealing with exceptions.
I see two problems. First, no way my mom or anyone like her is familiar with stuxnet or anything like it. I could tell her about it, but she’d be taking my word for it and have no way to judge whether my extrapolation to AI made sense.
Second, I think almost nobody can admit to themselves a time when they were outmanoeuvred by someone else. Normal people are quick to rationalize failure. I didn’t get the promotion but my coworker did, well that’s because they’re a lying bitch, or because they had the unfair advantage of being friends with the boss, or actually I never really wanted it anyway.
idea to make a thing that happened believable: - stuxnet has a wikipedia page that is easy to point to. Pointing to things as a reflex sometimes works. - there are perhaps some videos/books that are aimed at the general public, are somewhat entertaining for the general public, and have a visible view count of >1M. - Maybe it was covered by one of the news channels that the general public person acknowledges as existing and a valid source of real things.
I think for the “scary hacks” category, it is worth coming up with 3-5 very different illustrative cases, and looking for ways to connect them to other things the person (likely) thinks are real.
I think it is worth doing the same with pandemics. (for instance there was the black death, there was the spanish flu, there was covid, which (depending on the politics of the person) was acknowledged as having been engineered)
I think cases of “going hard” by human groups are worth knowing about.
I think if some such cases are very useful for making the case that ASI could win in a fight against humanity, it would be worth first getting really good at establishing and discussing many such cases in a fun and believable way, and then once you succeed at enough of them to establish their existence, you can talk about how an ASI could pull these human-pullable levers.
i think analogies to relatively well known intuitive everyday things, or historical events, are a good way to automatically establish some baseline level of plausibility, and also to reduce the chances of accidentally telling completely implausible stories. the core reason is basically that without tethering to objective things that actually happened in reality, it’s really easy to tell crazy stories about a wide range of possible conclusions.
for hacking, we can look at stuxnet as an example of how creative and powerful a cyberattack can be, or the 2024 crowdstrike failures as an example of how lots of computers can fail at the same time. for manipulation/deception, we can look at increasing political polarization in america due to social media, or politicians winning based on charisma and then betraying them once in office, or (for atheists) major world religions, or (for anyone mindkilled by politics) adherents of their dispreferred political party. most people might not have experienced humiliating defeat in chess, or experienced being an anthill on an active construction site, but perhaps they have personally experienced being politically outmaneuvered by a competitor at work, or being crushed beneath the heel of a soulless bureaucracy which, despite being composed of ensouled humans, would rather ruin people’s lives than be inconvenienced with dealing with exceptions.
I see two problems. First, no way my mom or anyone like her is familiar with stuxnet or anything like it. I could tell her about it, but she’d be taking my word for it and have no way to judge whether my extrapolation to AI made sense.
Second, I think almost nobody can admit to themselves a time when they were outmanoeuvred by someone else. Normal people are quick to rationalize failure. I didn’t get the promotion but my coworker did, well that’s because they’re a lying bitch, or because they had the unfair advantage of being friends with the boss, or actually I never really wanted it anyway.
“Well, AI will be the most lying bitch, and it will be friend with all bosses”
Put that on a solid magenta background and post to Facebook, and you’ve convinced every mom in the country I think.
idea to make a thing that happened believable:
- stuxnet has a wikipedia page that is easy to point to. Pointing to things as a reflex sometimes works.
- there are perhaps some videos/books that are aimed at the general public, are somewhat entertaining for the general public, and have a visible view count of >1M.
- Maybe it was covered by one of the news channels that the general public person acknowledges as existing and a valid source of real things.
I think for the “scary hacks” category, it is worth coming up with 3-5 very different illustrative cases, and looking for ways to connect them to other things the person (likely) thinks are real.
I think it is worth doing the same with pandemics. (for instance there was the black death, there was the spanish flu, there was covid, which (depending on the politics of the person) was acknowledged as having been engineered)
I think cases of “going hard” by human groups are worth knowing about.
I think if some such cases are very useful for making the case that ASI could win in a fight against humanity, it would be worth first getting really good at establishing and discussing many such cases in a fun and believable way, and then once you succeed at enough of them to establish their existence, you can talk about how an ASI could pull these human-pullable levers.