To anyone who has written publicly about how society needs to transform to survive ASI, or thinks that doing so is worthwhile, what is your theory of change?
The obvious one is to spray your ideas out into the world and hope that the right influential person takes them seriously at the right time. Milton Friedman describes this approach in the 1982 preface to Capitalism and Freedom:
Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically necessary.
But what if your theory is just noise that blocks out the better theories?[1] If this is worth worrying about, how would one assess that? Popularity could just be an indicator of storytelling ability, not how well a given person’s ideas will actually hold up.
Or is the main goal that we all debate together to work out the best idea? If that’s the case, should we stone anyone who defects by understating their uncertainty?
- ^
also, a country gets several shots at fixing its economy, but AI may be irretrievable. So trying several theories to see which one works might not be doable.
As someone who has loved the idea of enlightenment/individual transcendence for a long time, I now fall on the side of believing it is impossible.
Many famous historical figures were spiritually intense. This helped some (e.g. Muhammad, Louis IX) excel at rule and warfare. But nowadays the most effective people seem like they were born with some unusual inclination and just gradually accumulated power in their domain. In contrast, the most spiritually enlightened people are characterized by talking about enlightenment and spirituality all the time, rather than their preeminence in mathematics or philosophy or government.
I’m new to rationality, but I get the impression that rationalist training hasn’t been able to achieve individual transcendence either. “A Sense That More is Possible” was written 17 years ago, yet rationalists are not yet widely known for their evident auras of awesomeness, and CFAR declared “narrative bankruptcy” in 2022. If there has been some meaningful progress that a veteran could report, I’d be interested to hear it.
The biggest changes in society seem to come from new spiritual and social technologies (e.g. Christianity, academic institutions, capitalism, science) that coordinate behavior across many individuals rather than any individual awakening. In this sense maybe LessWrong is the significant innovation rather than rationalist training.