My go to karaoke song, by the way, is Bohemian Rhapsody.
Ok, so that leaves 3 possibilities. What’s the breakdown between them?
You’re an awesome singer
You don’t care how you sound to others
You know no one will care how you sound because they’ll all be joining in with you regardless
Yes
There is something very strange about being willing to form illegal cartels and frame competitors with false accusations, while being unwilling to directly deceive customers. Why one but not the other? There’s a lot of room to explore and learn more.
I’d be curious too. If we were talking about humans, I would guess that it’s that one group has (been) chosen to play the game, and the other has not, combined with a possibly unhealthy dose of “It is not in heaven,” or “All’s fair in love and war.”
I also get the impression that whether land is scarce during takeoff is not a settled question, but I don’t have a strong argument on this.
My expectation is no, at least not until after the point where humans don’t get to make the decisions if AI refuses. Mineral and energy scarcity, sure. Insufficient equipment and infrastructure of various sorts, yes. But I don’t imagine AGI or early ASI needing more than 1% of the planet’s surface on the very high end, probably 1-4 OOMs less, and that’s not enough to make land itself scarce.
Yes, this is true. Unfortunately these lands require active management, so one has to ask where the capital and labor is coming from.
I think the answer is “more AI.” At least in the sense that if AI can’t handle that, then we’re probably not far enough into takeoff that it’s a pressing urgent need.
I do agree on recognizing the different sources of value, and think people stay vague precisely because they all overlap in messy ways and because building a quorum of stakeholders behind conservation efforts has historically required some strange compromises and contortions. Tourism is often an easy sell at local scale. Ecosystem services are big in aggregate but too diffuse in most cases to be compelling to real decision makers. Existence value appeals to appreciation of the sacred if you can credibly claim such social high ground in the face of near-mode counterarguments. I think option value gets underrated because most people don’t have enough imagination and foresight to anticipate future capabilities or challenges and the needs they might generate.
What is it humans are currently using the land for, and why? Industry, which is more efficient when concentrated but harder to manage in ways automation can improve. Housing, which can be concentrated very effectively in ways that put people closer to things they care about, for which automation can alleviate many but not all of the downsides. But mostly it’s farming, which can be made a lot more land and chemical and water efficient by bringing it indoors and vertical (if you’re not constrained by electricity and labor).
AI radically alters a lot of the constraints under which these decisions are being made. Specifically, it changes which things are scarce.
One of the many worries is that the greatly increased value AI gains from industrial activity would threaten the biosphere, and having lots of conservation land plausibly elevates the importance and urgency of that.
FWIW I do have nice short useful mental handles for a lot of the things I’ve learned from this community, many of which come from things written in this community, but they make no sense to anyone who can’t unpack them into a version at least as long as that and aren’t useful to those who haven’t done the thinking. Tsuyoku naritai, whale cancer, you get about five words, expecting short inferential distances, double illusion of transparency. Things like that.
Back during covid I once quoted Zvi to a friend who didn’t read his stuff or LW about “pretending to pretend to try to try” and she was thrilled that there was some audience, anywhere, that could read that and nod along because it made sense to them. And it does make sense. You just need a lot of context to see it.
MV here I think explains why. You don’t need slogans to explain things that are obvious to children. And you maybe can’t make short slogans that are both immediately comprehensible and sufficiently accurate counters to the slogans people make to confuse others into disbelieving the things that are obvious to children.
Well, actually, there are a few, but I think they sound a bit silly and childish and condescending unless you know what they’re a response to. For example:
Death is bad.
If the sky is blue, I want to believe the sky is blue, and if the sky is not blue, I want to believe the sky is not blue.
If Hitler says the sun is shining that doesn’t make it dark out.
What is true is already so, and admitting it doesn’t make it worse.
in time period 1 you would sell to everyone at the monopoly price, but having saturated that market you would then lower the price, and then do it again, and do this all quickly, until price was equal to marginal cost
Isn’t this basically the hangman’s paradox in reverse? Each and every period where a company could offer you an above-MC price, you could refuse, and so you wait until the final period to buy. But instead that time never comes, and you are in fact surprised.
That’s fair. It may not be worth the effort, and I say that as someone who very much enjoys it. So much of what was originally unique about it has diffused into the broader genre that either you like his style or you don’t.
optimal solutions might involve people believing something unfounded, and rationality will never converge to this solution
The fact that we are here discussing this is proof by demonstration that rationality can notice the problem.
The (supposed) fact that we cannot immediately implement the obvious solution is a flaw in the structure of the human mind, which is a problem rationality can solve, with sufficient effort, should we decide to do so.
The assertion that there is no other solution available using our current minds does not (AFAICT) follow, and relies on facts not currently in evidence.
Tolkien is better if you read it not as novels, but as histories, written in-world by some series of imperfect historians.
This implies a likely 2.5 yr time for ‘develop capabilities silently’ during which apparently even internal deployments are subject to random restrictions. That’s a long time for a period in which ability to raise money, backed by rising revenue as products improve, is otherwise a huge factor in rate of advancement.
Plausibly, arguably true. Also plausibly could cause the entities that attempt to achieve it to suffer severe repercussions, lose all influence that would enable achieving such ends, cease to exist, etc. Therefore even if true should arguably not be discussed in public, and would need to be approached extremely carefully and circumspectly.
“It’s like they just speak in different languages,” the source said
Ah yes, a problem no national government has ever had to grapple with before. No known solutions, clearly.
Ok, this makes sense, thanks. I do think the difference s that I see more of a separation thany you do between opposition to AI-in-general and opposition to data center construction. I agree there are plenty of people who oppose the latter because of the former, or oppose the former because of the latter, but I think there are also somewhat distinct groups that oppose one much more than the other.
I also don’t think supporting various local bans on data center construction, or cancellationnof particular projects, is likely to have significant impact on either the normie or doomer non-local concerns, aside from preventing many local benefits (tax revenue) and eliminating some of the chance for local concerns to influence how AI and data centers are governed.
If I take this position fully, then it’s not actually possible for humans to avoid lying. Our communication channels are too low bandwidth to transmit everything we know that might be relevant to someone else, even if we really wanted to. Most of the time we don’t think about this, because we all have an intuitive sense of when we’ve shared enough to be not-lying-by-societal-standards and only call it out when either it’s blatant or we disagree on the margin about where in the vague boundary region we should draw a bright line. Regardless, for practical purposes we do need to draw a line, and I don’t think the one gestured at here is workable.
I’m curious which seven you have in mind? The ones I generally see are water use, energy prices, noise, air pollution, aesthetics, climate change impact, and labor market impact, of which I would argue the first 5 are primarily local concerns.
Or maybe this is a definitional difference I didn’t catch. I see people expressing much more global-impact opposition to AI in the abstract (concentration of wealth/power, effects on education, effects on the arts, slop, etc.) than I do to data center construction in specific places. Now I’m curious how much real overlap there is between these two things.
I agree, and I would add that today many people aren’t thinking about what system a mind is embedded in, and are trying to define AGI based on elicited capabilities instead of what a mind could do in the right environment.
Human baseline comparison: When did humans first become able to design rockets to the moon?
Normal answer: the 1960s.
Contrarian answer 1: Sometime in the paleolithic, we just didn’t have an environment that elicited it until the 20th century.
Contrarian answer 2: We still can’t. There is no human you can put in a room with a scratchpad and the instructions “Design a rocket to the moon” and expect them to produce a working plan that, when executed independently by them, reliably achieves that goal.
I regularly see the equivalent of all three of these in discussions and definitions of AGI. I suspect there is at least one existing model that, 50 years from now, we would say unambiguously ‘counts’ as AGI by analogy to the second definition above, after a proof by demonstration of giving it the right environment. I would not be surprised if there are at some point ASIs (under the first or second definition) that wouldn’t even count as AGI by analogy to the third definition above.
There may be something to this idea, but I think the answer to “Why not?” centers around the fact that the normie opposition to data centers is about local impacts, so local opposition is net positive by that reasoning. The doomer’s opposition is global, so a local ban (where anything not almost-global is local) is plausibly neutral (data centers move elsewhere) to negative (where you can’t subject them to local laws). A bit like how natural gas infrastructure can be net positive or net negative for climate change impact, and opposing such without a larger-scale, coherent, effective strategy can be a mistake.
True, good point. But if I try to imagine the OP taking that route, as a young new driver unfamiliar with the route, in the Philly metro area, I find it hard to imagine that going well? And I would expect them to anticipate the not-going-well and thereby avoid getting into that situation?
The entire region is extremely frustrating for outsiders to navigate even with GPS, and in my experience maps and asking for directions don’t help much. My dad used to be a wholesaler on Long Island, he dispatched trucks to Philly all the time and knew the whole region’s highway system very well, but pre-GPS whenever I asked for directions they ended up being unusably inadequate for one reason or another if I lacked sufficient local knowledge. Otherwise an exit closure or wrong turn became almost unrecoverable. Granted, I have an unusually terrible direction sense.
“Explanandum” seems like a word I should have come across before, but I didn’t previously have any short handle for the concept. Thanks!