QI will help to survive not for the whole civilisation, but only for the one observer. He will be either last human in the post-apocalyptic world, or AI.
avturchin
Karma: 3,507
AI safety in the age of neural networks and Stanislaw Lem 1959 prediction
The only such future is where he will be able constantly upgrade himself , and become a posthuman or AI-upload. After that stage, he will be able to create new beings. Basically it means that QI remote future is very positive.
Mini-conference “Near-term AI safety”
edited: Problem with posting solved
Got it.
I think that information that Japan has to increase its money supply was not unique, but Japan regulator was not able to do so until recently for several reasons:
Japan had agreement with US to prevent artificial lowering its exchange rate. Japan economic miracle was based on artificial lowering of exchange rate, so increasing the money supply is one of the ways to lower the rate. After Japan in 80s agreed to stop lowering it exchange rate (under treat of sanctions), its economy stopped to grow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord
Japan has largest public debt (200 per cent) with almost zero interest. Increasing money supply may increase interest and result in runaway collapse of debt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_Japan
“Yen carry-trade”. Carry trade is one of the most fuck up things you could do with your own economy. It is borrowing money in yens to invest them in dollar actives. Most Japanese wives are in debt as they do so, and they earn on it because of low interest rate and expectation of lower yen exchange rate in the future. It all resulted, however, in that yen rate behave counter-intuitively: it fails on good news and grows on bad. If increasing money supply is good news, it will be bad news for carry trade and bad news for Japan. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/11/yen-jumps-against-dollar-as-carry-trade-wanes-despite-bojs-negative-rates-policy.html
It all is probably much more complex than I remember from the time I was interested in the Japanese economy. However, it looks like the situation has changed recently:
1) Japan economic growth and export is not a problem now, as China now is the problem. So probably Japan got right to lower yen.
2) After 2008 US increased its money supply several times without damaging its inflation rate or interest rates, because it used Goldilocks principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_economy Basically, all new money exactly covered bad debts on banks balance sheets and didn’t spilled much in the markets. European central bank did the same and it is not surprised that Japan did it too.
For one of this reasons, Japan central bank probably decided that risks of increasing money supply is worse a try.
This is how I understand it and I would like be corrected from the one who knows more about Japanese economy.
I liked the text, but I don’t like that liked it, as I started to suspect that rationality movement may fail into the trap discussed into the text.
That is, the main art of a rationalist is to write rationality blog posts, and all the system is optimised to write better, more beuatiful and more likable posts.
As a result, it is great writing school, but it was not intended to be a school of text writing. It is inadequate equlibria for the rationality community. Shorter and less beutiful texts with condensed TL;DR may help to cure the beauty.
I have unpublished text on the topic and will put a draft online in the next couple of weeks, and will apply it to the competition. I will add URL here when it will be ready.
BTW, I stopped having depression after started megadosing vutamin D a couple years ago. Not very sure abouat causal connection, but it is the main big changes in my regiment. I take around 10 000 units of D once a week. I also spent one grand on LED.
Thanks! I will reread it and submit soon.
Put it in all relevant facebook groups?
The interesting question is what could be such a “fire alarm event”, which will immediately change public attitude.
I see two variants:
1) Appearing of home robots able to speak and activating of Uncanny valley reaction in humans, who will start to feel the danger.
2) AI related catastrophic accident, like Narrow AI virus attack on a nuclear power station. The event could be called “AI Chernobyl”.
Global catastrophic AI could appear, unfortunately, without any such harbingers.
If we try to have a dialog with AI sceptics about what should be regarded as AI fire alarm, it may be useful.
I think somewhere in the previous writing EY said that by printing money a central bank could increase prices, but it occured to me that it may be not true, because the prices will simultaneously fall in a harder currnecy, and thus hyperinflaion is deflation.
It reminds me the time when we in Russia had hyperinflation in 1990s, which also was deflation in more real assets. That is, Russian central bank printed so much money, that the prices constantly rose. However, the exchange rate to dollar grew even quicker and dollar prices constantly fell. Everybody started using dollar prices, written beneath ruble prices. The economy becomes a complete mess and collapsed in 1998 after failed attempt to stabilize ruble exchange rate using government short term debt.
The same could happen if too much dollars will be printed in the US—it could result in the deflation in gold and bitcoin prices.
Even now a lot of left economists, like Glaziev, ask Russian central bank to increase the money supply and to lend the money to money-starved factories. However, it is also well known that if money will be lended to the factories, they will be immideately converted in dollars, and this will crash russian ruble exchange rate. That is why left economists urges to ban dollar and other foreign currencies in Russia, and only after it to start to print money. However, such drastic measures will kill the economy as investment will stop.
He wrote:
“Q. What if I say I’ll print ten dollars and the market still thinks that’s not enough?
A. Create even more money. Look, imagine creating a quadrillion dollars. Prices would go up then, right? I mean, a 12-year-old raised by goldbugs could understand that part… uh, it’s possible you might need to add a 12-year-old raised by goldbugs to your advisory staff.” https://www.facebook.com/groups/674486385982694/permalink/896559330442064/
It look like he thinks that after printing a quadilion dollars, it will increase prices, but in fact only nominal prices will grow, but the prices in a harder currency will fail, and the market will be able to find the harder currency. For decades it was gold, but after 1970s central banks did exacltly what EY advises—they incresed fiat money supply, while playing against gold. There was elaborated scheme for lowering gold price by using gold lending and virtual gold, but it failed around 2008, and the price of gold jumped from 300 to 2000.
Yes, it looks like Western central banks try a Goldilock approach—to print enough money to start inflation but not enough to cause catastrophic consequences. However, nobody knows when the consequences will be become catastrophic as it is non-lineary event, when people lose the faith in the money stability and start to change all of them into a harder currency.
But raising nominal prices is economically useless if it is not the healthy inflation.
One could add 000 behind each prices number (thus 10 will be 10 000), something similar to denomination, but in the other diretion—thus nominal prices will grow 1000 times, but it will not affect economy.
I would add that the most uncertain thing is the interaction between different x-risks, as it seems that most of them could happen in very short period of time, like 10-20 years just before creation of the powerful AI. I call this epoch “oscillations before the Singularity” and for me the main question is will we be able to survive it.