I like the idea of cocktail party investment advice as an economic bellwether. That’s a good observation.
CRISPY
Karma: 37
There’s no hard delimiter on financially induced sector collapse, and it’s often not directly attributable to the sector that collapses. The dot com crash was tied to federal reserve interest rate increases that resulted in a sell off as investors moved towards less speculative investments.
AI is in a fairly safe position right now through sheer variety of vested interests. Government, construction, infrastructure, computing hardware, software, and early corporate adopters of AI are all doing everything they can to keep the ball rolling. They’ve crossed a line where sunk costs have an outsized role in future decisions. There’s also the wildcard of AI being deemed a strategic defense asset.
The present state of spending will continue until there’s some catastrophic event that scares people off or public pressure forces a reduction in scale.
My money is on public pressure leading to change. Data centers are being publicly subsidized and the general public is beginning to push back. One or two public service commissions refusing to comply with energy and water subsidies will lead to wide scale changes that will put the brakes on. Things will move out of startup mode and into the realm of actual business.
You were right. I was interested and genuinely enjoyed the article. I hope there is a Part III. I am interested to know about your personal approach.
Omelas can also be seen as plausibility through imperfection. People have trouble accepting perfection. Imperfection adds a layer of realism that anchors people to a story. Without imperfection, there’s nothing to talk about.
Reza Aslan cleverly applies the concept to deities, but it works with pretty much everything. Looking gift horses in the mouth is human nature. There’s a direct relationship between an ideal, and the level of effort put into the inquisition the ideal is subjected to in search of the imperfection. There’s also an expectation that the closer something is to utopia, the worse the imperfection will be.Mark Twain said “What do they say about a man with no vices?” Churchill said he didn’t trust a man without any vices. Both are saying the same thing. The same thing as Le Guin. Omelas isn’t interesting until suffering is introduced. Omelas is a fantasy that’s wholly unremarkable without the imperfection of the girl’s plight. The imperfection makes it relatable.
The error in the analysis seems to be the assumption that the value of the story is in the suffering. I don’t think that has to be the case. Omelas is a valid critique of cynicism. Our innate need to find fault simply to give ourselves something to complain about. Our refusal to accept something unless it’s damaged.
The eldritch horror analogy is interesting. I like it overall. If we extend the analysis to include not just the gods, but the people involved, I believe it adds another dimension to the discussion.
In eldritch horror there are rarely any good guys. Arguably there are none. There are typically two groups of actors, and the rest of humanity is an ignorant mass concerned with mundane matters. Innocent of the knowledge of the supermundane.
The two groups of actors are the priests, and the individuals who seek to thwart the priests using some other eldritch power. The priests are universally bad. They worship their god at the expense of everything, and everyone, else. The oppositional force, let’s call them adepts, seek to keep the priests in check. They do not worship the eldritch gods, but they do use esoteric knowledge of other eldritch gods in furtherance of their mission. There is a semblance of altruism in their opposition to the priests, but it’s more accurate to view their behavior as the cost of their education in their arts. A moral obligation that comes with their pursuit of knowledge for their own ends.
The priests and the adepts both use their beliefs as mechanisms to bypass moral and ethical considerations. They have a higher calling or self imposed obligation they use to justify their actions. The only people left untouched by the eldritch horrors are the people who don’t get involved. The central lesson in the genre is that no good comes from getting involved.
Since this essay is about getting involved, I think we must ask what the goal is, and where the solution lies. Are we to play the role of the priest or the adept? Are we accelerating the rise of eldritch horror, or are we shaping the horror to benefit ourselves while minimizing the impact to non-participants?
Once a role is chosen, the location of the solution must be determined, and here, I believe, is the crux of all this. Is the eldritch horror actually the problem, or is the problem the people involved? By targeting the god we’re really no different than the priests who use the god to justify immortality. By targeting the god we’re just continuing an age old game of making war on ideas while the priests are out conjuring new gods. By targeting the priests we’re crossing a line that, historically, hasn’t resulted in much good, and has created suffering so profound we define our temporal position by it.
So what is the point? We’re either wasting our time in an eternal philosophical conflict or we’re engaging in an eternal physical conflict and the moral quagmire that entails. Does reason truly demand we get involved, or are we citing reason as an excuse to pursue personal gain?
Within the genre of eldritch horror, reason would seem to dictate no action. There is limited room for the role of the scribe who records the deeds of the priests and adepts. That allows for intellectual satisfaction, but the neutrality required is notoriously difficult to maintain. If the compulsion to act cannot be overcome, perhaps a gatherer and recorder of information is a viable option.
I’m pleased this got some traction. One of my largest concerns with AI policy development is that state level decision makers will not recognize the threat until catastrophic damage has been done.
Identifying the need for chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare treaties was fairly universal, as there were real examples of their risks available for all to see. Without that tangible evidence, there’s a risk of incremental disaster like we’re seeing with climate change policies.
A policy accelerationist is probably my biggest concern. A group that creates a problem in order to highlight the need to protect against even larger disasters. Like the Gruinard Island soil incidents.
Any movement towards redlines and international safeguards is a good thing.
A central assumption here is that AI will continue to function in a unfettered way. Where each user is able to construct a bespoke digital world for themselves based on all the variation access to unlimited information can provide.
I don’t think that idea reflects reality. Historically, when it is possible to limit information, authorities will do so in whatever ways forward their agenda, or retards the agenda of an opponent or enemy.
Instead of a bespoke microcosm based on personal values, authorities will simply prevent access to information that is not compliant with the agenda. Trends towards monopolistic capitalism mixed and religious bias will result in a monolithic AI that doesn’t just ignore things (like evolution) but attacks the ideas and people who support them.
We’re already seeing a measurable reduction in original online content and ideas. That’s unlikely to change. The whole thing is speeding towards a single point that authoritarian types have been gagging for as long as literacy has existed. Instead of insular enclaves, I see an entire insular society living in a constant crisis of verisimilitude and outright propaganda where error checking is entirely self referential and wholly circular.
Conservatism isn’t about keeping things as they are. It’s about regression into a gilted fictional past. Intentionally introducing bias into a system in order to transit to a nonexistent temporal location as a reactionary response seems like a strange thing to do in general. It seems like an exceedingly strange thing to do to a conglomeration of logical procedures.
The entire notion is inherently regressive and reactionary. It’s coping with fear of an unknown future by appealing to an idealized past. Intentionally baking fear into the system eliminates the goal of an inherently progressive system that is, by definition and design, intended to be in a continuous state of incremental improvement.Systematic Utopianism predicated on fictions fabricated in correlation fallacy does not seem like a pursuit of reason; therefore hostile to AGI.
Another commonality between the Hasidim and LDS is disassociation from society at large. It’s more than localized consolidation of theologically aligned individuals. Both set themselves apart from society, essentially othering the majority of society. Whether they deem others to be merely goyim (Hasidim) or Gentiles (LDS), or the more extreme views tamei or unclean, a major emphasis is placed on downgrading those outside their faith.
That’s not to say individuals from either religion are viewing outsiders as lesser, necessarily, but from a group level the othering of outsiders is a key component in community building and cohesion. By establishing a state of being which outsiders cannot attain, the scale and scope of the community is severely limited. Community members are forced to look within the community to satisfy innate needs. Companionship, entertainment, education, reproduction, et al can only be obtained within the community.
On a small scale, these practices are very effective from a community perspective and they have limited negative impact outside the community. But at scale, things get complicated, and ugly. It’s not a big step from viewing people as unclean to becoming a cleaner. Highly insular communities are not, sociologically, far off from ethnic supremacy ideologies. The red headed stepchild of tradition is blood purity.
People tend to underestimate the scale of inter-cultural prehistoric networks. Humans are exceptionally good at sourcing materials.
I really like the mental picture of everyone waiting on Bob to return from the wilds with the special stones for the hunting points (or whatever).
You should look into a guy called Abraham Vereide. He is almost single handedly responsible for the development of Evangelical Christianism.
He’s the guy who rebranded Fundamentalism as Evangelicalism (via his proxy Billy Graham). He’s also the guy who introduced the multilevel marketing of planting as a business model for Jesus. Soteriological Amway. That’s why the podcasts you’re listening to are so filled with “growth words”. It’s a dodge around talking openly about money.
He’s a really interesting guy. He came to D.C. with FDR, and he stayed in the Oval Office until his death in 1969. The adoption of the National Motto and putting it on the money was his doing. He represented Truman during the drafting of the UN Charter at Dumbarton Oaks and pushed David Ben-Gurion to suggest Israel as the name for the new country (it was going to be Judah. The name Israel was a huge surprise for everyone, even the proto-Israelis). He also founded the National Prayer Breakfast that made religion the gatekeeper of American politics.
It’s near impossible to overstate the scale of Vereide’s influence on the United States. Regardless of how one feels about him, he can’t be overlooked in any thorough examination of Evangelical Christianism.
This is very interesting. Debriefing summaries like this are very useful in assessing the state of play. Information like this is typically kept confidential, so thank you for sharing.
I think I drew different conclusions from the information than a need to act on legislators. This article highlights vulnerabilities in the systems that are supposed to protect us. If you were able to use FUD to get tangible action from officials, then other lobbyists using positive incentives, should be able to get even greater action from a greater number of officials.
It seems to me the threat is more the lobbyists than their customers. Organizing action at lobbyists who are enabling things that pose an existential threat to civilization is perhaps a more structured approach that reduces the advantages provided by the customers of the lobbyists. Trying to get Whitehall to act for the Greater Good is high minded, but is it practical, given the ease with which they can be spurred to action?
The premise of
I think you’re correct. There’s a synergistic feedback loop between alarmism and social interaction that filters out pragmatic perspectives. Creating the illusion that the doom surrounding any given topic more prevalent than it really is, or even that it’s near universal.
Even before the rise of digital information the feedback phenomenon could be observed in any insular group. In today’s environment where a lot of effort goes into exploiting that feedback loop it requires a conscious effort to maintain perspective, or even remain aware that there are other perspectives.
The argument against R&D of contemporary systems because of future systems capabilities has always been shortsighted. Two examples of this are nuclear weapons controls and line level commenting of programming code.
In nuclear weapons development the safety advocates argued for safety measures on the weapons themselves to prevent misuse. They were overruled by arguments that future systems would be so physically secure that they couldn’t be stolen and the controls were centralized to the launch control process, usually with one person there having ultimate control. Proliferation and miniaturization eventually made theft and misuse a major risk and an entire specialized industry sprang up to develop and implement Permissive Action Links (PALs).
It wasn’t until the late nineteenth 1980s that the entire U.S. nuclear weapons inventory was equipped with PALs. Which is nuts. Even then, malfunction concerns were paramount, and they continue to be concerns, creating real risks in deterrence based defenses. Even today PALs are still being upgraded for reliability. It was the fact that PALs had to be retrofitted that was responsible for the 70 year timeframe for implementation of devices with questionable reliability. Safety R&D as a primary R&D focus during the pioneering era of nuclear weapons could have prevented that mess. Trying to shoehorn it in later was unbelievably expensive, difficult, and created strategic threats.
The finance and defense sectors have a similar problem with software. High turnover iterations led to a culture that eschewed internal comments in the code. Now making changes creates safety concerns that are only overcome with fantastically complex and expensive testing regimes that take so long to complete the problem they are trying to solve has been fixed another way. It’s phenomenally wasteful. Again, future safety was ignored because if arguments based in future capabilities.
Most importantly however, is that R&D of contemporary systems is how we learn to study future systems. Even though future generations of the technology will be vastly different, they are still based, ultimately, on today’s systems. By considering future safety as a contemporary core competency the way is being paved for the study and innovation of future systems and preventing waste from adhoc shoehorning exercises in future.
One of the many things I learned during my wife’s cancer treatment is that healthcare is designed with the cost development systems insulated to resist external influence. There is little accountability for the base cost architecture, often to the point where no one can identify the architect.
This makes addressing inefficiencies, exploitations, and shortcomings almost impossible.
From a regulatory standpoint, legislative action has little to target. The doctor, the technicians, the hospital, the supply vendor, the pharmacist, and even the insurers rarely set their own prices. Between every transaction there is at least one middleman who manages the cost and often their pricing guidelines are set by yet another middleman. The structure eliminates the cash flow variable from the parties in direct patient contact and leaves only the profit component as a variable. This undermines free market cost controls and performance incentives.For hypothetical example, a hospital billing for a $10000 procedure does not receive that $10000. Third, fourth, or fifth parties receive the money and redistribute it back to everyone in the chain. That means the hospital is left with a negotiable amount of just $600 (above the line, $200 below). This phenomenally granular disintermediation of the cost structure means no party has a vested interest in individual transactions. There’s simply not enough money at that level to invest in higher stakes negotiations one might expect in a $10000 transaction. This makes volume the success defining metric.
As I was spending countless days in hospital over the course of a year, I started counting keystrokes and mouse clicks performed by various hospital staff. Roughly 60% of all computer interaction was performed solely for billing purposes, not patient care. Billing purposes are also the primary driver in wait times. The doctors review patient records before each visit and spend much of that time reviewing what treatments they are allowed to use based on the patient’s financial means and their insurer. The highest performing doctors (a volume metric) are the ones who memorize the treatment approval criteria and don’t have to refer to the computer as often.
The scope of the disintermediation is vast, so more examples are not useful. At the end of the day, what it boils down to is that the individual parties involved in the minutiae of patient care are insulated from each other. This makes YIMBY activism ineffective because enacting change that way only affects one tiny group within the chain and everyone else adjusts to compensate. It’s like trying to eat Jello with a cooked noodle. Huge effort with little to no reward.
I do not have any reasonable solution. Americans have proven time and time again that adopting healthcare like developed countries have is unacceptable. The focus has to change to actual healthcare where patient outcomes are important (as opposed to focusing on billing outcomes for providers). Increased frequency of Luigi Lobbying is unreasonable, but I think more people are beginning to see it as justified.
1. **Religious texts and violence**: While Abrahamic texts do contain violent passages, characterizing the “overwhelming majority” as “justifications for genocide and ethnic supremacy” is factually incorrect. These texts contain diverse content including ethical teachings, poetry, historical narratives, and legal codes. The violent passages represent a minority of the content.
The overwhelming majority of the praise hymns, poetry, and historical narratives are praising and expressing gratitude for genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, and violence and the deity they claim caused those things to happen on their behalf. The ethical teachings are ethnic supremacy practices that are reserved solely for use by the practitioners.
2. **”2,000 years of the worst violence in history”**: This statement ignores that violence has existed in all human societies regardless of religion. It also overlooks that many historical atrocities were driven by non-religious ideologies (e.g., 20th century totalitarian regimes).It doesn’t ignore them at all, it categorizes them as they worst. Based on loss of life and economic costs the religious warfare and religious expansionism of the last 2,000 years has no precedent in history.
To ignore the religious basis for 20th century totalitarian regimes is to ignore history. The expansion of Christianism into the “godless Soviet Union” was a key element in Lebensraum and the ethnic persecutions of the NSDAP were entirely based in Christian doctrine. With “Gott mit uns” (God with us) on their belt buckles, Bibles that portrayed Jesus as an anti-Jewish warrior in their pockets, banners that read “Hitler’s fight and Luther’s teaching are the best defense for the German people”, they marched to a war that still defines the world today. They felt really good about it because, like Manifest Destiny, it was undertaken with religious authority. As everyone’s least favorite Austrian corporal said “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian.”.
3. **Religious monopoly on compassion**: While some religious groups do claim exclusive moral authority, many traditions explicitly teach universal compassion that extends beyond group boundaries. The comment oversimplifies complex theological positions across diverse traditions.They teach universal compassion under their own banner. The era of colonialism was viewed as compassionate. Forced birth is viewed as compassionate. Abrahamic religions view soteriological concerns compassion as outweighing physical compassion. Canada and Australia are still grappling with the compassionate religious programs that separated families. The U.S. has yet to address their own history of kidnapping and killing native children to advance their religious religious.
4. **Platonic origins claim**: The assertion that Abrahamic religions derived their concepts of compassion and empathy primarily from Plato is historically questionable. While Hellenistic philosophy influenced later Jewish and Christian thought, these traditions also drew from their own cultural and textual sources that pre-dated significant Greek influence.The Platonic concept of the imperishable soul as the basis for the fragmentation of Second Temple Judaism into the sects of the Saducees and Pharisees isn’t questioned by scholars. It marks the introduction of the “post-kleos society” into Canaan where (like in India and Greece) glory was previously obtainable through acts of tremendous bloodshed or martyrdom. The imperishable soul, and its continued existence in an afterlife, gave compassion and empathy persistent value that transferred to that afterlife both with the giver and recipient. For the first time, compassion had salvific value. Christianism took it even further and gamified compassion and empathy through their quantification. In both cases compassion and empathy resulted in direct reward in Plato’s afterlife. Prior to the introduction of Platonic concepts of compassion and empathy, the closest thing Judaism had was helping other Jews meet their religious obligations. A good introductory read on the topic is “Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife” by Bart Ehrman. It’s written in an approachable style and doesn’t require a lot of background on the subject.
5. **”Universal religion”**: This term is never clearly defined, making many of the claims difficult to evaluate precisely.
Agreed.
“Universal religion” has not taught or improved compassion or empathy. They teach that compassion and empathy are results of adhering to the religion. Membership confers the attributes of compassion and empathy, and minimizes or negates those attributes in non-members.
Religions aiming at universality are inherently unaccountable and divisive political entities. They devalue and dehumanize non-members and present clear and direct threats against those who oppose them, or do not want to comply with behavioral standards established by the worst kind of absentee manager.
Look at the Abrahamic cults. The overwhelming majority of their sacred texts are justifications for genocide and ethnic supremacy. Their brand of compassion and empathy have overseen 2,000 years of the worst violence in history. Christianism, for example, continues its tradition claiming to be the of arbiter of compassion, while simultaneously acknowledging compassion as something only they can provide.
It’s the pinnacle of right by might and it’s the worst possible model for training anything except an ethnic monoculture of racially similar ideologues with a penchant for violence.If you want to learn about compassion and empathy, it’s best to go to the source of it all. Plato, and the Platonic School, are where Second Temple Judaism and Christianism, and to a large degree Islam, got their concepts of compassion and empathy. They twisted and perverted Platonic ideals to suit their political aims. They took away the individual accountability and put all the responsibility on some nebulous, ever changing supreme being who, oddly enough, always agrees with them. Best to go to the source and leave the politics out of it.
From a sales perspective, I find myself bewildered by the approach this article takes to ethics. Deriding ethical concerns then launching into a grassroots campaign for fringe primate research into genetic hygiene and human alignment is nonstarter for changing opinions.
This article, and another here about germ engineering, are written as if the concepts are new. The reality is that these are 19th century ideas and early attempts to implement them are the reason for the ethical concerns.
Using the standard analogical language of this site, AI and gene editing are microwaves to the toaster oven of historically disastrous applied science programs like Lebensborn. Changing the technological methods of reaching an end do not obviate the ethical issues of the end itself. The onus of allaying those concerns is on the advocates and researchers, not society.
This article could very well have been written by Alfred Ploetz. That’s the barrier that has to be overcome. How is germ engineering, gene editing, and human alignment different from the programs that defined the 20th century as one of racial supremacy, genocide, and global warfare?
I know the answers to those questions. But I’m not the audience that needs to be convinced. What’s being presented here is not answering those questions. In fact, it’s doing the opposite. Anyone who has read Ploetz or Anastasius Nordenholz is going to, rightly, label this appeal to utopian reason as crypto-eugenics. It’s an inescapable certainty.Any argument that successfully overcomes the historically rooted ethical concerns must explain how the proposal is not Ploetz. How Nordenholz’s arguments against humanism and financial throttling of research won’t be reused to pursue supremacy ideologies. Those are the concerns, not incremental technological advances. The technology is just a distraction. The ethical questions must be answered before the technology can be considered.
The valuelessness of a treaty seems to be based on a binary interpretation of success. Treaties banning chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons development may not have been absolutely successful; they have been violated. But I don’t think many people would argue those restrictions haven’t been beneficial.
I’m not clear why a ban on developing AGI would not have similar value.