this post will have a net effect of slightly Red-partisanizing AI safety
I view myself as a Red tribe partisan and diplomat: I am a member of Red, but hope to conduct diplomacy with Blue on issues like AI Safety. I did take pains to be diplomatic in this essay, but it would be counterproductive for a diplomat to conceal his own loyalties. If I concede too many points to Blue, my own tribe will reject any compromise I manage to negotiate.
Prediction: there will soon be a spate of breakthroughs in computational astronomy, achieved by a combination of LLM-powered coding/ML and large astronomical datasets like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. There might be an opening for amateurs to make an impact here.
Animal rights and fiscal conservatism are extremely partisan
I don’t see this. My criterion for whether an issue is partisan is whether politicians mention it in a speech attacking their rivals. I classify climate change, immigration, DEI, transgender rights, abortion, and gun rights as partisan issues on that basis. I don’t see AI Safety or animal welfare as being in this category, and I separately recognize those issues as supremely important in the present moment.
There is strong nascent pro-animal-welfare sentiment on the right. Here are two tweets from arch-MAGA commentator Mike Cernovich:
Pigs are as emotionally aware as dogs are and a lot of 🐖 🐷 🐽 are raised in situations we would consider animal abuse and outright torture.
Eating pigs, by any objective measure, is equivalent to eating dogs. … Pigs are actually more conscious than dogs are.
One might suspect that if this is the case, the problem isn’t the leftists.
Sure, the problem is the ambient Culture War. I wrote about how we need a Culture War ceasefire to address many goals, including AI safety, animal welfare and just fixing the national debt; any reasonable observer must view these goals as far more important than any of the petty priorities of the political conflict.
It is very ominous to me that both of these politicians are on the far left side of the political spectrum. This will tend to partisanize ideas about AI Safety, in a completely unnecessary way, since AI is very unpopular among the conservative base.
More programming: As discussed above, I’ll be scheduling frequent writing clinics
One of the core tensions of Inkhaven is that you’re supposed to be doing a lot of writing, but there are also many fun and compelling activities competing for your time.
There’s a tension between the future environmental concerns and the idea that most people won’t be able to contribute much after 3 years or so. Valar Atomics and Terraform Industries are two companies that will substantially address most clean energy concerns if they succeed; there are likely many others that I don’t know about. It’s very hard for me to believe that those efforts will fail in a world where they gain access to unlimited scientific brainpower. I think the post-AGI world will have many problems, but the nature of those problems is extremely hard to predict in advance.
I would argue that a presidential candidate mentioning AI Safety in a speech would be extremely bad for the cause of AI Safety. Because if s/he mentions it in a speech, the goal will be to score points against the Enemy Team, and thus will tend to partisanize the issue.
Separately, I encourage AI Safety forecasters to dedicate copious amounts of brainpower to gaming out different strategies for AI regulation, and then present the best strategy to smart DC insiders, regardless of party, to implement behind the scenes. Many regulatory schemes will be calamitous, either backfiring or surrendering the lead in AI development to foreign rivals. But it’s plausible that smart rationalists could come up with a good plan.
One mechanism that likely kept people trapped in the cities is that living as a hunter-gatherer was technically difficult: you needed a ton of skills that were difficult to learn if you had grown up in the city. A naive urbanite who hoped to escape the misery of city life by running off to the hills would likely just starve, die of thirst, or get killed by wild animals.
In 2007, 3.2% of US chickens were cage-free, but now, as a result of corporate campaigns, only 45% are
I think you misplaced the word “only” in this sentence?
I define a cult as a professionally managed social environment. Because of the enormous importance of having a good social environment, normal people might very plausibly and rationally want to be part of a cult and be willing to pay someone to lead it. Of course, for the same reason, performing this role badly might to horrific outcomes (just like medical or legal malpractice). The reason the word “cult” has negative connotation is partly due to vividness bias (most cults are just living happily out on a farm somewhere, without bothering anyone, and we never hear about them), and partly due to a circular pattern where society stigmatizes cultishness, so the people who join/create them are predisposed to mental illness.
I would pay good money to be part of a “cult” that emphasized healthy living, non-consumerism, animal ethics, environmentalism, and community life. Yes, it would have rules that would seem weird to outsiders (e.g. no jewelry, no visible brand logos, veganism or strict diet codes, you have to hike 10 miles / day), but that is literally the whole point: I want to be in a community that upholds such values.
in practice, human morality is a kind of status game that actively disvalues careful strategy and philosophy in most places
I would build on this: human morality is deeply corrupted by politics, and our political culture is arguably worse than it’s been in decades.
It’s a bit of an orthogonal point, but I wrote Urgent Coordination Problems Require Narrow Mandates in response to Eliezer’s original post.
tl;dr : if you want people to accept some kind of universal mechanism to solve a coordination problem (e.g. AI development treaty), you’d better be very careful to ensure that the proposed agency has an extremely narrow mandate.
The thing that I am preaching here is that people are different, so… maybe there actually are many people like that.
There is a general ethical problem in our society: do high IQ, high human capital people with impulse control have a responsibility to model behavior that will also work for those without the positive traits? Or should the lucky upper echelon feel okay to conduct behaviors that are safe for them but risky for the lower groups?
Examples: recreational drug use, single parenting, pursuing a career in the arts, dropping out of school, polyamory, etc
UBI-dependent lifestyles will likely fall into a similar pattern. Some people will thrive; some will be destroyed by UBI. But it’s hard to legislate that some people should get UBI and others not (for their own safety/benefit).
America invented freedom. Switzerland then took those ideals and tried to refine them. The obvious big difference: Switzerland built its system on civil rather than common law.
To me the obvious big difference is just size: Switz is 10 million, the US is 35x larger in population, and also far larger in geography. Switz is also actually federalist, instead of pretending to be, as in the US, to the extent that nobody really knows who the president is.
Marcus Aurelius … was succeeded by his son Commodus.
Rephrasing of your motto: don’t build a huge empire, because eventually that empire will grow corrupt. It’s better to have an Archipelago of City-states, because when an individual city decays, it’s not a global catastrophe.
But Eliezer seems to think that we need a global regulatory agency for AI. It’s a plausible enough idea, but what happens when the agency falls into corruption like all the other crappy 3-letter agencies run by the US and the UN?
This trend is actually kind of good for AI safety...? Because it means you just have to control and regulate N frontier labs, with N=4 or so, not billions of individuals who are potentially crazy.
Create a global AI non-proliferation treaty, make sure the strongest models are only available to the big labs, and make sure the big labs follow some highly cautious and bureaucratic process when rolling out a new model. It won’t be easy to implement, but it’s not inconceivable.
Perhaps “pre-existing” would be a better word choice than “innate”, but I did write a whole paragraph about why Red is inclined to oppose AI (opposition to social upheaval, suspicion of Big Tech, etc).