I have been following LessWrong for not that long compared to others, but definitely knew about it for a while, was interested in AI before GPT-3. Have visions of AI future that I don’t really see elsewhere.
I make interactive games (and fiction) on http://icely.itch.io/ all trying to do something innovative and new. (my newest game is an interactive fiction + puzzle game presented in a Discord-like interface)
Just thinking out loud here wondering how true this is, because of course incremental games are not quite the real world, and having unbelievable hours of ‘content’ often with stalling and offline time is the norm. Things are quite complex, but if you buy that it’s “easy” for someone to make money in a guru-style way (which I can get if people don’t, because of how many get rich quick scheme course scams there are) you probably believe more in RSI. Because you believe “oh you can use the money to easily automatically make more money”. The real world is of course complex and most jobs require a lot of manual “prove you are human” efforts in some indirect way, dealing with a lot of proprietary software.
In an incremental game you’re also stuck in a “log scale” sort of way. When you go from 10^10 to 10^12 it’s just numbers that change. But in some sort of proto-AGI system this could be very well seen as 100x of… something. That could represent ‘foom’ way more than it may appear on a log scale.
It is odd to think about, because we do seemingly have stuff like “100x in compute”, it just hasn’t seemed like the pieces have been put together for a kind of power-getting system, with computer use and command line use still seeming a little bit of a prototype compared to where it could be. This “100x” could mean nothing or everything depending on what it represents, like if it was “100x copies” for some botnet computer virus using a zero-day that could be the most relevant thing, whereas even something like “100x money” may not be scalable or dead-end without a good way to use it (in the same way as an incremental, lol).
I believe the reason people at the top keep saying stuff like “democratize AI” is because the concept of democracy has good mouthfeel and PR optics, even if heavily eroded by platform censorship, algorithms controlling what you see, news narratives, marketing-and-ads-to-push-perspectives, think tanks and PR teams coining phrases like ‘carbon footprint’, etc.
I also think it provides a feeling of “this is just normal technology, totally will not displace jobs or cause catastrophes”.
That being said, as other comments here say that “liberalism” is more exact as what this article is pointing to, I do hope an ASI would care about the experience of other conscious beings, even if their actual solutions may be far below competence in how to truly fix it. That is after all what many people care about with the worry of ‘misalignment’, that some deeply important quality in the current human world is lost in whatever recreation of society ASI lands on.
That article is great for touching on the subject but I feel like it’s horribly missing a way to propose reversing such things. I am unbelievably against how many social landmines this has all caused (especially for a movement where people supposedly should be understanding of people of different mentalities and backgrounds who have to learn an ever increasing pile of things).
Also I wonder what happened with the comments in that article, like the top 10 top level replies are deleted on there...
I do find myself think about how this is such a high-trust vulnerable thing to do (especially the info dump and concept assumptions), if anyone has even really done such in ‘public’. Mine would probably have so many “childhood experiences” narrativized, certain people blown up into some platonic ideal of patterns, especially listing out “this annoyed me so I didn’t want to associate” is pretty vulnerable. I don’t disagree with this comment at all so it’s interesting that I think this I guess.
I happen to have known of your writing before but honestly this comment gives me a bit of pause lol. I would have considered an em-dash in online text “not getting the memo” as often other “AI-ish signs” are not as clear and blatant. Random people who see your writing won’t know you (generic you) used it back in 2015.
And yes I find there is way too much spam/scam/AI generated text online nowadays to not skim over a lot.
‘parrot’ is taken an insulting term to seem like it’s a repetitious mixer with nothing new. Now with coding agentic capabilities + the coiner of the term appearing smug/ignorant in interviews, it seems very empty now. I’m not even sure “markov chains are powerful tools” would be agreed upon much either, back then when that was the best we had, it was impressive to make only a semblance of sentences but mostly used for parody purposes.
Put in another way “parrot” < “just autocomplete” < “super autocomplete” in that clearly emotional connotation in the first two is misleading (as in, you wouldn’t be able to realize its power in computer use/hacking, unless you already had some intuition for this).
Well, you say “risks confusing someone into agreeing”, but I bet someone using this tactic thinks of it as a positive outcome, “even though” it’s dishonest if they gave it some thought. Or maybe not even considered fully dishonest, in the sense that whenever some ‘unpopular’ topic can come up (especially in a public online environment) things can get very easily derailed by other participants to latch onto (if you believe this unpopular thing is true then it is unpopular due to some ‘currently dominating’ negative connotation or view you find unjustified).
I find this unsurprising and it’s odd to even pose as a question. Reading older confident GPT-3-quality LLM’s that don’t know what it’s talking about, reading tons of mediocre spam by online people copypasting LLMs, plus of course the default style being close to journalist quality sludge that was already mediocre when humans were writing it, don’t give a good impression of the quality. If you actually want to read it request a denser or different style.
Count me (level 2 aphantasia, vivid dreams, if that matters at all) as no mindscape as well I guess. I feel like my mind is supposed to be this excellent thing that can get any info at any time (even if this is not true in ways like, I don’t think I could list literally every aspect of a game without forgetting a little bit), if you asked me about a game mechanic or anything, so dimensionality feels like it’s not how I’d picture it.
Despite being recent, this article feels like I could have read it before, and I don’t really agree with it overall, it’s written in like, a vague ‘bothsidesist’ voice, for giving examples more specific would make the article or author’s viewpoint appear too obviously slanted. (and you can write these articles in ways that respect their viewpoints more...) like for example, very commonly “anti-education” and “anti-science” are specific claims of corruption and mismanagement that people also believe spoil the entire group.
Because like, for me it’s very emotionally tempting for me to just believe that people with insane opposing views are just trying to be contrarian, except I’ve seen this accusation lobbed at people who I strongly agree with and came to that conclusion independently.
I think it’s really easy to turn popular opposing narratives for current worldviews into both an anti-”status quo” one. “My outgroup is pro status quo because look at all these popular influencers / richest man in the world / most popular podcast / current ruling government” vs. “My outgroup is pro status quo because all of these media outlets and news sites and education system / current ruling government, pushing the same opinion”.
I will say one true thing about this is how easy it is for this worldview to be a downward spiral of low-trust society, and the absolute lack of fiction trying to paint a better cooperative world. However from my personal experience, severe disillusionment of “The System” can never come from the rules themselves, because there are real people enforcing them. “The System” is not a physical entity. So close friends turned enemies, or bad events happening to friends, in which people bureaucratically and unempathetically cite rules from the system, over a long period of time, that is something that will definitely push you into a level of disgust.
This may also be a thing where, when an article like this is made about Some Mentality—as if it is an abstract element and not because you’ve personally seen this behavior and formed a pattern about it, like the “If you’ve never met any, it is hard to tell you how damaging their demeanour and behaviour can be.” line. I really don’t know if I have met any… even people I dislike this doesn’t feel like it quite fits their motives.
Ironically though, when I was a teenager I was more likely to be seen as a ‘contrarian’ on a far less meaningful scale, where I’d point out negative things like typos believing it was helpful to fix them, with little of my past self giving appreciation to good things, since I thought good things were a lot more obvious and agreed upon than I do now. I didn’t do the stereotypical teenager bad things though, and I still wonder if “they want to conform to friends and every adult around them is deeply uncool” is a more accurate descriptor of those people’s mindsets.
Hey, glad you saw my post and all that. Yes, I know about religion and people having unexplainable supernatural experiences. I don’t have anything like that, and I think people who daydreamed up a supernatural experience shouldn’t have literal certainty, just high confidence. (you’d also expect some high inconsistency in people who recount supernatural events. which unfortunately is probably true for qualia currently too, due to similar levels of how society spreads beliefs)
There is irony in using ‘convert’ when I was unconverted from believing these things by philosophical confusion, and then later untangled myself. Yes, you could go swap out any ‘certainty’ claim with any other words and mock the result. Sure, I guess no one can say ‘certain’ about anything.
“I think I would appreciate if someone else suggested to me, hopefully kindly, that perhaps my declaration that I know something for certain serves more to convince myself than to convince others.” My use of certainty is about honestly communicating strength of belief etc., not being hyperbolic or exaggerating. Yes I understand that many people exaggerate and lie about ‘certain’ things all the time so I trust other people’s “for certain” claims less. It doesn’t mean I should then reduce my own quality of claims to try to cater to the average, that makes no sense. (like, if I said it wasn’t certain, wouldn’t that be room for you to claim it’s a delusion anyway?) Like, the nature of consciousness/qualia is that someone who’s conscious/has qualia is never “uncertain” they are conscious (unlike with free will where there isn’t that level of certainty).
I think I mentioned it before but it seems perfectly rational if someone who doesn’t have qualia is confused by the whole thing. A “robust philosophical argument” isn’t possible, only some statistical one. (the same way that, if you didn’t understand some music’s appeal while a majority of other people did, the response to try to convince you could never be a robust philosophical argument.)
Despite that, I wish to convey that consciousness-related stuff is really about something meaningful and not a religious dream, and that it is very likely possible to make “more accurate predictions”, even though the actual topics relating to those predictions are usually really insignificant. (if consciousness had a major role to play in intelligence, for example, the world would still exhibit that with looking at intelligence only and there’d be likely other correlations to notice, although you might not be able to draw the connection to consciousness directly.)
It will not be due to the notion of qualia
debating this subject seems ultimately not very relevant to people’s actions or prosperity, yes.
, which will be little more than a footnote buried deep in the pages of some galactic empire’s archives.
nah
Hi, I was doing research on consciousness-related discussions, blah blah blah, 3 months old, would just like to reply to a few things you mentioned.
I know for certain that consciousness and qualia exist. I used to ‘fall for’ arguments that defined consciousness/qualia/free will as delusions or illusions because they were unobservable. Then, years later, I finally understood that I had some doublethink, and that these words actually were referring to something very simple and clear with my internal experience. I believed that the words were “meaningless” philosophy/morality words—for me, the lack of understanding WAS the ‘gap’ and they were referring to simple concepts all along.
The confusion of ‘defining’ these words even within philosophy creates lots of synonyms and jargon, though. I have gotten my definitions from the simplicity of what the concepts refer to, so I am almost certain I have not invented new complicated ways to refer to the concepts (as that would make communicating with others unnecessarily difficult and subjective).
These words refer to something that does indeed seem to be circular, because they all try to refer to something beyond the physical. I believe the people trying to define these words as something that relates to only physical things are the ones confused.
Why not think “I’m confused and probably wrong” as a first pass?
There is nothing confusing about what the concept is that the words are trying to communicate, but it’s impossible to get across because they are trying to describe something that can’t be replicated.
Part of the issue here is to avoid thinking of consciousness as either a discrete capacity one either has or doesn’t have, or even to think of it as existing a continuum, such that one could have “more” or “less” of it.
I’m not sure if you’re supporting/against this idea, but I know of consciousness as the sum of all of someone’s metaphysical experiences. Someone could have more or less amounts of senses/abilities, but it is metaphorical talk to say someone is “less conscious” because they are blind and deaf.
The relevancy of a metaphysical consciousness doesn’t come from philosophical mass mistakenness and navelgazing. It’s because it actually exists (but again, it’s individual, so I am never certain if it exists for anyone else).
I think the other replier did not answer the “redness”/”chocolateyness” question as I would have liked. Colors are the most common example because they seem to be the most ‘pure’ and consistent types of qualia. Are you familiar with the color-swapping thought questions like “if your senses of red and blue were switched, it would be a notably different experience just besides some words being used to refer to different concepts”, or “if you never saw green your entire life even if you read about green objects, then actually saw green, you gain new information”? Have they ever resonated or did they just seem confusing to you?
Its persistence could be due to quirks in the way human cognition works. If so, it may be difficult to dispel certain kinds of introspective illusions.
Yeah, it’s possible to imagine a gap that isn’t there (I mean, you’ve heard about people believing in spirits and magic and all that). Free will actually could be an illusion, although it strongly doesn’t feel like it. I know that from your perspective, unless you were extraordinarily confused and did have qualia, it seems you would still believe that other people were under illusions rather than experiencing something special.
If many individual people talked about feeling these experiences even without being excessively primed with other people’s philosophical discussions, would it make you ‘believe in qualia’, if you didn’t have it?
Beyond the classic rhetorics that can happen with ‘possibilities’, hypotheticals, and very very high values, I definitely don’t resonate with the examples here.
The human world is deeply broken in coordination problems, not even able to fix many human suffering problems, so the path to (non-human) animal suffering might actually be to fix all human suffering first, whereas “therefore we should all be working on animal suffering” does not imply.
The simulation hypothesis implies consciousness can be created from simulation which may not be true at all, the number of books in the world does not actually create any fictional character suffering.
I’m not sure if you find that related to the article, but I guess it just didn’t land for me in any way I can see because the examples I find flawed due to some premise and not because of the rhetoric.