Great example!
James_Miller
Karma: 15,262
I’m assuming the cost of this simulation is tiny compared to the value of learning about potential enemies and trading partners.
Yes, I agree that you can’t give too much weight to my saying I’m in pain because I could be non-conscious from your viewpoint. Assuming all humans are conscious and pain is as it appears to be, there seems to be a lot of unnecessary pain, but yes I could be missing the value of having us experience it.
I’m in low level chronic pain including as I write this comment, so while I think the entire Andromeda galaxy might be fake, I think at least some suffering must be real, or at least I have the same confidence in my suffering as I do in my consciousness.
I’m in low level chronic pain including as I write this comment, so while I think the entire Andromeda galaxy might be fake, I think at least some suffering must be real, or at least I have the same confidence in my suffering as I do in my consciousness.
They people running the Karma test deserve to lose a lot of Karma for the suffering in this world.
If your hypothesis is true, that’s a cruel civilization by my personal standards because of all the suffering in this world.
Yes, that is the same idea. “This is a big pile of speculation that I don’t take very seriously, but I feel like if we are being simulated, that’s where most simulations of me would be instantiate” Why not take it seriously, if you accept high chance that (1) our reality is a simulation, (2) we seem on track to creating a paperclip maximizer, (3) weird that I, Robert Miles, would have the personality traits that cause me to be one of the few humans so worried about humanity creating a paperclip maximizer if I’m right about us being on track to probably create one?
In your dreams do you ever see trees you think are real? I doubt your brain is simulating the trees at a very high level of detail, yet this dream simulation can fool you.
By your theory, if you believe that we are near to the singularity how should we update on the likelihood that we exist at such an incredibly important time?
We don’t know that our reality is being simulated at the molecular level, we could just be fooled into thinking it is.
A historical analogy might be the assassination of Bardiya, who was the king of Persia and the son of Cyrus the Great. Darius, who led the assassination, claimed that the man he killed was an impostor who used magic powers to resemble the son of Cyrus. As Darius became the next king of Persia, everyone was brute forced into accepting his narrative of the assassination.
I meant the noise pollution example in my essay to be the Coase theorem, but I agree with you that property rights are not strong enough to solve with AI risk. I agree that AI will open up new paths for solving all kinds of problems, including giving us solutions that could end up helping with alignment.
The big thing I used it for was asking it to find sentences it thinks it can improve, and then have it give me the improved sentence. I created this GPT to help with my writing: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-gahVWDJL5-iterative-text-improver
I agree with the analogy in your last paragraph, and this gives hope for governments slowing down AI development, if they have the will.
Germany should plant agents inside of Russia to sabotage Russian railroads at the start of the war. At the start of the war Austro-Hungary should just engage in a holding action against Serbia and instead use almost all their forces to hold off the Russians. Germany should attack directly into France by making use of a surprise massive chemical weapons attack against static French defenses.
He wrote “unless your GPT conversator is able to produce significantly different outputs when listening the same words in a different tone, I think it would be fair to classify it as not really talking.” So if that is true and I’m horribly at picking up tone and so it doesn’t impact my “outputs”, I’m not really talking.
I think you have defined me as not really talking as I am on the autism spectrum and have trouble telling emotions from tone. Funny, given that I make my living talking (I’m a professor at a liberal arts college). But this probably explains why I think my conversator can talk and you don’t.
You wrote “GPT4 cannot really hear, and it cannot really talk”. I used GPT builder to create Conversation. If you use it on a phone in voice mode it does, for me at least, seem like it can hear and talk, and isn’t that all that matters?
An implicit assumption (which should have been made explicit) of the post is that the cost per simulation is tiny. This is like in WW II where the US would send a long-range bomber to take photos of Japan. I agree with your last paragraph and I think it gets to what is consciousness. Is the program’s existence enough to generate consciousness, or does the program have to run to create conscious observers?