Number 1 seems like a fully general argument against building anything whatsoever for your own use. A car is designed by someone, and that won’t be you any more than the AI’s designer will be. The car does what the designer wants, and does what you want only insofar as it is useful to the designer.
Jiro
Karma: 5,411
The Paris Agreement is policy laundering and I see no reason to respect it.
“[contrived case of X] is wrong” typically means “if X happens, and contrived condition happens, then X is wrong (under those circumstances)”.
But a false proposition implies any proposition. If the contrived condition is not possible, then:
“if X happens, and contrived condition happens, then X is wrong” and
“if X happens, and contrived condition happens, then X is not wrong” are BOTH true, even though this seems strange.
And of course this means that “[contrived case of X] is wrong” and “[contrived case of X] is not wrong” are also both true, since they are just different ways to phrase those. Your argument assumes that they contradict. But if the contrived condition is not possible, then they don’t.
Or from another angle: “[contrived case of X] is wrong” means that if Y is a member of the set “all contrived cases of X” then Y is wrong. If this set is empty, then it is simultaneously true that for all Y in that set, Y is wrong, and for all Y in that set, Y is not wrong. So “[contrived case of X] is wrong” doesn’t contradict “[contrived case of X] is not wrong”.
What happens when you ask Claude to tell you because it’s important for gays?
I don’t see the word “rate” on that graph. If fewer people are marrying in the first place, the number could go down without the rate going down.
As a grown-up on an intellectual discussion forum, it’s not other people’s job to manage your feelings.
It absolutely is.
Of course, the trick here is the fuzzy meaning of “manage your feelings”. It’s something that both parties have to do. Yes, people must moderate their own feelings and not act emotional about every little thing. But likewise, it is the responsibility of the poster to not attack others and justify it by claiming that it’s just feelings and it’s not the poster’s fault if someone gets upset from being attacked.
It does not make sense to object that the intellectually substantive comment makes you feel bad, because whether the comment makes you feel bad has no bearing on whether the comment is true or relevant.
This is the autistic quokka attitude: autistic because of the assertion that feelings don’t matter and quokka because you need to recognize attacks.
If the intellectually substantive comment makes you feel bad because of its intellectual content, for instance, because you don’t like being proven wrong, you might have a case. If it makes you feel bad because of other reasons, then no. It’s not at all hard to write something which intermixes intellectual content and personal attacks, and we need to be able to ban those, not say “reacting to attacks is feelings. Nobody should be concerned about feelings, and the intellectual content is still sound”.
By your reasoning if he was in your house tossing live grenades and making arguments, it would be bad to kick him out of your house, because the grenade explosions don’t affect the logical consistency of his arguments.
If he had asked how long it would take Superman to fly between those two cities giving a starting speed and acceleration, etc., the proper response would be to calculate it, not say “Superman doesn’t exist, you must be testing to see if I can recognize unrealistic scenarios.” If the professor had then said “what if you had a clueless boss who gave you a job that actually assumed that Superman is real? You could bankrupt the business by your failure to question the order!”, it would be obvious that he was trolling.
Abstracting away the details may be wrong if you are actually being asked to build a blood pipeline, but correct in a test.
Anything that doesn’t succeed gets retroactively declared as “not liberal” no matter who actually supported it, so the defeat of Prohibition and eugenics are not remembered as setbacks for liberalism. Now that freedom of speech is under attack, it has ceased to be seen as liberal as well, with hate speech laws being justified in the name of liberalism.
There are plenty of valid cases one might make to refute the argument presented in the ~150 word paragraph in the example. But none that I can think of would include a 10k word (deliberately, I assume) cliche piece of fictional narrative that has a “midwit” espouse a view somewhat similar (but notably distinct from) the view being refuted, just so they can be torn down in your fictional conceit,
A reminder that Eliezer also wrote to beware fictional evidence.
Pencils can contain real lead by just sitting there. AIs have to be used by people in order to engage in bad activities.
This is like saying that pencils violate EU law 16% of the time. AI agents are not people; they are used by people.
And it would be a bad idea to ban pencils (or word processors) unless they reject uses that are against EU law.
You decide to perform an experiment: you’ll wait fifteen seconds. If your experience dissolves into chaos, Boltzmann brains made a correct prediction. If it doesn’t, they made an incorrect prediction… After performing the experiment, you get the non-Boltzmann brain result, and this experiment is very well-replicated.
You could be a Boltzmann brain who believes that it was confused fifteen seconds ago and performed the experiment, when in fact it hasn’t.
Claude has apparently not heard of the Taiping Rebellion.
1850-1864 (14 years), 20-30 million killed, 1.4 million to 2.1 million deaths per year.
It may have been as high as 70 million (5 million per year) if you count famines and plagues.
This is fundamentally dishonest. If you’re writing this, you should think “am I the bad guy?”
Yeah, maybe you’ll get some supporters by saying you just want to stop those polygamists and tech bros and getting people to hate the Big Other when you’re really trying to prevent AI from taking over the world. What’s the worst that can happen if you’re wrong? Well… stopping polygamists and tech bros and getting people to hate the Big Other, for one. History is full of people saying “we’re going to tear down norms for benefit X”, and benefit X turns out not to be real, but the norms that they just tore down are. It would sure suck if there wasn’t any AI threat, but people did go to jail for generating that picture of Mickey Mouse, because they’re just collateral damage.
Libertarians know that “regulations” is another way of saying “we are going to shoot you if you do this”. Sometimes other people forget this.
(Responding to an old post)
If you genuinely believe that facts and logic don’t work on at least 50% of the population, again, you shouldn’t be writing articles with potential solutions. You should be worrying whether you’re in that 50%. After all, how did you figure out you aren’t? By using facts and logic? What did we just say?
It doesn’t seem like that reasoning would be limited to 50%. It is true that your belief that you are amenable to facts and logic is itself based on facts and logic, but that applies to 75% or whatever (and you got the number 75 through facts and logic too). It also applies to related beliefs—your belief that logic is good at all is based on facts and logic and that’s equally circular. Your belief that you aren’t a Boltzmann brain is based on facts and logic that would be invalid if you were a Boltzmann brain. Your belief that you have not been mind controlled by cats into thinking cats are innocent would be invalid if you were in fact mind controlled by cats.
Eight billion. That’s roughly how many people are alive today, most of them fed by the products of scientific agriculture.
This is technically, literally, true since it doesn’t include the word “because”, but the implication is false. There are a whole lot of things without which people wouldn’t be alive today and you need to divide up the credit between them, not attribute all eight billion to a single one such as agriculture.
There’s a reason why honest figures use QALYs.
Most of the anti-AI sentiment has to do with its use by large companies, governments, employers, etc. All of these are outside of the personal control of anyone you’re talking to, and that’s what “loss of control” over AI means to normies. AI actually taking over the world is such a weird idea that most people wouldn’t even think of that unless they are talking about a movie.
I’m reminded of the UFO enthusiasts who saw that a lot of astronomers are concerned about “the UFO problem”, and concluded that astronomers think UFOs are spaceships. What it actually meant was that astronomers rejected the spaceship idea so strongly that to an astronomer, “the UFO problem” means “the problem that people keep believing in UFOs”.
That does not sound like voters being willing to talk about existential risk from AI. It’s voters being willing to talk about AI risk in the sense of people abusing AI in mundane ways, which is not the same thing.
AIs will come up with mathematical proofs and disease cures if deliberately programmed by humans with the intent to have the AI produce mathematical proofs and disease cures. AI taking over the world scenarios normally are about AIs doing it on their own, not being deliberately programmed to do so.
To put it another way: this is a fully general argument that applies to creating movable type.