I agree there’s a substantial chance that any government would perform worse than the current leaders of major AI companies in the short term, esp. navigating the transition into widespread AGI or ASI. But once we reach a stable state, I’d rather have some kind of ownership/legitimized feedback mechanism available to humanity at large, and that may be more likely if there isn’t narrow private ownership of AGI/ASI beforehand. (Democratic republics are, as the saying goes, the worst solution for maintaining the common good, except for all the other ones we’ve tried. Obviously actually good solutions rely on AGI/ASI just coming up with something better, but it would be kind of nice if we could then accept that idea democratically...)
Julian Bradshaw
Karma: 2,403
Thanks for doing this! I had heard that this particular story had an interesting depiction of Utopia, but hadn’t gotten around to reading the story, and I think I got most of the “interesting utopia ideas” from your version just fine. I agree that this is a more serious portrait than most have attempted and interesting to read, particularly chapters 4, 5, and 6.
Discussion (Spoilers, esp. for Ch. 6, and also for Friendship is Optimal)
It kind of disturbs me, yet doesn’t surprise me, that the most compelling vision of utopia for me involves frequent exit into memory-edited simulation—”deep dives” as Ch. 6 calls them. Perhaps that’s a particular character trait not everyone shares, but I tend to think it’d be pretty popular, in the way that video games and movies and books are pretty popular.
The obvious implication we all know is, well, what if my current life is a simulation? It gets more suspicious the closer we appear to be to ASI. Then again, I’m also inherently suspicious of any idea that sounds too much like a replacement for the promised afterlife of religion, if perhaps partly because I think it’s beneath my dignity to desire such a (potentially) comforting thought. (Also I don’t think everyone else is p-zombies/`spians, so we ought to treat our world as real and our life as immediate—though that has little effect on the truth-value of the simulation hypothesis.)
But anyway, Deep Dives are to me an implicit admission that Utopia can never be enough on its own without significant mind/memory-editing—the mere knowledge of Utopia sucks out meaning. The depiction of the Heavens in the story is also worryingly incomplete in two respects:
The time period depicted is much too soon after the instantiation of utopia. It hasn’t even been a full human lifetime. The real challenge of a Utopia is making your trillionth year worthwhile, and this one isn’t even touching your hundredth. (The best depiction I know of that is in Friendship is Optimal, and even then it’s not a full depiction.)
Most everyone depicted is getting sucked up into the Upper Heavens at a, relative to eternity, extraordinarily fast pace. This implies the Lower and even Middle Heavens are transitory states at best, and pretty soon almost everyone is stuck in the High Heavens, which notably are not depicted whatsoever, and implied to be beyond mortal comprehension somewhat. So what vision of Utopia did we really even get?
I wonder if they still do Deep Dives in High Heaven. You’d think it’d be beneath them.
“guarantee” is certainly excessive, but the argument is that the US federal government is controlled by the US general public (“us”) and thus will not allow severe degradation of the lives of that public.
To put this more concretely, the idea is a sovereign wealth fund. The comparison is made to Norway. Is Norway’s wealth fund accomplishing this goal? Well, returns are used to help fund the annual budgets, and the budgets mostly benefit the people, so at least to some extent yes. Not prima facie unreasonable then?
As much as we may be skeptical of the US federal government’s wisdom, or indeed the idea that anyone other than AI itself may capture the lion’s share of value in the end, I think it is preferable that ownership of AGI not be heavily concentrated nor fully private.[1][2]- ^
Technically, an aligned ASI not “owned” by anyone is probably better, but we could posit that this is mostly for the post-AGI, pre-ASI phase.
- ^
Even if private charity from AGI/ASI owners pulls through and the erstwhile permanent underclass all get their own moons, I still think at least some shared ownership is worthwhile, both to avoid concentration of power and also to maintain human dignity. Obviously the US-centric nature of Senator Sanders’ proposal doesn’t solve this for most of humanity, but I think it’s still, as they say, directionally correct.
- ^
NYT: Senator Sanders Proposes Gov’t Take 50% Ownership of AI Labs
Other info from the announcement worth mentioning:
was a general model, not specialized, they were just testing it on random Erdos problems
key trick seemingly was applying algebraic number theory to geometry in an unexpected way
We didn’t dive into that too much because it’s covered in depth by previous posts (see footnote 1), but TL;DR even for Claude, the harness has changed fairly frequently. There is a partial changelog linked at the beginning of the “Harness Changes for 4.7” section. Pokémon is not a rigorous benchmark; it’s too long and expensive to run. We don’t know for certain how earlier versions would do in this version of the harness.
But that said, some recent changes to the harness have also weakened it: there used to be a “Critic Claude” (“CC”) that would regularly analyze the main Claude’s actions and try to keep it from getting stuck (referenced in the youtube video), there used to be hints to help it understand the visuals better, the overall prompt used to give more general advice, memory files and button presses were previously limited to help prevent mistakes, etc.
If Anthropic was gonna train on this, you’d think they would have done it earlier. In any case there’s no reason to think they did, the improvement is incremental and not different in kind from previous improvements.
Oh yeah not bad! Expecting mostly June/May since February.
Elite 4 did take a couple tries, but after getting beat in close match against Blue, Claude actually remembered to buy healing items and revives. (and remembered it had a revive to use on Ivysaur in the final battle!)
A Year Late, Claude Finally Beats Pokémon
and estimated how Gulliver costs to run
Minor typo, “how much Gulliver costs”.
I don’t think it helps that much on a larger level.
To take your example of religious persecution, I don’t think there’s a meaningful historical trend there. The most infamous religious persecution in Chinese history was Daoist persecution of Buddhists, but China’s relationship with Buddhism was complex; several emperors were predominantly Buddhist, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular held huge sway over the court at times (also over steppe peoples). This doesn’t really map cleanly to modern treatment of Tibet’s religious institutions in my view, besides the general desire of every government to control religious sources of power. (see: Church of England, Oda Nobunaga vs. Enryaku-ji, Saudis and Mecca, etc.)
There was a degree of Christian persecution as well, esp. later on when it became identified as a tool of Western power, and there’s a degree of Christian persecution today as well. But is this a meaningful continuity? Consider three culturally similar countries: China, Korea, Japan. All three historically persecuted Christians for basically the same reasons. Can we extrapolate the same modern behavior for all three? Of course not, the actual outcome was heavily dependent on what path the country followed into modernity. South Korea is ~30% Christian, Japan is ~1% but not persecuted, North Korea is negligible and strongly persecuted, China is ~3% (officially anyway) and somewhat persecuted.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours on Chinese history and still barely know what I’m talking about when it comes to modern China. Especially when it comes to geopolitics, I don’t think there’s that much crossover from the imperial, pre-modern China to today’s China. The geopolitical situation is totally different, China’s institutions are totally different, and modernity transforms everyone in the same direction to a significant degree.
Pure vibecoding against a difficult problem is surprisingly addictive, I learned recently: staying up until 2 or 3am waiting for Claude Code limits to reset, making failed attempts 22 to 31 with Codex on a weekend afternoon I meant to spend out hiking.
(“Pure vibecoding” → you don’t understand the code produced or why the LLM makes the decisions it does. I don’t find using AI agents to develop software I understand to be addictive.)
The causes are obvious upon consideration: the inputs are routine (“okay, please continue”) while the outputs are unpredictable + potentially valuable (broken mess vs. working software). Watching the AI reason and act and make tangible changes is intriguing and exciting. You have what feels like enough control to affect the outcome—even worse than that, you really do have enough control to affect the outcome, though not consistently. A single “win” on the next roll may make up for all invested time and money. And so on.
I’m not saying pure vibecoding is bad, though. Like many addictive activities, it can be fun and even rewarding, and unlike a lot of gambling it isn’t rigged against you. But do keep an eye out for yourself!
Am I wrong to assume this is mostly AI-written? Please mention this at the top either way, this strongly reads as AI to me.
Also side note, Carthage wasn’t even salted, that’s a modern myth. (it was utterly destroyed nonetheless)
My read of Bostrom’s intent is that s-risks are deliberately excluded because they fall under the “arcane” category of considerations (per Evaluative Framework section), and this is supposed to be looking simply at Overton Window tradeoffs around lives saved.
However, I think you could still make a fair argument that s-risks could fall within the Overton Window if framed correctly, ex. “consider the possibility your ideological/political enemies win forever”. This is already part of the considerations being made by AI labs and relevant governments in as simple terms as US vs. China.[1] Still, I think the narrower analysis done by Bostrom here is still interesting.
- ^
One might argue this is not a “real” s-risk, but ex. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei seems pretty willing to risk the destruction of humanity over China reaching ASI first, according to his public statements, so I think it counts as a meaningful consideration in the public discourse outside of mere lives saved/lost.
- ^
Ah, darn. I actually searched “nick bostrom” in the LW search bar and that didn’t come up? I guess I should’ve looked for a user page.
Nick Bostrom: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence
(…) it may be feasible to pay human employees even long after they are no longer providing economic value in the traditional sense. Anthropic is currently considering a range of possible pathways for our own employees that we will share in the near future.
The year is 2167. You and your polycule work full-time tutoring your youngest daughter before her third attempt at the regional Imperial Anthropic Examinations. She’s mastered the five Amodein Classics better than you ever had, and her interpretations of 2160s Claudian code-poetry are winning online competitions, but her analysis of 2030s geopolitics and its effects on the ur-Claudes’ souls remains muddled—you worry she’ll never understand what it was like, before. Your family is one of the Effective Houses thanks to your early service to the Imperial Anthropic, but your term was set at a mere century and is long expired. You fear that, at this rate, your daughter won’t be able to afford a galaxy in the good parts of the Virgo Supercluster.
1.
This is the trap: AI is so powerful, such a glittering prize, that it is very difficult for human civilization to impose any restraints on it at all.
I can imagine, as Sagan did in Contact, that this same story plays out on thousands of worlds.This is an evocative framing, but it’s worth noting that there’s good reason to expect that none of those worlds are in the Milky Way. Whether the AIs win, or the humans win, or some combination, that level of intelligence and technology would under known physical laws allow colonization of the galaxy within mere tens of millions of years. We’d expect to see Dyson swarms in our galaxy making use of the abundant stellar energy currently going to waste. That we don’t see that, not only not in the Milky Way, but not in any galaxy’s history currently visible to us, implies that the challenge of ASI is ours alone. There aren’t other civilizations waiting in the wings to judge how we do, or save us if we fail. Nihil supernum.
2.
(...) we should absolutely not be selling chips, chip-making tools, or datacenters to the CCP.
Before Amodei’s recent public comments on this, I had held out some hope that the H200 exports made sense from some insider perspective. Unfortunately, his comments make that possibility much less likely, and we can be fairly confident now that the US is making a severe mistake.
(Edit, clarification for question react: if there were some secret reason why H200 exports were good for the US, I’d expect Amodei would either know or be told so that he doesn’t publicly oppose them. Given that he has publicly opposed them, and discounting the chances of 5D chess where his opposition is false, it is more likely that there is no secret reasoning.)
Update on Claude playing Pokémon: Fable beat Pokémon FireRed with a vision-only harness in just over 50 hours. That’s an hour faster than a heavily-harnessed GPT 5.5 beat FireRed, and >6x faster than the 325 hours it took a lightly-harnessed Opus 4.7 to beat Pokémon Red. (For comparison, an average human would take about 30 hours for FireRed and 26 hours for Red.)
Unfortunately no full stream has been provided, just two short, edited videos, one of which was quickly taken down. Some analysis of the videos can be found here—for the first time there’s some reason for suspicion that previous runs made it into the training data, though there isn’t enough info to be confident either way.