After reading IABED I’m left wanting to do more. One idea I had was to put copies of the book in my local Little Free Libraries. I’m curious about other people’s opinions on this. Do you think this may be effective? Are there better ways to spend my time and money?
mrpalmtree19
Karma: 7
mrpalmtree19′s Shortform
IABIED and The Fermi Paradox: while reading IABIED I noticed something that confused me. The book seems to argue that we’re on one of two paths. Option 1 is humanity barrels ahead with AI development, creates a misaligned ASI, and dies. Option 2 is humanity pauses AI development, hopefully solves alignment, then creates an ASI sometime a bit farther into the future. Which means that unless some other disaster befalls us, ASI from this point on is inevitable.
My confusion stems from how this interacts with the Fermi Paradox. If the book’s take is true, humanity will eventually create ASI, and that ASI will eventually spread throughout the universe (or at least throughout the galaxy), since either it or us will want to expand as far as possible. But if that’s true, why hasn’t another ASI already done so? It seems like following the conclusion of the book means that the reason we don’t find other life like us is that life like us is exceedingly rare—there must be at least one giant bottleneck in our past that most life doesn’t get through that we did.
One thing that makes Omelas such a good story is that it supports a variety of interpretations. For me, it supported two (related) interpretations, neither of which was touched on here.
The first was religion. I was in the process of deconstructing my Christian beliefs when I read the story, and for me it pointed out the horror that the Christian story postulated. An all-knowing all-powerful god thought that eternal human suffering (hell) was a price worth paying for utopia (heaven) for a select few. Though it was even worse than the story; at least in Omelas, only one suffered so that everyone else could be free.
The second was the value of rejecting a horrible system rather than embracing it as good enough. What do you do if you find yourself living in Omelas? Simply living in it seems wrong, because it requires the suffering of an innocent child. But saving the child also seems wrong, because that forces everyone else to suffer. The solution of those who walk away is to recognize that the system is fundamentally flawed and reject it entirely. If everyone did so, the child could be freed without causing any harm, as there would be no one left in Omelas to benefit from the child’s anguish.