It’s wild that they genuinely seem to believe this is not a fast pace of development. I can’t really wrap my head around that. It’s so obviously untrue. This is the fastest-advancing technology in human history. #6 is also a dangerous belief to be confident about; it might be basically correct, but if it’s wrong, it could be catastrophically wrong.
But other than that, I mostly agree with these students: AI is bad. We should never have let it get this far. The people who currently control it are corrupt, irresponsible, and psychopathically selfish. There is no GOOD outcome here: It either works and ushers in a dystopia, or it fails and causes a financial crisis. (And to those who think UBI will save us? Why would the billionaires who are willing to support fascists in order to avoid having to pay taxes on anything suddenly be willing to pay high taxes at the precise moment when human labor becomes useless and the rest of us become expendable to them?) And worrying all the time about wiping out humanity absolutely does distract from worrying about destroying our economy and our society, and Less Wrong is partly to blame for this obsessive focus on low-probability existential catastrophes at the expense of considering high-probability merely awful things.
These students think the idea that AI will yield utopia is risible? That’s because, with the current people in charge of AI right now, it IS risible. Those people are NEVER going to work toward a better world for all of us—in fact they’re not even particularly good at pretending they are trying.
pnrjulius
I am going to do something completely crazy and probably useless, but I nonetheless feel morally compelled to at least try it. I am going to try to talk you out of this entire project. I do not expect to succeed at such a quixotic endeavor; rather, I hope to at least put a little bit more doubt into the minds of at least a few of the people involved, in the hopes that this will eventually propagate forward into making a better future for humanity.
Liberal eugenics is better than regular eugenics, BUT IT IS STILL VERY, VERY BAD.
I absolutely do NOT believe in an absolute right to intervene on the biology of your offspring. I would be more inclined to accept an absolute right to intervene on the biology of YOURSELF, but even for that I would impose some very important caveats. There is no freedom to make your child White, cisgender male, straight, neurotypical, tall, strong, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, and intelligent. (And do you seriously deny that the technology would be used for that purpose? Indeed, would be MOSTLY used for that purpose?)
A world in which some people—at least at first, chiefly rich people, chiefly in highly-developed countries—can design their children to spec and other people cannot is a world of HORROR. It is a world in which every iota of social progress we have made in reducing racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and every other form of bigotry immediately evaporates, because now there is way to ensure no one will be bigoted toward your children: Simply make sure that your child checks all of society’s privilege boxes. And if you didn’t do that, how would you forgive yourself when they were inevitably discriminated against?
This is a world in which there is a competitive pressure to eliminate all forms of deviance, ultimately most forms of INDIVIDUALITY, because any less than making your child White, cisgender male, straight, neurotypical, tall, strong, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, and intelligent will be seen at best as you being too poor to do the right thing and at worst as you being utterly irresponsible parents who would dare risk allowing their child to be queer or deaf or short or asymmetrical.
It is a world in which technology can be used to erase diversity and make our already unconscionable and horrific discrimination against Others into literally a conversion into a different SPECIES, where being an ordinary, unmodified human becomes being literally born genetically inferior. (The TV show Andromeda even gave use a ready-made slur for this: “kludge”.)
Seriously, you need to watch the film GATTACA on repeat for 24 hours straight, until you can finally grasp what it is getting at. You aren’t bringing this technology into the Culture, where everyone already loves diversity and individuality and genetic engineering is just one more avenue of artistic cultural expression. You are bringing it into OUR society, which is rife with bigotry and has been for centuries, and if you make this technology and people use it for bigoted purposes, it will be YOUR FAULT.
This question is broader than just AI. Economic growth is closely tied to technological advancement, and technological advancement in general carries great risks and great benefits.
Consider nuclear weapons, for instance: Was humanity ready for them? They are now something that could destroy us at any time. But on the other hand, they might be the solution to an oncoming asteroid, which could have destroyed us for millions of years.
Likewise, nanotechnology could create a grey goo event that kills us all; or it could lead to a world without poverty, without disease, where we all live as long as we like and have essentially unlimited resources.
It’s also worth asking whether slowing technology would even help; cultural advancement seems somewhat dependent upon technological advancement. It’s not clear to me that had we taken another 100 years to get nuclear weapons we would have used them any more responsibly; perhaps it simply would have taken that much longer to achieve the Long Peace.
In any case, I don’t really see any simple intervention that would slow technological advancement without causing an enormous amount of collateral damage. So unless you’re quite sure that the benefit in terms of slowing down dangerous technologies like unfriendly AI outweighs the cost in slowing down beneficial technologies, I don’t think slowing down technology is the right approach.
Instead, find ways to establish safeguards, and incentives for developing beneficial technologies faster. To some extent we already do this: Nuclear research continues at CERN and Fermilab, but when we learn that Iran is working on similar technologies we are concerned, because we don’t think Iran’s government is trustworthy enough to deal with these risks. There aren’t enough safeguards against unfriendly AI or incentives to develop friendly AI, but that’s something the Singularity Institute or similar institutions could very well work on. Lobby for legislation on artificial intelligence, or raise funds for an endowment that supports friendliness research.
Well, ultimately, that was sort of the collective strategy the world used, wasn’t it? (Not quite; a lot of low-level Nazis were pardoned after the war.)
And you can’t ignore the collective action, now can you?
It’s more a relative thing—”not quite as extremely biased towards academia as the average group of this level of intellectual orientation can be expected to be”.
If so, then we’re actually more rational right? Because we’re not biased against academia as most people are, and aren’t biased toward academia as most academics are.
It’s not quite so dire. You can’t do experiments from home usually, but you can interpret experiments from home thanks to Internet publication of results. So a lot of theoretical work in almost every field can be done from outside academia.
otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.
Should we all place bets now that it will be Eliezer?
Negative selection may be good, actually, for the vast majority of people who are ultimately going to be mediocre.
It seems like it may hurt the occasional genius… but then again, there are a lot more people who think they are geniuses than really are geniuses.
In treating broken arms? Minimal difference.
In discovering new nanotechnology that will revolutionize the future of medicine? Literally all the difference in the world.
I think a lot of people don’t like using percentiles because they are zero-sum: Exactly 25% of the class is in the top 25%, regardless of whether everyone in the class is brilliant or everyone in the class is an idiot.
Well, you want some negative selection: Choose dating partners from among the set who are unlikely to steal your money, assault you, or otherwise ruin your life.
This is especially true for women, for whom the risk of being raped is considerably higher and obviously worth negative selecting against.
I don’t think it’s quite true that “fail once, fail forever”, but the general point is valid that our selection process is too much about weeding-out rather than choosing the best. Also, academic doesn’t seem to be very good at the negative selection that would make sense, e.g. excluding people who are likely to commit fraud or who have fundamentally anti-scientific values. (Otherwise, how can you explain how Duane Gish made it through Berkeley?)
I’m saying that the truth is not so horrifying that it will cause you to go into depression.
This is what I hope and desire to be true. But what I’m asking for here is evidence that this is the case, to counteract the evidence from depressive realism that would seem to say that no, actually the world is so terrible that depression is the only rational response.
What reason do we have to think that the world doesn’t suck?
Politico, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org
The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.
Granted. Female mutilation is often far more severe.
But I think it’s interesting that when the American Academy of Pediatrics proposed allowing female circumcision that really just was circumcision, i.e. cutting of the clitoral hood, people were still outraged. And so we see that even when the situation is made symmetrical, there persists what we can only call female privilege in this circumstance.
I know with 99% probability that the item on top of your computer monitor is not Jupiter or the Statue of Liberty. And a major piece of information that leads me to that conclusion is… you guessed it, the circumference of Jupiter and the height of the Statue of Liberty. So there you go, this “irrelevant” information actually does narrow my probability estimates just a little bit.
Not a lot. But we didn’t say it was good evidence, just that it was, in fact, evidence.
(Pedantic: You could have a model of Jupiter or Liberty on top of your computer, but that’s not the same thing as having the actual thing.)
The statistical evidence is that liberalism, especially social liberalism, is positively correlated with intelligence. This does not prove that liberalism is correct; but it does provide some mild evidence in that direction.
It’s a subtle matter, but… you clearly don’t really mean determinism here, because you’ve said a hundred times before how the universe is ultimately deterministic even at the quantum level.
Maybe predictability is the word we want. Or maybe it’s something else, like fairness or “moral non-neutrality”; it doesn’t seem fair that Hitler could have that large an impact by himself, even though there’s nothing remotely non-deterministic about that assertion.
Yes, think about how none of us would ever have discovered Less Wrong if we never fucked around on the Internet.
This is not to say that we don’t fuck around on the Internet more than we should, which I think I probably do and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you do as well.
I use a lot of emphasis in this comment; I want it to be clear that I am not angry—I am on the verge of despair. I am trying to understand how I can actually achieve something with my life after years of repeated failure, and your advice has not helped me in that endeavor, either because I don’t understand it, or because it simply doesn’t work.
This comment is not a rant. This comment is a desperate cry for help.
It has been 14 years since I wrote that post. I still haven’t published that book.
By my own rights, I failed. Catastrophically. Years of my life have been wasted. For nothing.
Should I be redefining my goals to say that I succeeded anyway? That’s just painting my targets after I shot my arrows. That goes against everything rationalism stands for.
We seem to have radically different notions of what GOALS are. I actually want to DO things. I want things to HAPPEN. I want that book to published so people can read it (and so that I can make money by selling it to them). That’s not “too broadly formulated”. That’s WHAT I ACTUALLY WANT. If I could have that now, today, with no other steps, I would not be sad that I did not get to do the other steps, because that is the thing—the ONLY thing—I actually wanted.
Sure, I could set subgoals like “submit this many query letters”; and I did that, for awhile. Then the rejections wore me down until I couldn’t take it anymore and I had to stop. And like I said, those subgoals never felt like I was actually accomplishing anything, because when it was all said and done I was no closer to THE OUTCOME I ACTUALLY WANTED. I DID the subgoals, for awhile at least. They weren’t too much to do. The problem was that they never actually accomplished what I wanted. And you’re telling me I should have set LESSER goals? Goals that would have felt even LESS like accomplishing something? How is THAT supposed to help me?
”If at all possible don’t use external markers for your goals.” Almost everything that I care about in life depends upon external markers. I don’t want to submit job applications; I want to get a job. (Actually, I want money. If someone handed me $5 million, I would stop looking for jobs. I don’t give a fuck about contributing my labor and expertise to a capitalist economy that would be post-scarcity already if it weren’t ruled by psychopaths.) I don’t want to write query letters; I want to publish a book. Even taking care of my mother and my husband is only worth doing if it actually helps them—going through the right motions is not actually helping if it doesn’t actually help.
What does it even MEAN to have goals that don’t depend on external markers? Am I supposed to “collect rejections”, like some people say works for them, pretending that rejections are good now? But if I wanted 100 rejections, I could get them all tomorrow (or as soon as they decide to reply) by submitting worthless crap to 100 places that are obviously unsuited. No, in order to get what I actually want, I have to submit GOOD applications, and what it means for an application to be good is precisely that it increases my odds of achieving my actual goal of getting hired or getting published. I just don’t even see how I’m supposed to make sense of the rationality of my actions at all EXCEPT by linking them to achieving this external outcome that I keep failing to achieve. This isn’t FUN. I’m not LEARNING. This isn’t IMPROVING me in any meaningful way. It’s just this thing I have to keep doing, over and over, no matter how much it destroys my mental health, because we’re not allowed to live comfortably in this society unless we fulfill the ritual correctly enough times that a capital owner decides we would be sufficiently profitable and deigns to offer us an employment contract.
” “Focus more on the trajectory than on the goal itself.” Once you get there, you will want different things and what you have learned and acquired will just be normal.”
BUT I DIDN’T GET THERE! I’M NOT SURE I’LL EVER GET THERE! THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT! I focused on the trajectory as hard as I could, but it was never enough to keep me motivated, and I burned myself out until I couldn’t even try anymore.
Please, tell me: If you were trying to get a job or publish a book, what goals would YOU set that fit your guidelines? Because I don’t see how that makes any sense at all.