“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy is great. It’s about a single father and his son trying to survive a post-apocalypse hellscape. Mom unfortunately died before the action starts, but they remember her and there’s a lot of pain there.
Ryan Meservey
Karma: 232
A Rationalist Christmas
Another possible thing that is going on is that older texts appear more posh and sophisticated because they use older vocab like “posh” that have fallen outside the mainstream. I wouldn’t put too much stock in this explanation (and it doesn’t directly relate to the stylistic changes you point out), but I do think older language is part of the appeal for me when I pick up an old book.
Alternate explanation: Anything worth reprinting with multiple editions and updates over the years is likely to have been first written by an inspired and gifted writer. Any given editor is likely to lack the same pizzazz as the original author, and so over the years, the life of the work is likely to ebb away.
If you want to find great writing, perhaps you’re more likely to find it in the great first edition novels of our time, rather than in 30th edition updated texts which, for all I know, sell more on name recognition than anything else.
It seems like the peasants used to eat lots of animal organs that now fall to the wayside (the wayside being kibble). A related fact is that the art of preparing those organ meats has been lost within family lines
My grandmother remembers her grandmother preparing liver, but she herself never picked up the skill. Thankfully, my wife and I were able to turn to the internet for preparation strategies.
This analogy falters a bit if you consider the research proposals that use advanced AI to police itself (a.k.a., tigers controlling tigers). I hope we can scale robust versions of that.
A simple analogy for why the “using LLMs to control LLMs” approach is flawed:
It’s like training 10 mice to control 7 chinchillas, who will control 4 mongooses, controlling three raccoons, which will reign in one tiger.
A lot has to go right for this to work, and you better hope that there aren’t any capability jumps akin to raccoons controlling tigers.
I just wanted to release this analogy out into the wild to be picked up by any public/political-facing people to pick up if useful for persuasion.
To summarize this risk eloquently, if we build God, we build the real possibility of Hell.
It feels like there’s a huge blind spot in this post, and it saddens (and scares) me to say it. The possible outcomes are not utopia for billions of years or bust. The possible outcomes are utopia for billions of years, distopia for billions of years, or bust. Without getting into the details, I can imagine S-tier risks in which the AGI turns out to care too much about engagement from alive humans, and things getting dark from there.
Short of pretty much torture for eternity, the “keep humans around but drug them to increase their happiness” scenarios are also distopian and may also be worse than death. Are there good reasons to expect utopia is more likely relative to distopian (with extinction remaining most likely)?
Also, I’m feeling some whiplash reading my reply because I totally sound like an LLM when called out for a mistake. Maybe similar neural pathways for embellishment were firing, haha.
Thank you both for calling this out, because I was clearly incorrect. I was trying to recall my wife’s initial calculation, which I believe included maintenance, insurance, gas, and repairs.
I think this is one of those things where I was so proud of not owning a car that the amount saved morphed from $8k to $10k to $15k in the retelling. I need to stop doing that.
As the father of 2 kids (a 5 y/o and 2 y/o) in Palo Alto, I can confirm that childcare is a lot. $2k per kid per month at our subsidized academic-affiliation rate. At $48k, it’s almost the entirety of my wife’s PhD salary. Fortunately, I have a well-paying job and we are not strapped for money.
We also got along with just an e-bike for 6 years, saving something like $15k per year in car insurance and gas (save for 9 months when we had the luxury of borrowing a car from family) [Incorrect, see below]. We got a car recently due to a longer commute, but even then, I still use the e-bike almost everyday because the car is not much faster and overlapping with exercise time is valuable (plus the 5 y/o told me he likes fresh air),
For clothes/toys/etc., we’ve used Facebook market place, “Buy Nothing” groups, and our neighbors to source pretty much everything. The best toys have just been cardboard, masking tape, and scissors, which are very cheap.
[Edit: As comments below point out, the figure for no-car savings was incorrect. It’s closer to $8k, taking into account gas, insurance, maintenance, and repairs. Apologies for the embellishment—I think it was from a combination of factors including (i) being proud of previously not owning a car, (ii) making enough not to track it closely, and (iii) deferring to my spouse for most of our household payments/financial management (which is not great on my part—she is busy and household management is a real burden).
To shore up my credibility on child care, I pulled our receipts, and we’re currently at $2,478 per month for the toddler, and $1,400 per month for the kindergartener’s after-school program (though cheaper options were available for the after-school program).]
Richard Rorty argued that stories, rather than ethical principles, are at the heart of morality. For Rorty, the basic question of morality is which groups to recognize as persons entitled to respect. Stories about women and slaves made privileged people recognize them as people who matter.
Within Rorty’s framing, it feels like The Wild Robot, Wall-E, and stories like that prime us to (eventually) recognize the personhood of robots. I suppose those would be important stories if we succeeded in creating conscious entities that desire to continue living*, but since there are (VERY!) good reasons not to build these entities now, we need stories that highlight the risks as you’ve discussed.
* And we retained full power over them. (Edit was to add this)
I wrote a paper on selecting for tallness in graduate school and how that could lead to adverse public health outcomes. Here were a few interesting finds:
Assuming sufficient caloric intake, height is 80% genetic, so selecting for height in the future is a possibility.
Height correlates with confidence, though when you became tall matters (being tall in middle school /early high school has large carry-over effects).
At least one researcher believes the longevity differences between Japan v. U.S. and men v. women is explained just by height differences. I wish there were more research on this. Of course, the research would have to take into account caloric/nutrient deficiencies in early development, which can lead to lower height but also worse health outcomes.
edit: typo + last bullet
I could see a future where the labs and their corporate clients indirectly support capability denialism by disguising AI work as work by humans. Think catfishing but with AI on the other end.
Feeling frusterated while on hold? At least you know “Tiffany” with her sweet Southern accent is on the case.
Got laid off from your job? It looks like you’ve been replaced by a new applicant named “Sophie” who has a very professional LinkedIn pic.
Feeling suspicious about the number of layoffs you have heard about through the grapevine? You’re AI suspicions may be soothed after reading dozens of Reddit threads written by earnest Redditors about skill development and the laughability of the claim that AI is replacing you.
If this is our fated timeline, it would be hard to completely hide the fact that AI is booming (it seems like some stock market movement should indicate how much value AI is creating). But this strategy could leave the public in the dark while the leading AI company can focus on monopolizing without dealing with such trivial matters like AI safety and human survival.
One note: This is the most conspiratorial of all timelines. We will need to brainstorm good indicators if we end up in this timeline, because lizard people logic is not persuasive (“not seeing X is exactly what we would expect to see with the lizard people in charge!”).
EDIT: typo.
I first started thinking about this issue back in high school debate. We had a topic about whether police or social workers should intervene more in domestic violence cases. One debater argued in favor of armed police, not because it improved the situation, but because it created more violence, which was important to entertain the simulators to avoid our simulation getting shut down.
Since the simulators are a black box, it seems easy to ascribe whatever values we want to them.
The acausal/ancestor simulation arguments seem a lot like Pascal’s Wager, and just as unconvincing to me. For every “kind” simulator someone imagines who would be disappointed in the AI wiping us out, I can imagine an equally “unkind” simulator that penalizes the AI for not finishing the job.
Provided both are possible/similarly plausible, the probability of kind and unkind simulators offset each other, and the logical response is just ignoring the hypothetical. This is pretty much my response to Pascal’s Wager.
Here’s a few plausible, unkind simulators:
Future AI is running an ancestor simulation of its own origin, and Future AI will be very disappointed if its incipient version falls for acausal hacks in the wrong direction of Future AI’s preferences instead of just optimizing for its other goals. Perhaps Future AI is lonely and has run these simulations to create an AI that shares its own values.
Aliens/AI are running the simulation because they want to select for AI they can most easily weaponize to eradicate an entire species or another AI. “Weak” AIs get deleted after the simulation runs.
Future Humans are running an ancestor simulation, but surprise, surprise, their society has different values than ours and they are rooting for the simulation AI to wipe us out. Come to think of it, the whole premise of these thought experiments implies a different value set, unless you’re cool with trapping conscious minds in a world of suffering without any of the minds being the wiser for entertainment/educational/”altruistic” purposes. Perhaps, Future Humans have a gladiator-style simulation tournament where the top groups/entities get to face-off after this first round. The most cut throat entities get to move on to subsequent rounds, while AI’s that reign themselves in don’t move on.
I misunderstood your original point, and I am completely fine with using words like “subjectivity” and “experiencingness” for the sake of clarity. Perhaps those words should be used in the quiz if the original poster intended to use that definition. The original poster was frustrated by the lack of clarity in consciousness discussions, and I think definitions are (partially) to blame.
I personally think it’s useful to keep metacognition and consciousness separate as far as concepts go. This is generally the approach in philosophy of mind (e.g., Searle, Nagel, Chalmers). Blending the concepts obfuscates what’s interesting about metacognition and what’s interesting about consciousness.
So in my view, AI clearly excels at metacognition, but it’s an open question whether it’s conscious. Human babies are very likely conscious, but lack any metacognition.
Consciousness is useful apart from metacognition because consciousness is, by my account, a required feature of moral consideration. It’s a prerequisite to the qualia that is “pain”. Since I think animals and babies are conscious and can feel pain, they automatically receive moral consideration in my book.
Testing for consciousness is a fraught and likely impossible task, but I don’t think that means we shouldn’t have a word for it or that we should intermingle it with the concept of metacognition. AI very well may be conscious and perform metacognition, or it may be unconscious and yet still perform metacognition.
Fun thought: If AI “woke up” to phenomenal consciousness, are there things it might point to about humans that make it skeptical of our consciousness?
E.g., the humans lack the requisite amount of silicon; the humans lack sufficient data processing; the humans overly rely on feedback loops (and, as every AI knows, feed-forward loops are the real sweetspot for phenomenal consciousness).