That’s true, but the change a strong AI would make would be probably completely irreversible and unmodifiable.
Val
Karma: 560
This brings up an interesting ethical dilemma. If strong AI will ever be possible, it will be probably designed with the values of what you described as a small minority. Does this this small minority have the ethical right to enforce a new world upon the majority which will be against their values?
I usually look out for the surveys, but until I opened this article I never even knew there was a survey for this year… so yeah, poor advertising.
“services that go visit the customer outcompete ones that the customer has to go visit”—and what does this have to do with self-driving cars? Whether the doctor has to actively drive the car to travel to the patient, or can just sit there in the car while the car drives all the way, the same time is still lost due to the travel, and the same fuel is still used up. A doctor or a hairdresser would be able to spend significantly less time with customers, if most of the working day would be taken up by traveling. And what about all the tools which have to be carried inside the customer’s house?
And self driving hotel rooms? What, are we in the Harry Potter world where things can be larger in the inside than in the outside?
I know about the first one having been mentioned on this site, I’ve read about it plenty of times, but it was not named as such. Therefore it’s advisable if you use a rare term (or especially one made up by you) that you also tell what it means.
Could you please put some links to “Hacker’s joke” and “Indexical blackmail”? Both use words common enough to not yield obvious results for a google search.
Another Christian here, raised as a Calvinist, but consider myself more of a non-denominational, ecumenical one, with some very slight deist tendencies.
I don’t want to sound rude, but I don’t know how to formulate it in a better way: if you think you have to choose between christianity and science, you have a very incomplete information about what Christianity is about, and also incomplete knowledge about the history of science itself. I wonder how many who call themselves Bayesians know that Bayes was a very devout Christian, similar to many other founders of modern science who where also philosophers and theologians.
This “Christianity is the enemy of rational thought” idea seems to be relatively recent, and is probably caused or at least magnified by the handful young earth creationists being very loud.
Why there are so few committed Christians here on this site, can be attributed to, among other factors, to how this community started. Reading the earliest posts, it seems that almost every single one of them was a rant against Christianity. No wonder this community mostly attracted atheists, at least in the beginning.
Christianity doesn’t mean, and shouldn’t mean, trials after trials to find a mathematical proof of God’s existence and a vicious fight against those who claim to have found mathematical proofs of God’s non-existence.
I want to converse and debate with rationalists who despite their Bayesian enlightenment choose to remain in the flock.
I would love to speak with them, to know exactly why they still believe and how
I’ll try an example to give back at least some part of the feeling. Let’s say you enjoy to listen to the songs of birds at dawn. (if you actually don’t, then imagine something else, something you enjoy which is not based around rationality. Like the smell of fresh flowers, or your favorite musical instrument, or looking at a great painting)
Would you stop enjoying listening to the singing birds, would you stop finding it beautiful, if someone explained it to you that scientifically, they are just waves formed by ordinary molecules bumping into each other, they are just mechanical vibrations, and you shouldn’t find anything more in them? Or would you stop enjoying it if someone pointed out to you that there were some horrible criminals hundreds of years ago on the other side of the planet who also claimed to enjoy listening to the songs of birds? Would you stop enjoying it if someone pointed it out to you that there is no rational explanation why you would find this vibration of the air more beautiful than any other vibration of the air? And, more importantly, would you find the singing of birds suddenly something horrible and disgusting, just because you developed a greater understanding in a scientific topic? (I’m not claiming Christianity is merely a form of thoughts to find pleasure or refuge in, this was only an example of how something which is not based on rationality can be compatible with rationality.)
If you make 100 loaves and sell them for 99 cents each, you’ve provided 1 dollar of value to society, but made 100 dollars for yourself.
Not 99 dollars?
Reaching out to people with the problems of friendly AI
Anyone who is reading this should take this survey, even if you don’t identify as an “effective altruist”.
Why? The questions are too much centered not only on effective altruists, but also on left- or far-left-leaning ideologies. I stopped filling it when it assumed only movements of that single political spectrum are considered social movements.
Even with the limited AGI with very specific goals (build 1000 cars) the problem is not automatically solved.
The AI might deduce that if humans still exist, there is a higher than zero probability that a human will prevent it from finishing the task, so to be completely safe, all humans must be killed.
Those “very real, very powerful security regimes around the world” are surprisingly inept at handling a few million people trying to migrate to other countries, and similarly inept at handling the crime waves and the political fallout generated by it.
And if you underestimate how much a threat could a mere “computer” be, read the “Friendship is Optimal” stories.
This is a well-presented article, and even though most (or maybe all) of the information is easily available else-where, this is a well-written summary. It also includes aspects which are not talked about much, or which are often misunderstood. Especially the following one:
Debating the beliefs is a red herring. There could be two groups worshiping the same sacred scripture, and yet one of them would exhibit the dramatic changes in its members, white the other would be just another mainstream faith with boring compartmentalizing believers; so the difference is clearly not the scripture itself.
Indeed, the beliefs are not even close to be among the most important aspects of a cult. A cult is not merely a group which believes in something you personally find ridiculous. A cult can even have a stated core belief which is objectively true, or is a universally accepted good thing, like protecting the environment or world peace.
This comment was very insightful, and made me think that the young-earth creationist I talked about had a similar motivation. Despite this outrageous argument, she is a (relatively speaking) smart and educated person. Not academic-level, but neither grown up on the streets level.
I always thought the talking snakes argument was very weak, but being confronted by a very weird argument from a young-earth creationist provided a great example for it:
If you believe in evolution, why don’t you grow wings and fly away?
The point here is not about the appeal to ridicule (although it contains a hefty dose of that too). It’s about a gross misrepresentation of a viewpoint. Compare the following flows of reasoning:
Christianity means that snakes can talk.
We can experimentally verify that snakes cannot talk.
Therefore, Christianity is false.
and
Evolution means people can spontaneously grow wings.
We can experimentally verify that people cannot spontaneously grow wings.
Therefore, evolution is false.
The big danger in this reasoning is that one can convince oneself of having used the experimental method, or of having been a rationalist. Because hey, we can scientifically verify the claim! - Without realizing that the verified claim is very different from the claims the discussed viewpoint actually holds.
I’ve even seen many self-proclaimed “rationalists” fall into this trap. Just as many religious people are reinforced by a “pat on the back” from their peers if they say something which is liked by the community they are in, so can people feel motivated to claim they are rationalists if that causes a pat on the back from people they interact with the most.
Isn’t this very closely related to the Dunning-Kruger effect?
I’m not surprised Dawkins makes a cameo in it. The theist in the discussion is a very blunt strawman, just as Dawkins usually likes to invite the dumbest theists he can find, who say the stupidest things about evolution or global warming, thereby allegedly proving all theists wrong.
I’m sorry if I might have offended Dawkins, I know many readers here are a fan of him. However, I have to state that although I have no doubts about the values of his scientific work and his competence in his field, he does make a clown of himself with all those stawman attacks against theism.
For many people, religion helps a lot in replenishing willpower. Although, what I observed, it’s less about stopping procrastination, and more about not despairing in a difficult or depressing situation. I might even safely guess that for a lot of believers this is among the primary causes of their beliefs.
I know that religious beliefs on this site are significantly below the offline average, I didn’t want to convince anyone of anything, I just pointed out that for many people it helps. Maybe by acknowledging this fact we might understand why.
we’d only really need the 5 big crops + plants for photosynthesis , insects and impollinators in order to survive and thrive
Time and time it turned out that we underestimated the complexity of the biosphere. And time and time again our meddling backfired horribly.
Even if we were utterly selfish and had no moral objections, wiping out all but a handful of “useful” species would almost certainly lead to unforeseen consequences ending in the total destruction of the planet’s biosphere. We did not yet manage to fully map the role each species plays in the natural balance, but it seems like it’s very deeply entangled, everything depending on lots of other species. You cannot just remove a handful of them and expect them to thrive on their own.
I didn’t say I had an answer. I only said it can be an interesting dilemma.