One thing to consider is how hard an AI needs to work to break out of human dependence. There’s no point destroying humanity if that then leaves you with noone to man the power stations that keep you alive.
If limited nanofactories exist it’s much easier to bootstrap them into whatever you want, than it is those nanofactories don’t exist, and robotics haven’t developed enough for you to create one without the human touch.
Presumably because there’s a hope that having a larger liver could help people lose weight, which is something a lot of people struggle to do?
I imagine that part of the difference is because Orcas are hunters, and need much more sophisticated sensors + controls.
I gigantic jellyfish wouldn’t have the same number of neurons as a similarly sized whale, so it’s not just about size, but how you use that size.
Douglas Adams answered this long ago of course:
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
Thanks—I’ve rehauled that section. Note a Codorcet method is not sufficient here, as the counter-example I give shows.
Why? That’s a fact about voting preferences in our toy scenario, not a normative statement about what people should prefer.
Thanks for this!
What are the chances of a variable bypass engine at some point? Any opinions?
Counterpoint: when I was about 12, I was too old to collect candy at my Synagogue on Simchat Torah, so I would beg a single candy from someone, then trade it up (Dutch book style) with naive younger kids until I had a decent stash. I was particularly pleased whenever my traded up stash included the original candy.
The single most useful thing I use LLMs for is telling me how to do things in bash. I use bash all the time for one off tasks, but not quite enough to build familiarity with it + learn all the quirks of the commands + language.
90% of the time it gives me a working bash script first shot, each time saving me between 5 minutes to half an hour.
Another thing LLMs are good at is e.g taking a picture of e.g. screw, and asking what type of screw it is.
They’re also great at converting data from one format to another: here’s some JSON, convert it into Yaml. Now prototext. I forgot to mention, use maps instead of nested structs, and use Pascal case. Also the JSON is hand written and not actually legal.
Similarly they’re good at fuzzy data querying tasks. I received this giant error response including full stack trace and lots of irrelevant fields, where’s the actual error, and what lines of the file should I look at.
Buyers have to pay a lot more, but sellers receive a lot more. It’s not clear that buyers at high prices are worse off than sellers, so it’s egalitarian impact is unclear.
Whereas when you stand in line, that time you wasted is gone. Nobody gets it. Everyone is worse off.
I’ve been convinced! I’ll let my wife know as soon as I’m back from Jamaica!
Similarly, the point about trash also ignores the larger context. Picking up my own trash has much less relationship to disgust, or germs, than picking up other people’s trash.
Agreed, but that’s exactly the point I’m making. Once you apply insights from rationality to situations outside spherical trash in a vacuum filled park you end up with all sorts of confounding affects that make the insights less applicable. Your point about germs and my point about fixing what you break are complimentary, not contradictory.
I think this post is missing the major part of what “metarational” means: acknowledging that the kinds of explicit principles and systems humans can hold in working memory and apply in real time are insufficient for capturing the full complexity of reality, having multiple such principles and systems available anyway, and skillfully switching among them in appropriate contexts.
This sounds to me like a semantic issue? Metarational isn’t exactly a standard AFAIAA, (I just made it up on the spot), and it looks like you’re using it to refer to a different concept from me.
Sure it is, if you accept a whole bunch of assumptions. Or it could just not do that.
Reading this reminds me of Scott Alexander in his review of “what we owe the future”:
But I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game. Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms. If I can’t find any system of axioms that doesn’t do something terrible when extended to infinity, I will just refuse to extend things to infinity. I can always just keep World A with its 5 billion extremely happy people! I like that one! When the friendly AI asks me if I want to switch from World A to something superficially better, I can ask it “tell me the truth, is this eventually going to result in my eyes being pecked out by seagulls?” and if it answers “yes, I have a series of twenty-eight switches, and each one is obviously better than the one before, and the twenty-eighth is this world except your eyes are getting pecked out by seagulls”, then I will just avoid the first switch. I realize that will intuitively feel like leaving some utility on the table—the first step in the chain just looks so much obviously better than the starting point—but I’m willing to make that sacrifice.
You come up with a brilliant simulation argument as to why the AI shouldn’t just do what’s clearly in his best interests. And maybe the AI is neurotic enough to care. But in all probability, for whatever reason, it doesn’t. And it just goes ahead and turns us into paperclips anyway, ignoring a person running behind it saying “bbbbbbut the simulation argument”.
I’m not sure why those shouldn’t be included? If someone uses my AI to perform 500 million dollars of fraud, then I should probably have been more careful releasing the product.
I would have concerns about suitably generic, flexible and sensitive humanoid robots, yes.