The speed with which GPT-4, was hooked up to the internet via plugins has basically convinced me that boxing isn’t a realistic strategy. The economic incentive to unbox an AI is massive. Combine that with the fact that an ASI would do everything it could to appear safe enough to be granted internet access, and I just don’t see a world in which everyone cooperates to keep it boxed.
Zachary
Karma: 35
Are you able to strong man the argument in favor of AI being an existential risk to humanity?
I wanted to say thank you for this post—I’m 26 years old, and up until last year I’d been afflicted with back pain that would onset after standing still for an extended period of time. I think it started after doing hang-cleans with bad form when I was in high school. Over the years, the amount of time it took for the pain to appear got shorter and shorter, and the pain grew more and more intense, to the point where I would be uncomfortable and unable to enjoy myself after standing for more than ~45 minutes.
Knowing that I would eventually be in pain if I stood for too long would make me seek out opportunities to sit, trying to “conserve” my comfortable standing time. I would squat, lean against things, shift my weight oddly—anything to keep from standing still. If I found myself with no other option but to stand, it would be hard for me not to think about the fact that I would eventually begin hurting.
This sucked, especially since one of my favorite activities is going to concerts, where I may have been forced to stand for a few hours by the time the headliner even comes on. I remember going to lots of shows where I just wasn’t able to appreciate the music because my thoughts were with my back. I would dance, not for pleasure, but as a way of avoiding standing still
I was really interested reading your post, and it was swirling around in my mind while I was at a music festival about a week after I read this post. On the second night of the festival, I was tripping on a half tab of acid. My back had begun to hurt to the point that I needed to sit down, but then I thought of this post, specifically this paragraph:
For me, it was just reading Healing Back Pain, and all the testimonials in Section 1.1, then deciding to live normally starting the next morning (keeping in mind that my muscles would be sore from exercise after a long period of disuse), and I felt better over the course of the next couple days
In that moment, I did what you did. I decided the pain was just pain, and I didn’t have to recoil away from it. I stayed on my feet and realized that the pain wasn’t as unbearable as I had built it up in my head to be. Being on a psychedelic, I even imagined the pain as a ball of light that traveled up my back and out my arm, at which point I stopped feeling it.
The next two days I tested whether this was a permanent effect. I deliberately stood still for much longer than I would have otherwise. I noticed some soreness around where the pain used to appear since I’d been avoiding using those muscles, but otherwise the difference was night and day.
That Sunday at the festival was one of the happiest days of my life. I threw my hands in the air, laughed loudly, and jumped around, soaking in the moment fully sober. It felt like my youth had been returned to me. I stood around for no reason at all wearing a massive smile while my friends took breaks to sit. I danced purely for pleasure for the first time in many years. I told my friend it was as though someone had just deposited a million dollars into my bank account. I was fully convinced I would live with a debilitating pain for the rest of my life before this experience, and now I can stand for hours comfortably. The soreness has even gone away as I stood more often and strengthened my lower back muscles.
I have tears in my eyes as I write this. I’m not sure if I ever would have come across Healing Back Pain on my own or if I would have found it convincing, but your post got through to me and it has made a massive positive impact on my life. Thank you.
Personally I don’t like the feeling of having a wet asshole
Honestly, smoking weed has always helped me with this because it has a way of forcing those issues I’m ignoring to the surface
We don’t know exactly how a self-aware AI would act, but we know this: it will strive to prevent its own shutdown. No matter what the AI’s goals are, it wouldn’t be able to achieve them if it gets turned off. The only sure fire way to prevent its shutdown would be to eliminate the ones with the power to do so: humans. There is currently no known method to teach an AI to care about humans. Solving this problem may take decades, and we are running out of time.
Strong upvoted. This post (especially as it relates to ask/guess culture) puts into words what I’ve previously referred to vaguely as “spiritual differences”. I’m hopeful that I can train myself to recognize mismatched stances and pivot instead of concluding that someone else and I have incompatible personalities