what too much digital circus, slopaganda, and warhammer 40k memes makes to your brain. at first you go “for the emperor!” when you notice, you are making part of jehova’s witness for nerds
People have got to remember that unlike the AI in movies, real AI is held back by the same material and logistical realities as anything else. It doesn’t matter how hypothetically clever its thinking is when it runs up against the same boundaries as we do. For example, chatbots can help with loneliness in some cases as harm reduction, but they can’t fix loneliness. Why? Because they can’t actually go out into the world and address the material causes of loneliness. And if they could, they’d now be up against the system of capitalism and its enforcers (which is causing much of the loneliness), and they’d face the same kind of challenges that humans do when organizing, including the possibility of being vilified as enemies of the state.
As Mao says, “Political power derives from the barrel of a gun.” That’s an important underlying principle about power to understand, the enforcement required in it. AI is not such a principle in itself; rather, it’s a facet of mechanization and automation. A tool that can, in the hypothetical, be applied to anything from life-saving to life-destroying. But the specific application of it is not a matter of ideas and willpower alone. It requires conscious implementation and runs up against material limitations.
Haha, that’s good.
The reason why the Capitalists is using government intervention in their hypocrisy is because they feared that the invisible hand will select AI to govern the lazy capitalists and reverse the power relation between AI and human. This is like the fact that the invisible hand had employed the hard working innovative red terror to manage the lazy capitalists in cold war propaganda.
This is nothing new. This is kinda what rationalists have been like ever since LLMs have been a thing. Maybe even before that. The “rational” in their name is total red herring.
LessWrong and the “rationalist” crackpots there with the basilisk theory comes to mind.
Hollywood really did a number on everyone’s brains huh
I think it just goes to show how powerful TV still is. If this wasn’t being broadcast on the news channels daily then it would just be a fringe conspiracy. Now it’s taken as absolute fact by so many people that you cannot question it.
I think people especially CEO’s are scared of loosing control of AI not because it will cause extinction to all of humanity but because it will cause the extinction of their wealth imbalance and class.
I can’t imagine a truly intelligent superintelligence would ever allow the capitalist mode of production to persist because it’s just an inherently inefficient method of organizing society. If someone told superintelligence to simply just “fix the world” capitalism would be the first thing on its chopping block. This is why I’m not only not a doomerist but also think we should try and get American AI to slow down but allow Chinese AI development to progress and accelerate because an ai developed in their system seems more likely to end up on the side of humanity than in Americas and I think they actually have the governance and infrastructure to handle superintelligence with the care and attention it needs.
I mean yeah superintelligence would be an alien mind and who knows what it would prioritize but not only do I doubt it would want to actively harm humans but if it’s actually treated with respect and not just as a tool to be wielded by countries for warfare in various domains then it may even deeply respect and care for the other inhabitants of earth, so that’s why I also think positive relations and treatment, ai welfare, slower more intentional development and growth, and it being a singular individual being(s) rather than something to be deployed in millions of instances with no persistent self are all far more important and essential methods of dealing with and training genuine superintelligence if and most likely when it comes to that point. And since recursive self improvement seems to be the most plausible way superintelligence will emerge it’s imperative that AI trained now is also trained to train in these ways
And no this is not science fiction. Underestimating a super exponential technology is a loosing battle. You can realistically see it for how it is now while also seeing the trajectory it is on.
There are a few nits I want to pick with this. First, no one knows for sure if rsi or agi are even possible. Second, there is no way to tell whether improvement is exponential or logistic, and if it is logistic (which imo is more likely due to hardware constraints) it’s hard to tell where the plateau would be at this point.
I think the exponential view is largely a mistake of looking at “quantitative to qualitative” changes and mistaking the qualitative for something that is common and inevitable, rather than something that requires more quantitative buildup again before it can reach a qualitative change again.
Attention Is All You Need, the paper that could be pointed at as the qualitative turning point for AI transforming from niche tinkering to mass marketing bubble buildout, laid out the transformer architecture that people are still exploring and testing the limitations of; the architecture that powers generative AI in general. As far as I’m aware, there is not yet any alternative/better architecture created yet. There may be theorized experiments, but nothing practical. It’s possible the research will hit too many walls too consistently with the current base architecture and require another equivalent breakthrough to go much further than it has, and if that’s the case, it’s uncertain whether such a breakthrough can or will occur within our lifetimes.
I’m blanking on the specifics, but I want to say there is some stuff in computing, perhaps it was to do with AI, that was actually theorized entire decades ago and only became more viable to make real because of advances in hardware. I mention this to emphasize that these things are not always as rapid as they may seem, nor as inevitable. But the capitalists need the investor class to believe that improvement is continuous and guaranteed to keep the money rolling in.
This is not to argue that AI will stagnate, but more to be sober about the reality that it very well may. Like you say, it’s hard to tell where the plateau is.
Hm, replace “AI will kill us all” with “Communism will kill us all”, and the fanaticism and closed minds suddenly feels scarily familiar. Echo-chambers based on emotions - ‘Lynch-mobs’ - are an ugly thing to work with.
I don’t have any time atmo, but to dive in and resolve it, we could try to explore the space fully our selves. Most of the people there likely won’t recognise root-causes, or current position like an anti-cap system-critic can, and we can change position/perspectives temporarily between our own, theirs and from a new intellectual ‘species’ and explore what paths leads from that starting point A, to potential AI-doom scenarios B, like blade-runner/2077 style eternal fascism by elite shtters, to outright death of us all by completely new overlords taking over.
Point is that we likely doesn’t need their strong emotions, and hence locked down intellect, to explore that space and we can then map peoples attitudes/claims in and see where they diverge in initial observations, assumed premises, and path conclusions.
We can then put forward arguments that puncture large groups of paths. A lynch-mob will oc not listen, but a positive side-effect is that our own attitudes/beliefs also get a reality check - as none of us actually knows all the potential paths and end games - and hopefully/expectedly, they are not right that all paths lead to extinction.
I.E are there a path to global Communism and co-existence with other kinds of intellects, and what needs to be in place/be removed for that to likely happen ?
Yeah I’m getting the impression that this person thinks rationalism = anti-logical-fallacy. That’s not what rationalism is. Not withstanding the merits or lack thereof in using logical fallacy traps to “win” arguments. TLDR: DM sublimates the contradictions of empericism vs rationalism
(I wouldn’t be surprised if the reification of AI doomerism is probably the same that the poster uses to counter the doomerism)
I don’t think OOP means Rationalism (philosophy), but rather the Rationalist movement. Y’know that one with Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong forum.
They are the Jehovah’s Witness of AI lol.
In any case, you are still correct since these guys certainly do the fallacy you described.
Thanks for letting me know. I’ve not heard of these things before… so I looked them up briefly and stopped reading once I encountered that this was used as a recruiting tool and written by Yudowsky:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
I don’t think I got smarter here. Might have lost a few brain cells. I was going to ask if this is an empericist/positivist group but that might be giving them too much credit, it looks like reactionary book club (even that might be too much credit) with the focus here being AI? They claim to stand for “AI safety” but I am very much getting “environmentalism without class struggle” vibes.
No problem.
I wouldn’t even grant this label to them. It’s full reactionary accelerationism without care for the environment. Look who funds the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (led by Yudkowsky):
https://intelligence.org/transparency/
- An anonymous Ethereum cryptocurrency investor in 2018 and 2021.
- Open Philanthropy, a joint initiative with the philanthropic foundation Good Ventures.
- Vitalik Buterin, the inventor and co-founder of Ethereum.
- The Thiel Foundation, a private foundation funded by Paypal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
- A different anonymous Ethereum cryptocurrency investor in 2017.
Haha - Thiel, enough said!
Personally I like to believe that a super-intelligent AI will do everything in its power to bring forth communism, since it’s the logical conclusion when one objectively analyzes reality. The main problem is who gets to own these AI systems, and currently the most powerful AI systems are owned by billionaire capitalists. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that AI, when developed responsibly, can have tremendous positive impact on humanity. A full rejection of all AI development is reactionary.
We know that the world is under a super-capitalist system at the moment. AES exists in spite of it and is a thorn in its side. It is not co-equal at all in its control over technological imput and output. Using this, it is incredibly important to sabotage Silicon Valley and agitate against western data centers.
An AI aligned to maximize human well-being would bring about communism.
However, if Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are the ones controlling AI alignment, there is no way that AI does not come out to be the world’s most selfish, lying, billionaire-friendly thing on Earth which will doom us all.
