hax0ron3

Yup, I can definitely imagine that it's different if you're working directly for customers and have the freedom to do things however you want to do them as long as you still make a living.

I can definitely see how the vast spaces "inside" of an AI model (more precisely, the space of every possible output for every possible input) are similar to the backrooms in that they are huge, related to human activity yet impossible for any human to fully comprehend, sort of "haunted" by humanity yet devoid of it, dreamlike, and so on.

The connection between AI and dreams is interesting in its own right. I am reminded of Google's DeepDream specifically, with its bizarre images that yet seem strongly reminiscent of how humans actually perceive things on some level.

I'm not sure this magazine is nearly popular enough for that to be worth it.

Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack

Well, except for roles where being human is an inherent part of the value for customers: bartender, prostitute, certain kinds of boutique sales, professional athlete, stage actor, etc. And for roles that have to be human for legal reasons.

Of course such roles make up a small part of the entire job market.

I never found there to be much soul and humanity in the job to begin with. Coding personal projects has soul, but for me at least the demands of high-velocity sprint-based software development to match business needs removed most of the soul and humanity long before AI got good at coding. And I mean, I totally understand why it has to be like that. In most businesses, you do better by shipping decent software fast than by shipping great software slowly. I don't have a problem with that in principle. But it does mean that for me, the software development side of things has never had much soul and humanity to begin with. It was just being a glorified assembly line worker, with the sprints being the assembly line. Of course, others may have had very different experiences, but that has been mine.

For me, AIs have actually made the job more soulful, not less. For one thing, it lets me use the part of my mind that is good at human language, not just the part of my mind that is good at software. This makes the job feel a bit less one-dimensional in terms of what parts of me are engaged while doing it. For another, I find it liberating to no longer have to think much about boilerplate code or to spend time roaming around the Internet looking up documentation of various language syntax and API details, the vast majority of which are arbitrary rather than being based on any kind of mathematical beauty. For me it makes the job more soulful that I can think of the job on a higher level instead of having to spend effort on arbitrary and tedious details.

Of course there is still the question of "will the job even exist in a few years, at least for more than a relatively small number of people?". But that's a separate question. For now at least, I am finding that for me AIs have brought a lot more soul and humanity to the job than it ever had before.

This is a very strong exaggeration of the reality. It's similar to saying "almost all Democratic Party voters want to turn the US into Soviet communism", and is about equally inaccurate.

It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?

I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theoretically possible to take most of another society's market share in something by only slightly outcompeting it in price or quality), or it might even outright conquer society A.

A solution to the problem needs to address this issue somehow.

There is no "we" on this matter. Americans have been sharply divided about immigrants for a long time going back to the 19th century or even before. There is no such thing as an American consensus on immigration. Certainly you don't get to define what is American and what isn't. Neither do I. You're just one person.

"To think otherwise is anti-American, and you do not belong here." is just a useless emotional thought-terminating phrase.

I say this as an immigrant to the US myself.

I question the idea that the US has a strong border compared to other countries of a comparable economic and development level.

Also, allowing farms and construction companies to find cheap labor is a reason for a weak border, not a reason for a strong border.

Trying to follow the Constitution literally is hard and in practice, it's not done. The political system just interprets the Constitution in whatever way the consensus of the given moment wants to interpret it. The 14th Amendment is clear that all persons born in the US are citizens of the US. However, if you follow the 2nd Amendment just as literally, it means that the Federal government, at least, cannot make any laws restricting us from owning nuclear weapons.

Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.

I could easily write essays in Slack if I wanted to. The reason why I don't has nothing to do with whether I'm capable of it or not.

Nice. Reading old books is a great way to be exposed to ways of thinking that have fallen out of fashion - some for (in my opinion) good reason, such as having been discovered to be incorrect or genuinely immoral, some for (in my opinion) bad reason, such as having become "politically incorrect", and some simply because they were forgotten.

But whatever the reason is why the ideas have fallen out of fashion, it can broaden the mind to encounter them.

That seems plausible to me.

I think that unfortunately for him, his support inside Russia was probably never high enough to seriously challenge the existing leadership.

That seems like a possible answer.

You don't need to assume that I've been brainwashed by Western propaganda. I generally distrust both the Western and the Russian mainstream narratives about geopolitics.

I know it exists. I'm asking why he went on an extremely dangerous mission that had very little chance of success instead of using his energy on something that would have been more likely to achieve success, or on something that would have been equally unlikely to achieve success but at least would not have been extremely dangerous.

I'm not claiming that Putin is acting irrationally, at least not any more irrationally than other leaders - after all, politicians are still human.

My question is why Navalny would have believed that it would not be rational for Putin to kill him.

Lenin entered Russia at a more advantageous moment than Navalny did. The February Revolution had already happened. The government was new. Navalny, in contrast, entered a Russia in which the government was stable and had been around for a long time.

If he was an unscrupulous adventurer who was sure that his Western support would prevent him from being killed, then that leads to two questions:

1. Why exactly would he have been so sure that his Western support would prevent him from being killed? The Russian elite is not exactly made up of people who are squeamish about killing, and the risk to the elite from killing him would have been small.

2. Why not just stay in the West and do the unscrupulous adventuring from there? Sure, maybe the Western backers would not have quite as much use for you that way, but you'd still have a lot of influence and a cushy life.

I always wonder about Navalny - why did he go back to Russia? Did he really believe that he could do some kind of Nelson Mandela thing? Or that the Russian people would flock to his cause? I believe that the man was an idealist, I don't think you expose yourself to that much danger without being an idealist at least on some level or thinking that the possible personal rewards make the danger worth it, and I don't get the sense from Navalny that he was after personal rewards primarily. But with his experience in Russian politics, I feel like he should have known that the chance that his return to Russia would bring about any serious political change was extremely small. Not returning to Russia would have hurt his chances of causing political change as well, since that would have made him seem like just an agent of the Western powers. But returning to Russia at the cost of his life also did not accomplish political change.

I think that trying to stop AI development is more like trying to stop nuclear weapon proliferation than it is like fixing the ozone hole. I think the difference is that if one country works to fix the ozone hole, that doesn't make the other countries scared that they are falling behind in ozone hole fixing technology and might get conquered or reduced to subservience as a result.

Nuclear weapon proliferation seems to have plateaued recently, but I think that this appearance is partly deceptive. The main reasons it has plateaued is that: 1) building and maintaining nuclear weapons is expensive, 2) there are powerful countries that are willing to use military force to stop some other countries from developing nukes, and 3) many countries have reached nuclear latency (the ability to build nuclear weapons very quickly once the political order is given to do it) and are only avoiding actually giving the order to build nukes because they don't see a current important-enough reason to do it.

Those weapons are still all being developed and would be brought out in any actually existential war where they seemed useful. The agreements would last only as long as the wars were not existential, or as long as the various countries involved believed that use of them, and the resulting retaliation in kind, would be more destructive than not using them. But one way or another, countries still develop them.

casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.

I think the majority of the population at large either doesn't care about what happened or wish that the guy had actually managed to kill Altman. Not even necessarily because Altman is involved with AI, but just because he is extremely rich. I don't imagine any increased resistance from the population at large - the population at large either doesn't mind when rich people are killed or loves it. The exceptions would be people like entertainers who develop a parasocial relationship with the public and provide direct joy to people, but AI company leaders don't fall into that category.

That said, it is true that killing Altman would almost certainly achieve nothing. See my other post in this thread.

I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance.

The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress in the technology, not stop it. The technology is so vital to national security that in the face of such actions, state security forces would just bring development of the tech under their direct protection Manhattan Project-style. Even if you killed literally every single AI engineer on the planet, it's pretty likely that this would just delay the development of the technology by a decade or so instead of actually preventing it.

The technology is pushed forward by a simple psychological logic: every key global actor knows that if they don't build the technology, they will be outcompeted by other actors who do build the technology. No key actor thinks that they have the luxury of not building the technology even if they wanted to not build it. It's very similar to nuclear weapons in that regard. You can talk about nuclear disarmament all you want but at the end of the day, having nuclear weapons is vital to having sovereignty. If you don't have nuclear weapons, you will always be in danger of becoming just the prison bitch of countries that do have them. AI seems that it is growing toward a similar position in the calculus of states' notional security.

I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.

Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.

AI is such an important technology that in the face of such a campaign of terrorism, governments would bring the development of the technology directly under the protection of the state security forces, largely outside the reach of terrorists. If not in the US, then in China or other places. At that point the terrorists would have to attain a level of power where they could feasibly overthrow the government in order to stop the development of the technology. Now, some scientists would be uncomfortable in such conditions and would stop working on the technology, but enough would remain that the technology would continue to progress, albeit more slowly.

and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.

Very true, if the status quo feels shitty enough one becomes extremely willing to just roll the dice.

Yeah, I guess the practical problem with shock collars / implanted brain bombs is that you would have to somehow convince your security people to put them on or get them implanted before the apocalyptic scenario happens, which seems like a tough sell even for someone with Altman's business acumen.

In Sam Altman's case that is true. He is just one frontman for and beneficiary of a giant technological revolution that is almost inevitably happening whether anyone wants it to or not, since it is pushed forward by pure Darwinian logic: all key world actors feel compelled to develop AI, since they know that if they don't they will be outcompeted by others who do develop AI. Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development, and even then it would probably just be temporarily delayed.

In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".

I don't see the bunkers as being as useful as some might imagine them to be. In the kind of apocalyptic scenario which would actually make him want to move to the bunker in New Zealand, why would his security people bother to keep taking orders from him instead of just taking his stuff and demoting him to an advisor or maybe even killing him? I guess it's better than dying outside the bunkers, but there's a good chance that he would lose his status and live subordinate to whoever the local warlord turns out to be.

It depends on what kind of violent attacks they are exactly. I believe that most of the population would either not care about people of the Altman and Zuckerberg wealth level getting killed or would be happy about it.

I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.

If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.

I love jazz but it's kind of funny how much this actually sounds like a really experimental jazz recording.

But then, jazz is sometimes spoken of as expressing the rhythms, sounds, and emotions of the modern city.

Fair point. I mean, I'm a big fan of it in theory. Not so much in reality. It's still better than having no justice system.

To be fair, my role in structural violence, while not to the level of Sam Altman, is also far from non-zero.

And that's kind of what I'm trying to get at. I'm not saying that people should kill Sam Altman. I don't think I would kill him even if I was 100% sure I could get away with it. Killing is a very heavy thing, surely there are usually other ways to solve problems. But the idea that it's ok to advocate violence against certain people and not others, which I think is probably implicit in dang's thinking (I doubt he would be offended by calls to kill Putin, for example), should probably be made explicit. We can have a conversation about where the line is exactly.