Three months ago, China’s foreign minister disappeared for a while, and after a month he was replaced. Now it’s the defense minister’s turn for a lengthy absence. A real doomer interpretation would be that China’s preparing to grab Taiwan, and they’re just changing personnel first so there won’t be any infighting.
Hopefully that won’t happen, but I was thinking, what if it did, and had an alarming thought. I’m old enough to have been an adult when 9/11 happened, so I vaguely recall the Internet aspect of the western response. Blogs were still kind of new, and overnight a network of “war-blogs” sprang into being, sharing opinion and analysis. Also, offstage, and far more portentously, legal barriers to Internet surveillance were brought down, though many of us naive civilians had no inkling for a decade, until Snowden defected.
My alarming thought was, what would happen if there was a similar geopolitical shock now, and the developing AI infrastructure (social as well as technical) was mobilized with the same urgency as the 2001 Internet? But then, what form would that even take? Would the deep state’s AI policy experts go to Big Tech and say, we need a superstrategist now, we’re nationalizing your frontier research and we’ll be going at top speed towards superintelligence? Then it really would be Manhattan Project 2.0.
I was expecting something like “an AI is killing the ministers and replacing them with its avatars”.
(I should probably read less Less Wrong.)
China’s preparing to grab Taiwan
Hm, I think people were saying that the war in Ukraine is also a symbol for “what would happen if China attacked Taiwan”. (As in, if Russia gets a cheap victory, China will expect the same; and if Russia is defeated, China will also think twice.) So either those people were wrong, or China is predicting Russian victory?
Or perhaps it is something more complicated, like: “Russia will probably lose, but only narrowly. The West is too tired to fight another proxy war (before the first one even finished). Also, we are stronger and less dysfunctional than Russia. All things considered, a narrow loss for Russia predicts a narrow victory for China, which seems worth it. And maybe start now, while the West is still busy with Russia.”
we’re nationalizing your frontier research and we’ll be going at top speed towards superintelligence?
I think you don’t even need superintelligence. Using GPT-4 efficiently could already be a huge change. Like, make it immediately analyze and comment all your plans. Also, have it create new tactical plans that human experts will verify.
Even if the tactical advice is sometimes wrong, the fact that you can get it immediately (also, when you figure out the mistake, you can get a correction immediately) could be a dramatic improvement. I mean, people sometimes make mistakes, too; but they also spend a lot of time deciding, and there is information they fail to consider, plus sometimes no one wants to be the bearer of the bad news… but with GPT you just get instant answers to anything.
You need to make it somehow so that you can feed to GPT all the government secrets, without them leaking to the tech companies. Like, run a copy on government servers, or something.
Three months ago, China’s foreign minister disappeared for a while, and after a month he was replaced. Now it’s the defense minister’s turn for a lengthy absence. A real doomer interpretation would be that China’s preparing to grab Taiwan, and they’re just changing personnel first so there won’t be any infighting.
Hopefully that won’t happen, but I was thinking, what if it did, and had an alarming thought. I’m old enough to have been an adult when 9/11 happened, so I vaguely recall the Internet aspect of the western response. Blogs were still kind of new, and overnight a network of “war-blogs” sprang into being, sharing opinion and analysis. Also, offstage, and far more portentously, legal barriers to Internet surveillance were brought down, though many of us naive civilians had no inkling for a decade, until Snowden defected.
My alarming thought was, what would happen if there was a similar geopolitical shock now, and the developing AI infrastructure (social as well as technical) was mobilized with the same urgency as the 2001 Internet? But then, what form would that even take? Would the deep state’s AI policy experts go to Big Tech and say, we need a superstrategist now, we’re nationalizing your frontier research and we’ll be going at top speed towards superintelligence? Then it really would be Manhattan Project 2.0.
I was expecting something like “an AI is killing the ministers and replacing them with its avatars”.
(I should probably read less Less Wrong.)
Hm, I think people were saying that the war in Ukraine is also a symbol for “what would happen if China attacked Taiwan”. (As in, if Russia gets a cheap victory, China will expect the same; and if Russia is defeated, China will also think twice.) So either those people were wrong, or China is predicting Russian victory?
Or perhaps it is something more complicated, like: “Russia will probably lose, but only narrowly. The West is too tired to fight another proxy war (before the first one even finished). Also, we are stronger and less dysfunctional than Russia. All things considered, a narrow loss for Russia predicts a narrow victory for China, which seems worth it. And maybe start now, while the West is still busy with Russia.”
I think you don’t even need superintelligence. Using GPT-4 efficiently could already be a huge change. Like, make it immediately analyze and comment all your plans. Also, have it create new tactical plans that human experts will verify.
Even if the tactical advice is sometimes wrong, the fact that you can get it immediately (also, when you figure out the mistake, you can get a correction immediately) could be a dramatic improvement. I mean, people sometimes make mistakes, too; but they also spend a lot of time deciding, and there is information they fail to consider, plus sometimes no one wants to be the bearer of the bad news… but with GPT you just get instant answers to anything.
You need to make it somehow so that you can feed to GPT all the government secrets, without them leaking to the tech companies. Like, run a copy on government servers, or something.