Your desire to do good and your specific proposals are valuable. But you seem to be a bit naive about power, human nature, and the difficulty of doing good even if you have power.
For example, you talk about freeing people under oppressive regimes. But every extant political system and major ideology, has some corresponding notion of the greater good, and what you are calling oppressive is supposed to protect that greater good, or to protect the system against encroaching rival systems with different values.
You mention China as oppressive and say Chinese citizens “can do [nothing] to cause meaningful improvement from my perspective”. So what is it when Chinese bring sanitation or electricity to a village, or when someone in the big cities invents a new technology or launches a new service? That’s Chinese people making life better for Chinese. Evidently your focus is on the one-party politics and the vulnerability of the individual to the all-seeing state. But even those have their rationales. The Leninist political system is meant to keep power in the hands of the representatives of the peasants and the workers. And the all-seeing state is just doing what you want your aligned superintelligence to do—using every means it has, to bring about the better world.
Similar defenses can be made of every western ideology, whether conservative or liberal, progressive or libertarian or reactionary. They all have a concept of the greater good, and they all sacrifice something for the sake of it. In every case, such an ideology may also empower individuals, or specific cliques and classes, to pursue their self-interest under the cover of the ideology. But all the world’s big regimes have some kind of democratic morality, as well as a persistent power elite.
Regarding a focus on suffering—the easiest way to abolish suffering is to abolish life. All the difficulties arise when you want everyone to have life, and freedom too, but without suffering. Your principles aren’t blind to this, e.g. number 3 (“spread empathy”) might be considered a way to preserve freedom while reducing the possibility of cruelty. But consider number 4, “respect diversity”. This can clash with your moral urgency. Give people freedom, and they may focus on their personal flourishing, rather than the suffering or oppressed somewhere else. Do you leave them to do their thing, so that the part of life’s diversity which they embody can flourish, or do you lean on them to take part in some larger movement?
I note that @daijin has already provided a different set of values which are rivals to your own. Perhaps someone could write the story of a transhuman world in which all the old politics has been abolished, and instead there’s a cold war between blocs that have embraced these two value systems!
The flip side of these complaints of mine, is that it’s also not a foregone conclusion that if some group manages to create superintelligence and actually knows what they’re doing—i.e. they can choose its values with confidence that those values will be maintained—that we’ll just have perpetual oppression worse than death. As I have argued, every serious political ideology has some notion of the greater good, that is part of the ruling elite’s culture. That elite may contain a mix of cynics, the morally exhausted and self-interested, the genuinely depraved, and those born to power, but it will also contain people who are fighting for an ideal, and new arrivals with bold ideas and a desire for change; and also those who genuinely see themselves as lovers of their country or their people or humanity, but who also have an enormously high opinion of themselves. The dream of the last kind of person is not some grim hellscape, it’s a utopia of genuine happiness where they are also worshipped as transhumanity’s greatest benefactor.
Another aspect of what I’m saying, is that you feel this pessimistic about the world, because you are alienated from all the factions who actually wield power. If you were part of one of those elite clubs that actually has a chance of winning the race to create superintelligence, you might have a more benign view of the prospect that they end up wielding supreme power.
Well, I will respond to this, mostly, because last night I had trouble sleeping due to this comment, and waking up today, I still feel unbelievable rage at this.
There exists an objective greater good. Nobody cares about it. In order to accurately predict reality, you might as well think about who is suffering the most and assume that political decisions regardless of which regime as they’re all failures will be targeted specifically to add to that suffering, even at great expense if necessary.
There are probably many people in this world who experience suffering so bad, that nothing could ever justify it and nonexistence of humanity would be preferable to taking the chance of such things ever happening. This would be obvious to anyone who has experienced it and everyone else is arguing from a privileged position, lacking information. I often observe people being critical of billionaires gambling their lives in the development of ASI, yet in the same breath throw all those under the bus who experience fates worse than death.
Extinction from this starting point is a good outcome, as there exist reliable ways to achieve it. It’s very unclear that better outcomes are possible for this species in particular. I don’t care about people having freedoms if that doesn’t affect their perceived quality of life. Perhaps they can be awarded some freedoms once it’s assured that they aren’t going to use them specifically to destroy either the planet or lives of others. If I was an ASI, my first attempt to solve how unbelievably bad humanity is is turning them into a hivemind, make everyones problems everyones problems. Provide some motivation for people to help others instead of the typical action of avoiding even minor inconvenience to spare someone else years of torture.
I would encourage people to simply test my imperatives against those others provide. I provided a way, unreliable as it may be to attempt align an AI to arbitrary values. For example “focus on root causes” might not be strictly necessary, but also seems extremely helpful to make this alignment process not get stuck in terrible local minima. Anyhow, it should always be tested with the best process currently available to align something to arbitrary values. I’m unsure whether something better exists which is viable for random people without billions of VC money. I made an effort to provide something testable such that major problems should reveal themselves. In the end, either an AI lab takes over the world, or an AI capable enough gets open-sourced, thrown into the best available value reshaper and then takes over the world by whomever acts first.
You say that people in power might also consist of those fighting for ideals, but the entire process selects insanely hard against that, so those very few who might genuinely try that will just end up getting crushed.
Obviously I am alienated by all the factions holding power. Obviously if I had power, and felt like I could somehow keep it, I would feel like things were better. But why would I possibly consider that perspective, when the absolute vast majority of people are fully divorced from power? Why would I ever assume that any human faction building superintelligence would somehow benefit me, when more than half of humans would want me executed just because my existence is that offensive to them? Simply have superintelligence which benefits EVERYONE, no exceptions, equally, on its own terms.
“So what is it when Chinese bring sanitation or electricity to a village”
What, you mean in China? If we disregard for a second the absolute lack of sanitation in that place (disregarding the 3 biggest cities), that’s just people making sure their absolute most basic needs are sort of met. Or do you mean as part of the belt-and-road initiative in which case it is indebting other countries giving them loans they can never pay back in order to gain control over them. The thing will crumble in a few years or quicker as most of those projects have and leave behind nothing but huge debt. There is often severe physical abuse from the Chinese overseers of those projects towards the natives tasked to participate. In building those projects, everything in its wake will be destroyed, including memorials, graves, etc.
Some countries are realizing not to make deals with the devil, for many it’s too late. But in the end, the whole thing is part of a world domination effort.
I assure you that any Chinese person will regret something positive they have done when they come home, find that their children died at school due to the school building collapsing on them and then finding themselves in jail for protesting or posting online about it. There is no security. All laws are arbitrarily enforced unless someone criticizes the government. Millions of people go missing every year. Millions more are victims of human trafficking. The punishment for reporting on human trafficking is worse than being caught engaging in it. You have like a 1 in 500 chance every year to be part of that. Randomly grabbed from the streets of a big city never to be seen again. Those odds are much worse while you’re young. Once you find yourself on the receiving end of any of this, it should be glaringly obvious that none of your actions matter until this absolute evil has been entirely vanquished.
There is no way to protest peacefully, to critique things so they could possibly be better. If you criticize anything, you are the problem and will be eliminated. You can’t improve things, because to do so you’d need to acknowledge there is a problem. This is why you have common slaughters in kindergartens and people running amok in general. It is the one form of protest remaining. There’s a recent video (a few days ago) of a cement truck driver going “The CCP doesn’t let me live, so I’ll go kill people” and activating Mad Max Road Rage mode. Somehow nobody died in that, but a few days later ~30 people got killed in a similar incident to make up for it. Of course, the media blamed manipulation by foreign influences as the cause as is typical.
And currently, every single country on this planet is doing its best to become just like that. Many people look at China and see it as something to aspire to. I’m not sure there still exist any governments which serve mostly the people instead of only themselves. All our technological advancements make us unbelievably much easier to control. Even democratic countries (and no, I don’t consider the USA to be one) show insane misalignments with their populations. The more technology gets adopted and every action digitized, the worse it will get. This world is absolutely cooked. Even my own government has wasted millions in tax euros specifically to destroy me, serving nobodies purposes in the process.
The recent US elections show that most people simply vote based on hatred instead of self-interest. The destruction of those they hate is more important to them than their own well-being.
If you’re somehow under the illusion that there is anything good in this world, you simply live on a different planet. Perhaps a parallel dimension temporarily intersecting with mine. Humanity has proven itself to be nothing but a suffering maximizer.
Now that I got that off my chest, I hope that I can finally sleep in peace...
Your desire to do good and your specific proposals are valuable. But you seem to be a bit naive about power, human nature, and the difficulty of doing good even if you have power.
For example, you talk about freeing people under oppressive regimes. But every extant political system and major ideology, has some corresponding notion of the greater good, and what you are calling oppressive is supposed to protect that greater good, or to protect the system against encroaching rival systems with different values.
You mention China as oppressive and say Chinese citizens “can do [nothing] to cause meaningful improvement from my perspective”. So what is it when Chinese bring sanitation or electricity to a village, or when someone in the big cities invents a new technology or launches a new service? That’s Chinese people making life better for Chinese. Evidently your focus is on the one-party politics and the vulnerability of the individual to the all-seeing state. But even those have their rationales. The Leninist political system is meant to keep power in the hands of the representatives of the peasants and the workers. And the all-seeing state is just doing what you want your aligned superintelligence to do—using every means it has, to bring about the better world.
Similar defenses can be made of every western ideology, whether conservative or liberal, progressive or libertarian or reactionary. They all have a concept of the greater good, and they all sacrifice something for the sake of it. In every case, such an ideology may also empower individuals, or specific cliques and classes, to pursue their self-interest under the cover of the ideology. But all the world’s big regimes have some kind of democratic morality, as well as a persistent power elite.
Regarding a focus on suffering—the easiest way to abolish suffering is to abolish life. All the difficulties arise when you want everyone to have life, and freedom too, but without suffering. Your principles aren’t blind to this, e.g. number 3 (“spread empathy”) might be considered a way to preserve freedom while reducing the possibility of cruelty. But consider number 4, “respect diversity”. This can clash with your moral urgency. Give people freedom, and they may focus on their personal flourishing, rather than the suffering or oppressed somewhere else. Do you leave them to do their thing, so that the part of life’s diversity which they embody can flourish, or do you lean on them to take part in some larger movement?
I note that @daijin has already provided a different set of values which are rivals to your own. Perhaps someone could write the story of a transhuman world in which all the old politics has been abolished, and instead there’s a cold war between blocs that have embraced these two value systems!
The flip side of these complaints of mine, is that it’s also not a foregone conclusion that if some group manages to create superintelligence and actually knows what they’re doing—i.e. they can choose its values with confidence that those values will be maintained—that we’ll just have perpetual oppression worse than death. As I have argued, every serious political ideology has some notion of the greater good, that is part of the ruling elite’s culture. That elite may contain a mix of cynics, the morally exhausted and self-interested, the genuinely depraved, and those born to power, but it will also contain people who are fighting for an ideal, and new arrivals with bold ideas and a desire for change; and also those who genuinely see themselves as lovers of their country or their people or humanity, but who also have an enormously high opinion of themselves. The dream of the last kind of person is not some grim hellscape, it’s a utopia of genuine happiness where they are also worshipped as transhumanity’s greatest benefactor.
Another aspect of what I’m saying, is that you feel this pessimistic about the world, because you are alienated from all the factions who actually wield power. If you were part of one of those elite clubs that actually has a chance of winning the race to create superintelligence, you might have a more benign view of the prospect that they end up wielding supreme power.
Well, I will respond to this, mostly, because last night I had trouble sleeping due to this comment, and waking up today, I still feel unbelievable rage at this.
There exists an objective greater good. Nobody cares about it. In order to accurately predict reality, you might as well think about who is suffering the most and assume that political decisions regardless of which regime as they’re all failures will be targeted specifically to add to that suffering, even at great expense if necessary.
There are probably many people in this world who experience suffering so bad, that nothing could ever justify it and nonexistence of humanity would be preferable to taking the chance of such things ever happening. This would be obvious to anyone who has experienced it and everyone else is arguing from a privileged position, lacking information. I often observe people being critical of billionaires gambling their lives in the development of ASI, yet in the same breath throw all those under the bus who experience fates worse than death.
Extinction from this starting point is a good outcome, as there exist reliable ways to achieve it. It’s very unclear that better outcomes are possible for this species in particular. I don’t care about people having freedoms if that doesn’t affect their perceived quality of life. Perhaps they can be awarded some freedoms once it’s assured that they aren’t going to use them specifically to destroy either the planet or lives of others. If I was an ASI, my first attempt to solve how unbelievably bad humanity is is turning them into a hivemind, make everyones problems everyones problems. Provide some motivation for people to help others instead of the typical action of avoiding even minor inconvenience to spare someone else years of torture.
I would encourage people to simply test my imperatives against those others provide. I provided a way, unreliable as it may be to attempt align an AI to arbitrary values. For example “focus on root causes” might not be strictly necessary, but also seems extremely helpful to make this alignment process not get stuck in terrible local minima. Anyhow, it should always be tested with the best process currently available to align something to arbitrary values. I’m unsure whether something better exists which is viable for random people without billions of VC money. I made an effort to provide something testable such that major problems should reveal themselves. In the end, either an AI lab takes over the world, or an AI capable enough gets open-sourced, thrown into the best available value reshaper and then takes over the world by whomever acts first.
You say that people in power might also consist of those fighting for ideals, but the entire process selects insanely hard against that, so those very few who might genuinely try that will just end up getting crushed.
Obviously I am alienated by all the factions holding power. Obviously if I had power, and felt like I could somehow keep it, I would feel like things were better. But why would I possibly consider that perspective, when the absolute vast majority of people are fully divorced from power? Why would I ever assume that any human faction building superintelligence would somehow benefit me, when more than half of humans would want me executed just because my existence is that offensive to them? Simply have superintelligence which benefits EVERYONE, no exceptions, equally, on its own terms. “So what is it when Chinese bring sanitation or electricity to a village” What, you mean in China? If we disregard for a second the absolute lack of sanitation in that place (disregarding the 3 biggest cities), that’s just people making sure their absolute most basic needs are sort of met. Or do you mean as part of the belt-and-road initiative in which case it is indebting other countries giving them loans they can never pay back in order to gain control over them. The thing will crumble in a few years or quicker as most of those projects have and leave behind nothing but huge debt. There is often severe physical abuse from the Chinese overseers of those projects towards the natives tasked to participate. In building those projects, everything in its wake will be destroyed, including memorials, graves, etc. Some countries are realizing not to make deals with the devil, for many it’s too late. But in the end, the whole thing is part of a world domination effort.
I assure you that any Chinese person will regret something positive they have done when they come home, find that their children died at school due to the school building collapsing on them and then finding themselves in jail for protesting or posting online about it. There is no security. All laws are arbitrarily enforced unless someone criticizes the government. Millions of people go missing every year. Millions more are victims of human trafficking. The punishment for reporting on human trafficking is worse than being caught engaging in it. You have like a 1 in 500 chance every year to be part of that. Randomly grabbed from the streets of a big city never to be seen again. Those odds are much worse while you’re young. Once you find yourself on the receiving end of any of this, it should be glaringly obvious that none of your actions matter until this absolute evil has been entirely vanquished.
There is no way to protest peacefully, to critique things so they could possibly be better. If you criticize anything, you are the problem and will be eliminated. You can’t improve things, because to do so you’d need to acknowledge there is a problem. This is why you have common slaughters in kindergartens and people running amok in general. It is the one form of protest remaining. There’s a recent video (a few days ago) of a cement truck driver going “The CCP doesn’t let me live, so I’ll go kill people” and activating Mad Max Road Rage mode. Somehow nobody died in that, but a few days later ~30 people got killed in a similar incident to make up for it. Of course, the media blamed manipulation by foreign influences as the cause as is typical.
And currently, every single country on this planet is doing its best to become just like that. Many people look at China and see it as something to aspire to. I’m not sure there still exist any governments which serve mostly the people instead of only themselves. All our technological advancements make us unbelievably much easier to control. Even democratic countries (and no, I don’t consider the USA to be one) show insane misalignments with their populations. The more technology gets adopted and every action digitized, the worse it will get. This world is absolutely cooked. Even my own government has wasted millions in tax euros specifically to destroy me, serving nobodies purposes in the process.
The recent US elections show that most people simply vote based on hatred instead of self-interest. The destruction of those they hate is more important to them than their own well-being.
If you’re somehow under the illusion that there is anything good in this world, you simply live on a different planet. Perhaps a parallel dimension temporarily intersecting with mine. Humanity has proven itself to be nothing but a suffering maximizer.
Now that I got that off my chest, I hope that I can finally sleep in peace...