As usual, I am torn on chips spending. Hardware progress accelerates core AI capabilities, but there is a national security issue with the capacity relying so heavily on Taiwan, and our lead over China here is valuable. That risk is very real.
With how rationalists seem to be speaking about China recently, I honestly don’t know what you mean here. You literally use the words “national security issue”, how am I not supposed to interpret that as being parochial?
And why are you using language like “our lead over China”? Again, parochial. I get that the major plurality of LW readers are in USA, but as of 2023 it’s still just 49%.
How would they spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11 campers, and—
—and that turned out to be quite sufficient.
I hate to be nitpicky, but may I request that you spend 0.2 oomph of optimization power on trying to avoid being misinterpreted as “boo China! yay USA!” These are astronomic abstractions that cover literally ~1.7B people, and there are more effective words you can use if you want to avoid increasing ethnic tension / superpower conflict.
I’m curious what these “more effective words” are. This isn’t asked flippantly. Clearly there is a geopolitical dimension to the AI issue and Zvi lives in the U.S. Even as a rationalist, how should Zvi talk about the issue? China and the U.S. are hostile to each other and will each likely use AGI to (at the very least) disempower the other, so if you live in the U.S., first, you hope that AGI doesn’t arrive until alignment is solved, and second, you hope that the U.S. gets it first.
With how rationalists seem to be speaking about China recently, I honestly don’t know what you mean here. You literally use the words “national security issue”, how am I not supposed to interpret that as being parochial?
And why are you using language like “our lead over China”? Again, parochial. I get that the major plurality of LW readers are in USA, but as of 2023 it’s still just 49%.
Gentle reminder:
I hate to be nitpicky, but may I request that you spend 0.2 oomph of optimization power on trying to avoid being misinterpreted as “boo China! yay USA!” These are astronomic abstractions that cover literally ~1.7B people, and there are more effective words you can use if you want to avoid increasing ethnic tension / superpower conflict.
I’m curious what these “more effective words” are. This isn’t asked flippantly. Clearly there is a geopolitical dimension to the AI issue and Zvi lives in the U.S. Even as a rationalist, how should Zvi talk about the issue? China and the U.S. are hostile to each other and will each likely use AGI to (at the very least) disempower the other, so if you live in the U.S., first, you hope that AGI doesn’t arrive until alignment is solved, and second, you hope that the U.S. gets it first.