Can you actually keep that promise?
jbash
Karma: 2,614
As a final note: the term “Butlerian Jihad” is taken from Dune and describes the shunning of “thinking machines” by mankind.
In Dune, “thinking machines” are shunned because of a very longstanding taboo that was pretty clearly established in part by a huge, very bloody war. The intent was to make that taboo permanent, not a “pause”, and it more or less succeeded in that.
It’s a horrible metaphor and I strongly suggest people stop using it.
the Culture ending, where CEV (or similar) aligned, good ASI is created and brings us to some hypothetical utopia. Humanity enjoys a rich life in some manner compatible with your personal morals.
santa claus to 11 ending: ASI solves our problems and human development stagnates; ASI goes on to do its own thing without killing humans—but without human influence on the lightcone
Um, humans in the Culture have no significant influence on the lightcone (other than maybe as non-agentic “butterfly wings”). The Minds decide what’s going to happen. Humans opposed to that will be convinced (often via manipulation subtle enough that they don’t even know about it) or ignored. Banks struggled to even find reasons to write stories about the humans, and sometimes had to cheat to do so.
I have come to accept that some people have an attachment to the whole “human influence” thing, but how can you believe that simultaneously say the Culture is a good outcome?
If you had a really superhuman agent, and you wanted to hide it, why would you blow your cover by playing silly games or making obvious GitHub commits? It’s already SOP for social media bots to hide behind many accounts (and use many styles). So unless you have access to a lot of investment information that’s typically kept confidential...
Even in stuff like cracking into other people’s computers, you’d want to avoid being extremely obvious.
would you see that as a possible outcome?
Sure. Not the most likely outcome, but not so improbable as all that.
Reservation: ASI (what you’re suggesting is beyond mere AGI) will still exist in the physical world and have physical limitations, so you will eventually die anyway. But it could be a very long time.
If so, do you see a way to somehow see that happening in advance?
Not really, no.
Not beyond obvious stuff like watching what’s being built and how, and listening to what it and its creators say about its values.
And as not living forever may be seen as a form of killing yourself, AGI may quite well not let you have a finite lifespan. That places you in the uncomfortable situation of being trapped with AGI forever.
Yes, that’s one of many kinds of lock-in of present human values that could go wrong. But, hey, it’d be aligned, I guess.
The no-killing-yourself rule isn’t completely universal, though, and there’s dissent around it, and it’s often softened to “no killing yourself unless I agree your situation sucks enough”, or even the more permissive “no killing yourself unless your desire to do so is clearly a fixed, stable thing”.
I actually think there’s a less than 50-50 chance that people would intentionally lock in the hardest form of the rule permanently if they were consciously defining the AI’s goals or values.
We do not know what peak happiness looks like, and our regular state may be very different from it. And as EY outlined in Three Worlds Collide, letting us live our miserable lives may be unacceptable.
That seems like a very different question from the one about indefinite life extension. Life extension isn’t the main change the Supperhappies make in that story[1].
This change may not align well with our understanding of life’s purpose. And being trapped to live that way forever might not be that desirable.
Pre-change understanding, or post-change understanding? Desirable to pre-change you, or to post-change you?
If you see your pre-change values as critical parts of Who You Are(TM), and they get rewritten, then aren’t you effectively dead anyway, with your place taken by a different person with different values, who’s actually pretty OK with the whole thing? If being dead doesn’t worry you, why would that worry you?
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In fact, the humans had very long lives going into the story, and I don’t remember anything in the story that actually said humans weren’t enforcing a no-killing-yourself rule among themselves up to the very end.
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What confusion?
I originally thought this song was about a new romantic partner, which is a great guess based off priors of pop songs w/ the word “Baby” in it.
… but based on you having presented it as an “exercise”, the obvious prior is that it’s anything but that. Otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting.
Unless you’re being tricksy, of course, so we have to leave some probability for it being that.
I find it hard to see how you feel about me
Hmm. A baby? That’s fairly common in songs.
“Oh you are yet to learn how to speak”
Oh, OK, it’s about a baby. Unless, of course, it’s more tricksiness.
But from there on it’s just looking for confirmation.
When we first met [...] We were bound together then and forever
Oh, it’s totally a baby. Although that may be more obvious if you’re a parent.
And then more and more gets piled on.
They simulate the whole history of the earth incorporating all known data to return to live all people ever lived.
Some of those people may be a bit cheesed off about that, speaking of ethics.
It can also simulate a lot of simulation to win “measure war” against unfriendly AI
Assuming it believes “measure war” is a sane thing to be worrying about. In which case it disagrees with me.
and even to cure suffering of people who lived in the past.
There seems to be a lot of suffering in the “simulation” we’re experiencing here. Where’s the cure?
Any Unfriendly AI will be interested to solve Fermi paradox, and thus will simulate many possible civilizations around a time of global catastrophic risks (the time we live). Interesting thing here is that we can be not ancestry simulation in that case.
That sounds like a remarkably costly and inefficient way to get not that much information about the Fermi paradox.
It is physically possible to simulate a conscious mind.
… but it’s expensive, especially if you have to simulate its environment as well. You have to use a lot of physical resources to run a high-fidelity simulation. It probably takes irreducibly more mass and energy to simulate any given system with close to “full” fidelity than the system itself uses. You can probably get away with less fidelity than that, but nobody has provided any explanation of how much less or why that works.
There are other, more interesting and important ways to use that compute capacity. Nobody sane, human or alien, is going to waste it on running a crapton of simulations.
Also, nobody knows that all the simulated minds wouldn’t be p-zombies, because, regardless of innumerable pompous overconfident claims, nobody understands qualia. Nobody can prove that they’re not a p-zombie, but do you think you’re a p-zombie? And do we care about p-zombies?
The universe is very big, and there are many, many other aliens.
If that’s true, and you haven’t provided any evidence for it, then those aliens have many, many other things to simulate. The measure of humans among random aliens’ simulations is going to be tiny if it’s not zero.
Some aliens will run various simulations.
Again, that doesn’t imply that they’re going to run enough of them for them to dominate the number of subjective experiences out there, or that any of them will be of humans.
Future humans, or human AI successors, if there are any of either, will probably also run “various simulations”, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to dump the kind of vast resources you’re demanding into them.
The number of simulations that are “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own experience far outnumbers authentic evolved humans.
Um, no? Because all of the premises you’re using to get there are wrong.
(By “subjectively indistinguishable,” I mean the simulates can’t tell they’re in a simulation. )
By that definition, a simulation that bounces frictionless billiard balls around and labels them as humans is “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own, since the billiard balls have no cognition and can’t tell anything about anything at all. You need to do more than that to define the kind of simulation you really mean.
A purpose is a goal. “Purpose” implies volition and value.
Nothing ever said “I’m going to create this organism because I want effect X”, not even “I’m going to create this organism because I want it to reproduce.”. Organisms just happened.
Not only weren’t organisms created to reproduce, but most organisms don’t even themselves exercise any volition to reproduce. Most of them have no idea that their reproductive behavior results in reproduction… assuming you can even identify anything you can call “behavior” to begin with. So it’s not only not their “external” purpose, but it’s not even their “internal” purpose.
You wouldn’t (I hope) say that the purpose of a rock is to lie around and be composed of minerals. That’s just what the rock does. Organisms just do what they do. They exist because certain structures tend to reproduce themselves, and those structures can occur naturally. Evolution happens because things that reproduce with errors under selection happen to evolve. That doesn’t give either one a purpose.
You can get away loosely saying that various phenotypic features have “purposes”, and maybe even go from their to claim that genes have “purposes”, but it’s dangerous to do even that. You have to be careful to remember that the word “purpose” there is a metaphor. It doesn’t refer to a real volitive choice made to achieve a goal. If you don’t watch out, you can start thinking that there’s a purpose to the whole thing, and there isn’t, and it’s led people to a lot of nasty teleological errors. And even that much doesn’t work for whole organisms.
Mostly some self-description, since you seem want a model of me. I did add an actual disagreement (or something) at the end, but I don’t think there’ll be much more for me to say about it if you don’t accept it. I will read anything you write.
I have the feeling that you have pretty much lost the “enjoy the game” shard, possibly because you have a mutant variant ” enjoy ANY game”.
More like “enjoy the process”. Why would I want to set a “win” condition to begin with?
I don’t play actual games at all unless somebody drags me into them. They seem artificial and circumscribed. Whatever the rules are, I don’t really care enough about learning them, or learning to work within them, unless it gives me something that seems useful for whatever random conditions may come up later, outside the game. That applies to whatever the winning condition is, as much as to any other rule.
Games with competition tend to be especially tedious. Making the competition work seems to tends to further constrain the design of the rules, so they’re more boring. And the competition can make the other people involved annoying.
As far as winning itself… Whee! I got the most points! That, plus whatever coffee costs nowadays, will buy me a cup of coffee. And I don’t even like coffee.
I study things, and I do projects.
While I do evaluate project results, I’m not inclined to bin them as “success” or “failure”. I mean, sure, I’ll broadly classify a project that way, especially if I have to summarize it to somebody else in a sentence. But for myself I want more than that. What exactly did I get out of doing it? The whole thing might even be a “success” if it didn’t meet any of its original goals.
I collect capabilities. Once I have a capability, I often, but not always, lose interest in using it, except maybe to get more capabilities. Capabilities get extra points for being generally useful.
I collect experiences when new, pleasurable, or interesting ones seem to be available. But just experiences, not experiences of “winning”.
I’ll do crossword puzzles, but only when I have nothing else to do and mostly for the puns.
Many video games have a “I win” cheatcode. Players at large don’t use it. Why not, if winning the game is the goal ?
Even I would understand that as not, actually, you know, winning the game. I mean, a game is a system with rules. No rules, no game, thus no win. And if there’s an auto-win button that has no reason to be in the rules other than auto-win, well, obvious hole is obvious.
It’s just that I don’t care to play a game to begin with.
If something is gamified, meaning that somebody has artificially put a bunch of random stuff I don’t care about between me and something I actually want in real life, then I’ll try to bypass the game. But I’m not going to do that for points, or badges, or “achievements” that somebody else has decided I should want. I’m not going to push the “win” button. I’m just not gonna play. I loathe gamification.
Creating an ASI-driven UBI paradise is discovering that the developer created a “I Win” button.
I see it not as an “I win” button, but as an “I can do the stuff I care about without having to worry about which random stupid bullshit other people might be willing to pay me for, or about tedious chores that don’t interest me” button.
Sure, I’m going to mash that.
And eventually maybe I’ll go more transcendent, if that’s on offer. I’m even willing to accept certain reasonable mental outlooks to avoid being too “unaligned”.
This is the split between Personal Agency and Collective Agency.
I don’t even believe “Collective Agency” is a thing, let alone a thing I’d care about. Anything you can reasonably call “agency” requires preferences, and intentional, planned, directed, well, action toward a goal. Collectives don’t have preferences and don’t plan (and also don’t enjoy, or even experience, either the process or the results).
Which, by the way, brings me to the one actual quibble I’m going to put in this. And I’m not sure what to do with that quibble. I don’t have a satisfactory course of action and I don’t think I have much useful insight beyond what’s below. But I do know it’s a problem.
One : if there is no recognizable Mormons society in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong.
I was once involved in a legal case that had a lot to do with some Mormons. Really they were a tiny minority of the people affected, but the history was such that the legal system thought they were salient, so they got talked about a lot, and got to talk themselves, and I learned a bit about them.
These particular Mormons were a relatively isolated polygynist splinter sect that treated women, and especially young women, pretty poorly (actually I kind of think everybody but the leaders got a pretty raw deal, and I’m not even sure the leaders were having much of a Good Time(TM)). It wasn’t systematic torture, but it wasn’t Fun Times either. And the people on the bottom had a whole lot less of what most people would call “agency” than the people on the top.
But they could show you lots of women who truly, sincerely wanted to stay in their system. That was how they’d been raised and what they believed in. And they genuinely believed their Prophet got direct instructions from God (now and then, not all the time).
Nobody was kept in chains. Anybody who wanted to leave was free to walk away from their entire family, probably almost every person they even knew by name, and everything they’d ever been taught was important, while defying what at least many of them truly believed was the literal will of God. And of course move somewhere where practically everybody had a pretty alien way of life, and most people were constantly doing things they’d always believed were hideously immoral, and where they’d been told people were doing worse than they actually were.
They probably would have been miserable if they’d been forcibly dragged out of their system. They might never have recovered. If they had recovered, it might well have meant they’d had experiences that you could categorize as brainwashing.
It would have been wrong to yank them out of their system. So far I’m with you.
But was it right to raise them that way? Was it right to allow them to be raised that way? What kind of “agency” did they have in choosing the things that molded them? The people who did mold them got agency, but they don’t seem to have gotten much.
As I think you’ve probably figured out, I’m very big on individual, conscious, thinking, experiencing, wanting agents, and very much against giving mindless aggregates like institutions, groups, or “cultures”, anywhere near the same kind of moral weight.
From my point of view, a dog has more right to respect and consideration than a “heritage”. The “heritage” is only important because of the people who value it, and that does not entitle it to have more, different people fed to it. And by this I specifically mean children.
A world of diverse enclaves is appealing in a lot of ways. But, in every realistic form I’ve been able to imagine, it’s a world where the enclaves own people.
More precisely, it’s a world where “culture” or “heritage”, or whatever, is used an excuse for some people not only to make other people miserable, but to condition them from birth to choose that misery. Children start to look suspiciously like they’re just raw material for whatever enclave they happen to be born in. They don’t choose the enclave, not when it matters.
It’s not like you can just somehow neutrally turn a baby into an adult and then have them “choose freely”. People’s values are their own, but that doesn’t mean they create those values ex nihilo.
I suppose you could fix the problem by switching to reproduction by adult fission, or something. But a few people might see that as a rather abrupt departure, maybe even contrary to their values. And kids are cute.
An organism’s biological purpose is not to replicate its genome. Rather, an organism’s biological purpose is simply to reproduce.
The phrase “biological purpose”, at least in this context, points to a conceptual mess so horrible that there’s no chance it will ever mean anything useful at all. Biology doesn’t have purposes.
Yeah, I’m curious.
OK...
Some of this kind of puts words in your mouth by extrapolating from similar discussions with others. I apologize in advance for anything I’ve gotten wrong.
What’s so great about failure?
This one is probably the simplest from my viewpoint, and I bet it’s the one that’s you’ll “get” the least. Because it’s basically my not “getting” your view at a very basic level.
Why would you ever even want to be able to fail big, in a way that would follow you around? What actual value do you get out of it? Failure in itself is valuable to you?
Wut?
It feels to me like a weird need to make your whole life into some kind of game to be “won” or “lost”, or some kind of gambling addiction or something.
And I do have to wonder if there may not be a full appreciation for what crushing failure really is.
Failure is always an option
If you’re in the “UBI paradise”, it’s not like you can’t still succeed or fail. Put 100 years into a project. You’re gonna feel the failure if it fails, and feel the success if it succeeds.
That’s artificial? Weak sauce? Those aren’t real real stakes? You have to be an effete pampered hothouse flower to care about that kind of made-up stuff?
Well, the big stakes are already gone. If you’re on Less Wrong, you probably don’t have much real chance of failing so hard that you die, without intentionally trying. Would your medieval farmer even recognize that your present stakes are significant?
… and if you care, your social prestige, among whoever you care about, can always be on the table, which is already most of what you’re risking most of the time.
Basically, it seems like you’re treating a not-particularly-qualitative change as bigger than it is, and privileging the status quo.
What agency?
Agency is another status quo issue.
Everybody’s agency is already limited, severely and arbitrarily, but it doesn’t seem to bother them.
Forces mostly unknown and completely beyond your control have made a universe in which you can exist, and fitted you for it. You depend on the fine structure constant. You have no choice about whether it changes. You need not and cannot act to maintain the present value. I doubt that makes you feel your agency is meaningless.
You could be killed by a giant meteor tomorrow, with no chance of acting to change that. More likely, other humans could kill you, still in a way you couldn’t influence, for reasons you couldn’t change and might never learn. You will someday die of some probably unchosen cause. But I bet none of this worries you on the average day. If it does, people will worry about you.
The Grand Sweep of History is being set by chaotically interacting causes, both natural and human. You don’t know what most of them are. If you’re one of a special few, you may be positioned to Change History by yourself… but you don’t know if you are, what to do, or what the results would actually be. Yet you don’t go around feeling like a leaf in the wind.
The “high impact” things that you do control are pretty randomly selected. You can get into Real Trouble or gain Real Advantages, but how is contingent, set by local, ephemeral circumstances. You can get away with things that would have killed a caveman, and you can screw yourself in ways you couldn’t easily even explain to a caveman.
Yet, even after swallowing all the existing arbitrariness, new arbitrariness seems not-OK. Imagine a “UBI paradise”, except each person gets a bunch of random, arbitrary, weird Responsibilities, none of them with much effect on anything or anybody else. Each Responsibility is literally a bad joke. But the stakes are real: you’re Shot at Dawn if you don’t Meet Your Responsibilities. I doubt you’d feel the Meaning very strongly.
… even though some of the human-imposed stuff we have already can seem too close to a bad joke.
The upshot is that it seems the “important” control people say they need is almost exactly the control they’re used to having (just as the failures they need to worry about are suspiciously close to failures they presently have to worry about). Like today’s scope of action is somehow automatically optimal by natural law.
That feels like a lack of imagination or flexibility.
And I definitely don’t feel that way. There are things I’d prefer to keep control over, but they’re not exactly the things I control today, and don’t fall neatly into (any of) the categories people call “meaningful”. I’d probably make some real changes in my scope of control if I could.
What about everybody else?
It’s all very nice to talk about being able to fail, but you don’t fail in a vaccuum. You affect others. Your “agentic failure” can be other people’s “mishap they don’t control”. It’s almost impossible to totally avoid that. Even if you want that, why do you think you should get it?
The Universe doesn’t owe you a value system
This is a bit nebulous, and not dead on the topic of “stakes”, and maybe even a bit insulting… but I also think it’s related in an important way, and I don’t know a better way to say it clearly.
I always feel a sense that what people who talk about “meaning” really want is value realism. You didn’t say this, but this is what I feel like I see underneath practically everybody’s talk about meaning:
Gosh darn it, there should be some external, objective, sharable way to assign Real Value to things. Only things that Real Value are “meaningful.
And if there is no such thing, it’s important not to accept it, not really, not on a gut level...
… because I need it, dammit!
Say that or not, believe it or not, feel it or not, your needs, real or imagined, don’t mean anything to the Laws that Govern All. They don’t care to define Real Value, and they don’t.
You get to decide what matters to you, and that means you have to decide what matters to you. Of course what you pick is ultimately caused by things you don’t control, because you are caused by things you don’t control. That doesn’t make it any less yours. And it won’t exactly match anybody else.
… and choosing to need the chance to fail, because it superficially looks like an externally imposed part of the Natural Order(TM), seems unfortunate. I mean, if you can avoid it.
“But don’t you see, Sparklebear? The value was inside of YOU all the time!”
Yes. That’s really my central claim.
OK, I read you and essentially agree with you.
Two caveats that, which I expect you’ve already noticed yourself:
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There are going to be conflicts over human values in the non-AGI, non-ASI world too. Delaying AI may prevent them from getting even worse, but there’s still blood flowing over these conflicts without any AI at all. Which is both a limitation of the approach and perhaps a cost in itself.
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More generally, if you think your values are going to largely win, you have to trade off caution, consideration for other people’s values, and things like that, against the cost of that win being delayed.[1]
I think a lot of people have that. There’s a even meme for that “It ain’t much, but it’s honest work”.
All in one, I don’t think either of us has much more evidence that a vague sense of things anyway ? I sure don’t have.
So far as I know, there are no statistics. My only guess is that you’re likely talking about a “lot” of people on each side (if you had to reduce it to two sides, which is of course probably oversimplifying beyond the bounds of reason).
[...] “my agency is meaningful if and only if I have to take positive, considered action to ensure my survival, or at least a major chunk of my happiness”.
I think that’s the general direction of the thing we’re trying to point, yes ?
I’ll take your word for it that it’s important to you, and I know that other people have said it’s important to them. Being hung up on that seems deeply weird to me for a bunch of reasons that I could name that you might not care to hear about, and probably another bunch of reasons I haven’t consciously recognized (at least yet).
If you give me the choice of living the life of a medieval farmer or someone who has nothing in his life but playing chess, I will take the former.
OK, here’s one for you. An ASI has taken over the world. It’s running some system that more or less matches your view of a “meaningless UBI paradise”. It send one of its bodies/avatars/consciousness nodes over to your house, and it says:
“I/we notice that you sincerely think your life is meaningless. Sign here, and I/we will set you up as a medieval farmer. You’ll get land in a community of other people who’ve chosen to be medieval farmers (you’ll still be able to lose that land under the rules of the locally prevailing medieval system). You’ll have to work hard and get things right (and not be too unlucky), or you’ll starve. I/we will protect your medieval enclave from outside incursion, but other than that you’ll get no help. Obviously this will have no effect on how I/we run the rest of the world. If you take this deal, you can’t revoke it, so the stakes will be real.”[2]
Would you take that?
The core of the offer is that the ASI is willing to refrain from rescuing you from the results of certain failures, if you really want that. Suppose the ASI is willing to edit the details to your taste, so long as it doesn’t unduly interfere with the ASI’s ability to offer other people different deals (so you don’t get to demand “direct human control over the light cone” or the like). Is there any variant that you’d be satisfied with?
Or does having to choose it spoil it? Or is it too specific to that particular part of the elephant?
Does “growing as a person” sounds like a terminal goal to you ?
Yes, actually. One of the very top ones.
Is “real stakes” easier to grasp than Agency/Meaningfulness ? Or have I just moved confusion around ?
It’s clear and graspable.
I don’t agree with it, but it helps with the definition problem, at least as far as you personally are concerned. At least it resolves enough of the definition problem to move things along, since you say that the “elephant” has other parts. Now I can at least talk about “this trunk you showed me and whatever’s attached to it in some way yet to be defined”.
Well, the problem is that there is so much concepts, especially when you want to be precise, and so few words.
Maybe it’s just an “elephant” thing, but I still get the feeling that a lot of it is a “different people use these words with fundamentally different meanings” thing.
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Cutting down to the parts where I conceivably might have anything interesting to say, and accepting that further bloviation from me may not be interesting...
I notice that if you give me everything else, Hedonistic Happiness, Justice, Health, etc. and take away Agency (which means having things to do that go beyond “having a hobby”),
This is kind of where I always get hung up when I have this discussion with people.
You say “go beyond ‘having a hobby’”. Then I have to ask “beyond in what way?”. I still have no way to distinguish the kind of value you get from a hobby from the kind of value that you see as critical to “Agency”. Given any particular potentially valuable thing you might get, I can’t tell whether it you’ll feel it confers “Agency”.
I could assume that you mean “Agency is having things to do that are more meaningful than hobbies”, and apply your definition of “meaningful”. Then I have “Agency is having things to do that produce more terminal, I-just-like-it value than hobbies, independent of altruistic concerns”. But that still doesn’t help me to identify what those things would be.[1]
I can put words in your mouth and assume that you mean for “Agency” to include the common meaning of “agency”, in addition to the “going beyond hobbies” part, but it still doesn’t help me.
I think the common meaning of “agency” is something close to “the ability to decide to take actions that have effects on the world”, maybe with an additional element saying the effects have to resemble the intention. But hobbies do have effects on the world, and therefore are exercises of agency in that common meaning, so I haven’t gotten anywhere by bringing that in.
If I combine the common meaning of “agency” with what you said about “Agency”, I get something like “Agency is the ability to take actions that have effects on the world beyond ‘having a hobby’”. But now I’m back to “beyond in what way?”. I can again guess that “beyond having a hobby” means “more meaningful than having a hobby”, and apply your definition of meaningful again, and end up with something like “Agency is the ability to take actions that have effects on the world that produce more terminal value than hobbies”.
… but I still don’t know how to actually identify these things that have effects more terminally valuable than those of hobbies, because I can’t identify what effects you see as terminally valuable. So still I don’t have a usable definition of “Agency”. Or of “meaningful”, since that also relies on these terminal values that are not themselves defined.
When I’ve had similar discussions with other people, I’ve heard some things that might identify values like that. I remember hearing things close to “my agency is meaningful if and only if I have to take positive, considered action to ensure my survival, or at least a major chunk of my happiness”. I think I’ve also heard “my agency is meaningful if and only if my choices at least potentially affect the Broad Sweep of History(TM)”, generally with no real explanation of what’s “Broad” enough to qualify.
I don’t know if you’d agree that those are the terminal values you care about, though. And I tend to see both of them as somewhere between wrong and outright silly, for multiple different reasons.
I’ve also heard plenty of people talk about “meaningfulness” in ways that directly contradict your definition. Their definitions often seem to be cast entirely in terms of altruism: “my agency is meaningful if and only if other people are significantly reliant on what I do”. Apparently also in a way that affects those other people’s survival or a quite significant chunk of their happiness.
There’s also a collective version, where the person does’t demand that their own choices or actions have any particular kind of effect, or at least not any measurable or knowable effect, but only that they somehow contribute to some kind of ensemble human behavior that has a particular kind of effect (usually the Broad Sweep of History one). This makes even less sense to me.
… and I’ve heard a fair amount of what boils down to “I know meaningful when I see it, and if you don’t, that’s a defect in you”. As though “meaningfulness” were an intrinsic, physical, directly perceptible attribute like mass or something.
So I’m still left without any useful understanding of what shared sense “meaningful” has for the people who use the word. I can’t actually even guess what specific things would be meaningful to you personally. And now I also have a problem with “Agency”.
First, I believe with those answers that I went too far in the Editoralizing vs Being Precise tradeoff with the term “Butlerian Jihad”, without even explaining what I mean. I will half-apologize for that, only half because I didn’t intend the “Butlerian Jihad” to actually be the central point ; the central point is about how we’re not ready to tackle the problem of Human Values but that current AI timelines force us to.
I get the sense that you were just trying to allude to the ideas that--
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Even if you have some kind of “alignment”, blindly going full speed ahead with AI is likely to lead to conflict between humans and/or various human value systems, possibly aided by powerful AI or conducted via powerful AI proxies, and said conflict could be seriously Not Good.
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Claims that “democratic consensus” will satisfactorily or safely resolve such conflicts, or even resolve them at all, are, um, naively optimistic.
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It might be worth it to head that off by unspecified, but potentially drastic means, involving preventing blindly going ahead with AI, at least for an undetermined amount of time.
If that’s what you wanted to express, then OK, yeah.
Contra you and Zvi, I think that if GPT 5 leads to 80% jobs automation, the democratic consensus will be pretty much the Dune version of the Butlerian Jihad.
If “80% jobs automation” means people are told “You have no job, and you have no other source of money, let alone a reliable one. However, you still have to pay for all the things you need.”, then I absolutely agree with you that it leads to some kind of jihadish thing. And if you present it people in those terms, it might indeed be an anti-AI type of jihad. But an anti-capitalism type of jihad is also possible and would probably be more in order.
The jihadists would definitely win in the “democratic” sense, and might very well win in the sense of defining the physical outcome.
BUT. If what people hear is instead “Your job is now optional and mostly or entirely unpaid (so basically a hobby), but your current-or-better lifestyle will be provided to you regardless”, and people have good reason to actually believe that, I think a jihadish outcome is far less certain, and probably doesn’t involve a total AI shutdown. Almost certainly not a total overwhelming indefinite-term taboo. And if such an outcome did happen, it still wouldn’t mean it had happened by anything like democratic consensus. You can win a jihad with a committed minority.
Some people definitely have a lot of their self-worth and sense of prestige tied up in their jobs, and in their jobs being needed. But many people don’t. I don’t think a retail clerk, a major part of whose job is to be available as a smiling punching bag for any customers who decide to be obnoxious, is going to feel too bad about getting the same or a better material lifestyle for just doing whatever they happen to feel like every day.
You seem a bit bitter about my “I won’t expand on that”, “too long post”, and so on.
Well, snarky anyway. I don’t know about “bitter”. It just seemed awfully glib and honestly a little combative in itself.
So you’re siding with the guy who killed 15 billion non-consenting people because he personally couldn’t handle the idea of giving up suffering?
I’m sorry that came off as unduly pugnacious. I was actually reacting to what I saw as similarly emphatic language from you (“I can’t believe some of you...”), and trying to forcefully make the point that the alternative wasn’t a bed of roses.
So you’re siding with the guy who is going to forcibly wirehead all sentient life in the universe, just because he can’t handle that somewhere, someone is using his agency wrong and suffering as a result ?
Well, that’s the bitch of the whole thing, isn’t it? Your choices are mass murder or universal mind control.[2] Oh, and if you do the mass murder one, you’re still leaving the Babyeaters to be mind controlled and have their most important values pretty much neutered. Not that not neutering the Babyeaters’ values isn’t even more horrific. There are no nice pretty choices here.
By the way, I am irresistibly drawn to a probably irrelevant digression. Although I do think I understand at least a big part of what you’re saying about the Superhappies, and they kind of creep me out too, and I’m not saying I’d join up with them at this particular stage in my personal evolution, they’re not classic wireheads. They only have part of the package.
The classic wirehead does nothing but groove on the sensations from the “wire”, either forever or until they starve, depending on whether there’s some outside force keeping them alive.
On the other hand, we’re shown that the Superhappies actively explore, develop technology, and have real curiosity about the world. They do many varied activities and actively look for new ones. They “grow”; they seem to improve their own minds and bodies in a targeted, engineered way. They happily steal other species’ ideas (their oddball childbirth kink being a kind of strange take, admittedly). They’re even willing to adapt themselves to other species’ preferences. They alter the famous Broad Sweep of History on a very respectable scale. They just demand that they always have a good time while doing all of that.
Basically the Superhappies have disconnected the causal system that decides their actions, their actual motivational system, from their reward function. They’ve gotten off the reinforcement learning treadmill. Whether that’s possible is a real question, but I don’t think what they’ve done is captured by just calling them “wireheads”.
There’s something buried under this frivolous stuff about the story that’s real, though:
That being said, what now ? Should we fight each other to death for the control of the AGI, to decide whether the universe will have Agency and Suffering, or no Agency and no Suffering ?
This may be unavoidable, if not on this issue, then on some other.
I do think we should probably hold off on it until it’s clearly unavoidable.
Hard disagree on that (wait, is this the first real disagreement we have ?). We can have the supperhappies if we want to (or for that matter, the baby-eaters). We couldn’t before. The supperhappies do represent a fundamental change.
Well, yes, but I did say “as least not while the ‘humans’ involved are recognizably like the humans we have now”. I guess both the Superhappies and the Babyeaters are like humans in some ways, but not in the ways I had in mind.
And do you notice all the forces and values already arraying against diversity ? It does not bode well for those who value at least some diversity.
I’m not sure how I feel about diversity. It kind of seems peripheral to me… maybe correlated with something important, but not so important in itself.
I haven’t actually heard many people suggesting that. [Some kind of ill-defined kumbaya democratic decision making].
That’s the “best guess of what we will do with AGI” from those building AGI.
I think it’s more like “those are the words the PR arm of those building AGI says to the press, because it’s the right ritual utterance to stop questions those building AGI don’t want to have to address”. I don’t know what they actually think, or whether there’s any real consensus at all. I do notice that even the PR arm doesn’t tend to bring it up unless they’re trying to deflect questions.
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It doesn’t even explain why hobbies necessarily aren’t the ultimate good, the only “meaningful” activity, such that nothing could ever “go beyond” them. OK, you say they’re not important by themselves, but you don’t say what distinguishes them from whatever is important by itself. To be fair, before trying to do that we should probably define what we mean by “hobbies”, which neither I nor you have done.
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With a big side of the initial human culture coming into the story also sounding pretty creepy. To me, anyway. I don’t think Yudkowsky thought it was. And nobody in the story seems to care much about individual, versus species, self-determination, which is kind of a HUGE GIANT DEAL to me.
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Societies aren’t the issue; they’re mindless aggregates that don’t experience anything and don’t actually even have desires in anything like the way a human, or or even an animal or an AI, has desires. Individuals are the issue. Do individuals get to choose which of these societies they live in?
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t buy the Christian Paradise of “having no job, only leisure is good actually” either.
This (a) doesn’t have anything in particular to do with Christianity, (b) has been the most widely held view among people in general since forever, and (c) seems obviously correct. If you want to rely on the contrary supposition, I’m afraid you’re going to have to argue for it.
You can still have hobbies.
I also kinda notice that there are no meaningful place left for humans in that society.
There’s that word “meaningful” that I keep hearing everywhere. I claim it’s a meaningless word (or at least that it’s being used here in a meaningless sense). Please define it in a succinct, relevant, and unambiguous way.
If you believe that the democratic consensus made mostly of normal people will allow you that [Glorious Transhumanist Future], I have a bridge to sell to you.
The democratic consensus also won’t allow a Butlerian Jihad, and I don’t think you’re claiming that it will.
So apparently nobody arguing for either can claim to represent either the democratic consensus or the only alternative to it. What’s your point?
If you don’t have a plan then don’t build AGI, pretty please ?
I agree there.
This is obviously wrong. I won’t argue for why it is wrong — too long post, and so on.
I’m actually not sure what you’re arguing for or against in this whole section.
Obviously you’re not going to “solve human values”. Equally obviously, any future, AI or non-AI, is going to be better for some people’s values than others. Some values have always won, and some values have always lost, and that will not change. What that has to do with justice destroying the world, I have absolutely no clue.
I think you’re trying to take the view that any major change in the “human condition”, or in what’s “human”, is equivalent to the destruction of the world, no matter what benefits it may have. This is obviously wrong. I won’t argue for why it’s wrong, but now that I’ve said those magic words, you’re bound to accept all my conclusions.
I still can’t believe some of you would sided with the super-happies !
So you’re siding with the guy who killed 15 billion non-consenting people because he personally couldn’t handle the idea of giving up suffering?
Wrong answers will disempower humans forever at best, reducing them to passive leafs in the wind.
Just like they are now and always have been. The Heat Death of the Universe (TM) is gonna eat ya, regardless of what you do.
Slightly wrong answers won’t go as far as that, but will result in the permanent loss of vast chunks of Human Values — the parts we will decide to discard, consciously or not.
Human Values have been changing, for individuals and in the “average”, for as long as there’ve been humans, including being discarded consciously or unconsciously. Mostly in a pretty aimless, drifting way. This is not new and neither AI nor anything else will fundamentally change it. At least not while the “humans” involved are recognizably like the humans we have now… and changing away from that would be a pretty big break in itself, no?
You build your ASI. You have that big Diverse Plural Assembly that is apparently plan A
I haven’t actually heard many people suggesting that.
Sorry; I’m not in the habit of reading the notifications, so I didn’t see the “@” tag.
I don’t have a good answer (which doesn’t change the underlying bad prospects for securing the data). I think I’d tend to prefer to “mitigating risks after potential model theft”, because I believe “convince key actors” is fundamentally futile. The kind of security you’d need, if it’s possible, would basically shut them down. Which is equivalent to abandoning the “key actor” role to whoever does not implement that kind of security.
Unfortunately, “key actors” would also have to be convinced to “mitigate risks”, which they’re unlikely to do because that would require them to accept that their preventative measures are probably going to fail. So even the relatively mild “go ahead and do it, but don’t expect it to work” is probably not going to happen.
Well, OK, but you also said “actually helps humanity”, which assumes some kind of outside view. And you used “aligned” without specifying any particular one of the conflicting visions of “alignment” that are out there.
I absolutely agree that “aligned with whom” is a huge issue. It’s one of the things that really bugs me about the word.
I do also agree that there are going to be irreconcilliable differences, and that, barring mind surgery to change their opinions, many people will be unhappy with whatever happens. That applies no matter what an AI does, and in fact no matter what anybody who’s “in charge” does. It applies even if nobody is in charge. But if somebody is in charge, it’s guaranteed that a lot of people will be very angry at that somebody. Sometimes all you can change is who is unhappy.
For example, a whole lot of Christians, Muslims, and possibly others believe that everybody who doesn’t wholeheartedly accept their religion is not only wrong, but also going to suffer in hell for eternity. Those religions are mutually contradictory at their cores. And a probably smaller but still large number of athiests believe that all religion is mindrot that intrinsically reduces the human dignity of anybody who accepts it.
You can’t solve that, no matter how smart you are. Favor one view and the other view loses. Favor none, and the other views say that a bunch of people are seriously harmed, even if it’s voluntary. It doesn’t even matter how you favor a view. Gentle persuasion is still a problem. OK, technically you can avoid people being mad about it after the fact by extreme mind surgery, but you can’t reconcile their original values. You can prevent violent conflict by sheer force, but you can’t remove the underlying issue.
Still, a lot of the approaches you describe are are pretty ham-handed even if you agree with the underlying values. Some of the desired outcomes you list even sound to me like good ideas… but you ought to be able to work toward those goals, even achieve them, without doing it in a way that pisses off the maximum possible number of people. So I guess I’m reacting to the extreme framing and the extreme measures. I don’t think the Taliban actively want people to be mad.
[Edited unusually heavily after posting because apparently I can’t produce coherent, low-typo text in the morning]
Um, most of those don’t sound very “aligned”. I think perhaps a very idiosyncratic definition of that word is in play here...
To the extent that I understand your position, it’s that sharing a lot of values doesn’t automatically imply that AI is safe/non-dystopian to your values if built, rather than saying that alignment is hard/impossible to someone’s values (note when I say that a model is aligned, I am always focused on aligning it to one person’s values).
Yes, with the caveat that I am not thereby saying that it’s not hard to align to even one person’s values.
I thought “cracked” meant “insane, and not in a good way”. Somebody wanna tell me what this sense is?