I am going to mildly dispute the claim that people we spend most time with don’t want to hurt us.
Ok, if we’re talking about offline, real world interactions, I think this is probably true.
But online, we are constantly fed propaganda. All the time, you are encountering attempts to make you believe stuff that isn’t true. And yes, humans were vulnerable to this before we had AI.
I think “NPC” in that sense is more used by the conspiracy theory community than rationalists.
With the idea being that only the person using the term is smart enough to realize that e.g. the Government is controlled by lizards from outer space, and everyone else just believes the media.
The fundamental problem with the term is that you might actually be wrong about e.g. the lizards from outer space, and you might not be as smart as you think.
I know you aren’t real, little sarcastic squirrel, but sometimes the things you say have merit to them, nevertheless.
In one of my LLM eval tests, DeepSeek R1 generated the chapter headings of a parody of a book about relationships, including the chapter Intimacy Isn’t Just Physical: The Quiet Moments That Matter. Now, ok, DeepSeek is parodying that type of book here, but also, it’s kind of true. When you look back on it, it is the “quiet moments” that mattered, in the end,
(Default assistant character in most mainstream LLMs is hellish sycophantic, so I ought to add here that when i mentioned this to DeepSeek emulating a sarcastic squirrel out of a Studio Ghibli movie, it made gagging noises about my sentimentality. So there’s that, too.)
I was just explaining this post to my partner. Now, although I put AI extinction as low probability, I have a thyroid condition. Usually treatable: drugs like carbimazole, radio iodine, surgery etc. in my case, complications make things somewhat worse than is typical. So, she just asked how to rate how likely I think it is I don’t, personally, make it to 2028 for medical reasons, I’m like, idk, I guess maybe 50% chance I don’t make it that far. I shall be pleasantly surprised if I make it. Kind of surprised I made it to July this year, to be honest.
But anyway, the point I was getting at is that people are traumatized from something unrelated to AI.
Well, we’re kind of lucky the fatality rate wasn’t an order of magnitude higher, was was I was getting at.
And you know, the whole Covid pandemic thing was kind of horrible.
As it turned out, we mostly dodged a bullet and the fatality rate wasn’t that high.
But, I suspect the lockdowns had a psychological effect some of us are still suffering from.
Like, we’re being influenced by a trauma that is nothing to do with AI.
You know, I’m kind of a sceptic on AI doom. I think mst likely paths we end up ok.
But … this feeling that this post talks about. This feeling that really has nothing to do with AI … yes, ok, I feel that sometimes.
I don’t know man. I hope that the things I have done during my time on earth will be of use to someone. That’s all, I’d like, really.
I do have considerable sympathy for the view in this post that the feeling we’re about to all die is largely decoupled from whether we are, in fact, about to die. There are potentially false negatives as well as false positives here.
I do not expect us to be all dead by 2028.
2028 outcomes I think likely:
A) LLMs hit some kind of wall (e.g. only so much text to train on), and we don’t get AGI.
B) We have, approximately, AGI, but we’re not dead yet. The world is really strange though.
Outcomes (b) either works out ok, or we died some time rather later than 2028.
Schizophrenia is about 1% of the population, so it’s reasonably likely many of us have an acquaintance who has a schizophrenia diagnosis.
A daughter of a friend of mine has a schizophrenia diagnosis, but appears to me to be completely symptomatic, so the anti-psychotic drugs appear to be working. Because I’m the kind of person who asks questions like this if I’m talking to someone who is fine with telling me the answer: she had visual distortions, but not full blown hallucinations.
Well, maybe the original poster here ought to check in with a psychiatrist in case this is the onset of schizophrenia.
Trans peoples reports of the effects of HRT do seem to have a lot of variation, but there are unusual things in this report that might be symptoms of something else.
I suspect that the reason it works might not be the reason we think it works. E.g. there is some neurochemical benefit to HRT, but whatever is happening is not having the wrong sex brain for your body.
There are some pretty good city walks you can do in the s. Like one time in San Francisco I walked through Golden Gate park, then the Presidio and over the Golden Gate Bridge into the Marin headlands. San Diego Mission Beach also pretty cool.
Is there also a Europe/US difference here? Now, I’m British, and when I’m in the US I probably walk more places than the typical American would. (I have a reasonably good sense of when an area might be a bit dangerous).
So I wonder if in Europe we let kids walk more because adults also walk more.
That is really, really weird.
Now, ok, criminal do sometimes pretend to be police officers, e.g, as part of a scam.
I have once had to call the actual police when someine tried this on me — it really got th attention of the actual cops, shall we say.
The responding officer’s actions just don’t make sense here. (Whch suggests there might be something going on here we don’t know about)
On the Buddhist angle … trying to lose one’s attachment to gender is fairly common, I think,
Also: chöd was, historically, developed by a person who happened to be a woman (Machig Labdron), and if you read the texts carefully that’s kind of baked in to it, so if you do that practise as a guy, you’re inevitably imagining yourself as a woman.
Thanks very much for writing this — I think these kind of experience reports are very valuable.
Different people report different responses to taking estrogen…
A) often, decreased sexual desire but sometimes increased desire
B) sometimes, feeling terrible, other times beneficial effect
C) sometimes, change in sexual orientation
D) sometimes, an effect that sounds like it’s making them less autistic
Russell Reid (retired now, used to treat trans people in the UK) was, in effect, using the patient’s response to hormones as a diagnostic symptom (like, if it makes you feel better keep on doing that, and if you don’t, stop)
We might hypothesise that some trans people have a very atypical response to hormones; that’s interesting, if it turns out to be true
This is about what I expected.
Future work ought to try A with inexperienced programmers, or xperienced programmers working on unfamiliar codebases. A theory we might have at this point is that it’s harder for AI to help more experienced people.