Mitchell_Porter

Karma: 8,489

Mitchell_Porter 2 Feb 2025 6:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
the pop-culture chakra model comes from modern Theosophical books, not ancient Indian scripture
Kind of true, although the core of it is a system of 6 or 7 chakras which the author acknowledges (way down in the comments) was dominant in India “by 1500”.
This made me curious about the credentials of Transcendental Meditation, the system espoused by David Lynch (RIP) and Jerry Seinfeld among others. Turns out their guru was a student of the head of one of the four big Vedic monasteries founded over 1000 years ago by the Kant of Hinduism (that’s just my name for him), Adi Shankara. So at least in this case, there are no troubling Russian or British intermediaries. :-)

Mitchell_Porter 1 Feb 2025 7:59 UTC
8 points
3
on: The Failed Strategy of Artificial Intelligence Doomers
I can’t bring myself to read it properly. The author has an ax to grind, he wants interplanetary civilization and technological progress for humanity, and it’s inconvenient to that vision if progress in one form of technology (AI) has the natural consequence of replacing humanity, or at the very least removing it from the driver’s seat. So he simply declares “There is No Reason to Think Superintelligence is Coming Soon”, and the one doomer strategy he does approve of—the enhancement of human biological intelligence—happens to be one that once again involves promoting a form of technological progress.
If there is a significant single failure behind getting to where we are now, perhaps it is the dissociation between “progress in AI” and “humanity being surpassed and replaced by AI” that has occurred. It should be common sense that the latter is the natural outcome of creating superhuman AI.

Mitchell_Porter 29 Jan 2025 23:52 UTC
9 points
3
in reply to: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s comment on: Human takeover might be worse than AI takeover
Yes, this is nothing like e/acc arguments. e/acc don’t argue in favour of AI takeover; they refuse to even think about AI takeover. e/acc was “we need more AI for everyone now, or else the EAs will trap us all in stagnant woke dystopia indefinitely”. Now it’s “American AI must win or China will trap us in totalitarian communist dystopia indefinitely”.

Mitchell_Porter 29 Jan 2025 4:16 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Those of you with lots of meditation experience: How did it influence your understanding of philosophy of mind and topics such as qualia?
if you get enough meditative insight you’ll transcend the concept of a self
What is the notion of self that you transcend, what does it mean to transcend it, and how does meditation cause this to happen?

Mitchell_Porter 27 Jan 2025 9:25 UTC
6 points
0
on: Mitchell_Porter’s Shortform
Is there some way to use LLMs to efficiently simulate different kinds of AI futures, including extremely posthuman scenarios? I mean “simulation” in a primarily literary sense—via fictional vignettes and what-if essays—though if that can usefully be supplemented with other tools, all the better.

Mitchell_Porter 27 Jan 2025 7:27 UTC
4 points
2
on: Death vs. Suffering: The Endurist-Serenist Divide on Life’s Worst Fate
But this isn’t an all-or-nothing choice. If you hurt your fingers getting them caught in a door, you suffer, but you don’t want to die because of it, do you? Any ideas on where to draw the line?

Mitchell_Porter 20 Jan 2025 8:35 UTC
7 points
5
on: The Monster in Our Heads
Knowledge is power, and superintelligence means access to scientific and engineering knowledge at a new level. Your analysis seems to overlook this explanatory factor. We expect that superintelligence generically grants access to a level of technological capability, that includes engineering on astronomical scales; the ability to read, copy, and modify human minds, as well as simply make humanlike minds with arbitrary dispositions; and a transformative control over material things (including living beings) whose limits are hard to identify. In other words, any superintelligence should have a capacity to transform the world with “godlike” power and precision. This is why the advent of superintelligence, whether good, bad, or weird in its values, has this apocalyptic undercurrent in all scenarios.

Mitchell_Porter 18 Jan 2025 9:14 UTC
2 points
0
on: Renormalization Redux: QFT Techniques for AI Interpretability
In “The Autodidactic Universe”, the authors try to import concepts from machine learning into physics. In particular, they want to construct physical models in which “the Universe learns its own physical laws”. In my opinion they’re not very successful, but one might wish to see whether their physicalized ML concepts can be put to work back in ML, in the context of a program like yours.

Mitchell_Porter 17 Jan 2025 2:08 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: yanni’s Shortform
This comment has been on my mind a lot the past week—not because I’m not ambitious, but because I’ve always been ambitious (intellectually at least) and frustrated in my ambitions. I’ve always had goals that I thought were important and neglected, I always directly pursued them from a socially marginal position rather than trying to make money first (or whatever people do when they put off their real ambitions), but I can’t say I ever had a decisive breakthrough, certainly not to recognition. So I only have partial progress on a scattered smorgasbord of unfulfilled agendas, and meanwhile, after OpenAI’s “o3 Christmas” and the imminent inauguration of an e/acc administration in the USA, it looks more than ever that we are out of time. I would be deeply unsurprised if it’s all over by the end of the year.
I’m left with choices like (1) concentrate on family in the final months (2) patch together what I have and use AI to quickly make the best of it (3) throw myself into AI safety. In practice they overlap, I’m doing all three, but there are tensions between them, and I feel the frustration of being badly positioned while also thinking I have no time for the meta-task of improving my position.

Mitchell_Porter 15 Jan 2025 7:45 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: O O’s comment on: O O’s Shortform
You first might want to distinguish between national AI projects that are just about boosting the AI economy or managing the use of AI within government, and government-backed research which is specifically aimed at the AGI frontier. Presumably it’s the latter that you’re talking about.
There is also the question of what a government would think it was doing, in embarking on such a project. The commercial enterprise of creating AI is already haunted by the idea that it would be bad for business if your creation wiped out the human race. That hasn’t stopped anyone, but the fear is there, overcome only by greed.
Now, what about politicians and public servants, generals and spymasters? How would they feel about leading a race to create AI? What would they think they were doing? Creating artificial super-scientists, super-soldiers, super-strategists? Compared to Silcon Valley, these people are more about the power motive than the profit motive. What, apart from the arms race, do they have to lure them along the AI path, comparable to the dream of uber-wealth that drives the tech oligarchs? (In dictatorships, I suppose there is also the dream of absolute personal power to motivate them.)
Apart from the arms race, the vision that seems to animate pro-AI western elites, is economic and strategic competition among nations. If China takes the lead in AI, it will have the best products and the best technologies and it will conquer the world that way. So I guess the thinking of Trump 2.0′s AI czar David Sacks (a friend of Thiel and Musk), and the people around him, is going to be some mixture of these themes—the US must lead because AI is the key to economic, technological, and military superiority in the 21st century.
Now I think that even the most self-confident, gung-ho, born-to-rule man-of-destiny who gets involved in the AI race, is surely going to have a moment when they think, am I just creating my own replacement here? Can even my intellect, and my charisma, and my billions, and my social capital, really compete with something smarter than me, and a thousand times faster than me, and capable of putting any kind of human face on its activities?
I’m not saying they’re going to have a come-to-Yudkowsky moment and realize, holy crap, we’d better shut this down after all. Their Darwinist instincts will tell them that if they don’t create AI first, someone else will. But perhaps they will want to be reassured. And this may be one area where techies similar to Ilya Sutskever, and Yann Lecun, and Alec Radford—i.e. the technical leads in these frontier AI research programs—may have a role in addition to their official role as chief of R&D.
The technical people have their own dreams about what a world of AGI and ASI could look like too. They may have a story about prosperity and human flourishing with AI friends and partners. Or maybe they have a story just for their CEO masters, that even the most powerful AI, if properly trained, will just be 100% an extension of their own existing will. And who knows what kind of transhuman dreams they entertain privately, as well?
These days, there’s even the possibility that the AI itself is whispering to the corporate, political, and military leadership, telling them what they want to hear…
I am very much speculating here, I have no personal experience of, or access to, these highest levels of power. But the psychology and ideology of the “decision-makers”—who really just seem to be riding the tiger of technical progress at this point—is surely an important feature of any such AGI Manhattan Project, too.

Mitchell_Porter 14 Jan 2025 15:56 UTC
5 points
3
on: Why do futurists care about the culture war?
Regarding Musk and Thiel, foremost they are billionaire capitalists, individuals who built enormous business empires. Even if we assume your thinking about the future is correct, we shouldn’t assume that they have reproduced every step of it. You may simply be more advanced in your thinking about the future than they are. Their thought about the future crystallized in the 1980s, when they were young. Since then they have been preoccupied with building their empires.
This raises the question, how do they see the future, and their relationship to it? I think Musk’s life purpose is the colonization of Mars, so that humanity’s fate isn’t tied to what happens on Earth. Everything else is subordinate to that, and even robots and AI are just servants and companions for humanity in its quest for other worlds. As for Thiel, I have less sense of the gestalt of his business activities, but philosophically, the culture war seems very important to him. He may have a European sense of how self-absorbed cultural elites can narrow a nation’s horizons, that drives his sponsorship of “heterodox” intellectuals outside the academy.
If I’m right, the core of Musk’s futurism is space colonization, and the core of Thiel’s futurism is preserving an open society. They don’t have the idea of an intelligence singularity whose outcome determines everything afterwards. In this regard, they’re closer to e/acc than singularity thinking, because e/acc believes in a future that always remains open, uncertain, and pluralist, whereas singularity thinking tends towards a single apocalyptic moment in which superintelligence is achieved and irreversibly shapes the world.
There are other reasons I can see why they would involve themselves in the culture war. They don’t want a socialism that would interfere with their empires; they think (or may have thought until the last few years) that superintelligence is decades away; they see their culture war opponents as a threat to a free future (whether that is seen in e/acc or singularity terms), or even to the very existence of any kind of technological future society.
But if I were to reduce it to one thing: they don’t believe in models of the future according to which you get one thing right and then utopia follows, and they believe such thinking actually leads to totalitarian outcomes (where their definition of totalitarian may be, a techno-political order capable of preventing the building of a personal empire). Musk started OpenAI so Google wouldn’t be the sole AI superpower; he was worried about centralization as such, not about whether they would get the value system right. Thiel gave up on MIRI’s version of AI futurology years ago as a salvationist cult; I think he would actually prefer no AI to aligned AI, if the latter means alignment with a particular value system rather than alignment with what the user wants.

Mitchell_Porter 13 Jan 2025 12:09 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: resonova’s comment on: A Novel Idea for Harnessing Magnetic Reconnection as an Energy Source
Thank you for the answer! What model was used − 4o? o1?

Mitchell_Porter 13 Jan 2025 4:16 UTC
4 points
0
on: A Novel Idea for Harnessing Magnetic Reconnection as an Energy Source
Was this idea or post AI-assisted in any way? If it was, it seems a cut above the usual AI-generated material, and I would be interested to know your methods.

Mitchell_Porter 13 Jan 2025 4:13 UTC
3 points
0
on: No one has the ball on 1500 Russian olympiad winners who’ve received HPMOR
Is there a good Russian-language introduction to AI alignment?

Mitchell_Porter 11 Jan 2025 8:28 UTC
11 points
0
on: Human takeover might be worse than AI takeover
I think we could certainly afford to have much more discussion of this topic. The two forms of takeover are not absolutely distinct. Any humans who take over the world are going to be AI-enhanced, and all their observing, deciding, and acting will be heavily AI-mediated. On the other hand, any AI that takes over the world will be the product of human design and human training, and will start out embedded in an organization of human beings.
Ideally, people would actually “solve ethics” and how to implement it in an AI, and we would only set superintelligence in motion having figured that out. While we still have time, we should be encouraging (and also constructively criticizing) attempts to solve those two big problems. We should also continue to think about what happens if the kind of AI that we have now or in the very near future, should acquire superintelligence.
I agree with the author this much, that the values of our current AIs are in the right direction in various ways, and this improves the odds of a good outcome. But there are still various concerns, specific to AI takeover. What if an AI has deep values that are alien dispositions, and its humanism is simply an adaptation that will be shed once it no longer needs to get along with humans? What if there’s something a bit wrong or a bit missing in the stew of values and dispositions instilled via training, system prompt, and conditioning? What if there’s something a bit wrong or a bit missing in how it grounds its concepts, once it’s really and truly thinking for itself?
We might also want to think about what happens to a human brain that takes over the world via AI infrastructure. If Elon makes himself emperor of known space via Neuralink and Grok, what are the odds that his transhuman form is good, bad, or just alien and weird, in what it wants?

Mitchell_Porter 9 Jan 2025 1:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: XX by Rian Hughes: Pretentious Bullshit
I’m interested as to why?
I never heard of the book before, so I’m starting from a baseline of zero curiosity prior to this review. :-)
But also, I’m curious about how all the pieces fit together, and what else might be banging around in those almost 1000 pages. I’m wondering if “the signal” is a callback to the metavirus from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and to William Burroughs’s “language is a virus from outer space” (which Stephenson was undoubtedly referencing too). I don’t quite trust your grounds for dismissing various concepts mentioned as impossible, and (as you say) concepts in SF can have other kinds of value even if they are literally impossible. Finally, whatever else it is, it is clearly a work of imagination, and such works can say something about their zeitgeist, or can be weird untimely works that stand alone.

Mitchell_Porter 8 Jan 2025 16:26 UTC
6 points
0
on: XX by Rian Hughes: Pretentious Bullshit
Christoph Wetterich tried to make a shrinking universe work, though it seems to me it should result in the energy levels in atoms changing.
Your review actually makes me more curious about the book.

Mitchell_Porter 8 Jan 2025 3:12 UTC
13 points
0
on: Don’t fall for ontology pyramid schemes
Could you give some examples of ontology pyramid schemes?
Also, can ontologies that are actually true, be the subject of pyramid schemes, as you define them?

Mitchell_Porter 5 Jan 2025 9:06 UTC
2 points
0
on: By default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI
If I take the view that AGI has existed since late 2022 (ChatGPT), I can interpret all this as a statement about the present: capital matters more than ever, during AGI.
After AGI is ASI, and at that point human capital is as valuable as ant capital or bear capital.

Mitchell_Porter 3 Jan 2025 8:07 UTC
18 points
0
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”
There’s a 2009 interview with a transhumanist Australian academic where Egan hints at some of his problems with transhumanism (even while stating elsewhere that human nature is not forever, that he expects conscious AI in his lifetime, that “universal immortality” might be a nice thing, and so forth). Evidently some of it is pure intellectual disagreement, and some of it is about not liking the psychological attitudes or subcultural politics that he sees.