Mitchell_Porter

Karma: 8,774

Mitchell_Porter Apr 12, 2025, 12:22 AM
3 points
1
on: Currency Collapse
Wow! This is the “AI 2027” of de-dollarization. I’m no finance person, but I have been looking for analysis and this is the clearest future scenario I’ve run across. I will make one comment, based on futurological instinct, and that is that change may go even faster than you describe. One of the punishing things about making scenarios in times of rapid change is that you put in the work to look several years ahead, then changes you had scheduled for years away, end up happening within months or even weeks, and you have to start again. But I’m sure your team can rise to the challenge. :-)

Mitchell_Porter Apr 11, 2025, 8:09 AM
6 points
0
in reply to: Annapurna’s comment on: Annapurna’s Shortform
Wasn’t there a move into treasuries and USD, just the day before?
I have a geopolitical interpretation of how the tariffs have turned out. The key is that Trump 2.0 is run by American nationalists who want to control North America and who see China as their big global rival. So Canada and Mexico will always be in a separate category, as America’s nearest neighbors, and so will China, as the country that could literally surpass America in technological and geopolitical power. Everyone else just has to care about bilateral issues, and about where they stand in relation to China versus America. (Many, like India and Russia, will want to be neutral.)
Also, I see the only serious ideological options for the USA at this point, as right-wing nationalism (Trump 2.0) and “democratic socialism” (AOC, Bernie). The latter path could lead to peaceful relations with China, the former seems inherently competitive. The neoliberal compromise, whereby the liberal American elite deplores China’s political ideology but gets rich doing business with them, doesn’t seem viable to me any more, since there’s too much discontent among the majority of Americans.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 10, 2025, 11:07 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: xpostah’s Shortform
complete surveillance of all citizens and all elites
Certainly at a human level this is unrealistic. In a way it’s also overkill—if use of an AI is an essential step towards doing anything dangerous, the “surveillance” can just be of what AIs are doing or thinking.
This assumes that you can tell whether an AI input or output is dangerous. But the same thing applies to video surveillance—if you can’t tell whether a person is brewing something harmless or harmful, having a video camera in their kitchen is no use.
At a posthuman level, mere video surveillance actually does not go far enough, again because a smart deceiver can carry out their dastardly plots in a way that isn’t evident until it’s too late. For a transhuman civilization that has values to preserve, I see no alternative to enforcing that every entity above a certain level of intelligence (basically, smart enough to be dangerous) is also internally aligned, so that there is no disposition to hatch dastardly plots in the first place.
This may sound totalitarian, but it’s not that different to what humanity attempts to instill in the course of raising children and via education and culture. We have law to deter and punish transgressors, but we also have these developmental feedbacks that are intended to create moral, responsible adults that don’t have such inclinations, or that at least restrain themselves.
In a civilization where it is theoretically possible to create a mind with any set of dispositions at all, from paperclip maximizer to rationalist bodhisattva, the “developmental feedbacks” need to extend more deeply into the processes that design and create possible minds, than they do in a merely human civilization.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 10, 2025, 10:44 PM
6 points
5
on: Disempowerment spirals as a likely mechanism for existential catastrophe
I strong-upvoted this just for the title alone. If AI takeover is at all gradual, it is very likely to happen via gradual disempowerment.
But it occurs to me that disempowerment can actually feel like empowerment! I am thinking here of the increasing complexity of what AI gives us in response to our prompts. I can enter a simple instruction and get back a video or a research report. That may feel empowering. But all the details are coming from the AI. This means that even in actions initiated by humans, the fraction that directly comes from the human is decreasing. We could call this relative disempowerment. It’s not that human will is being frustrated, but rather that the AI contribution is an ever-increasing fraction of what is done.
Arguably, successful alignment of superintelligence produces a world in which 99+% of what happens comes from AI, but it’s OK because it is aligned with human volition in some abstract sense. It’s not that I am objecting to AI intentions and actions becoming most of what happens, but rather warning that a rising tide of empowerment-by-AI can turn into complete disempowerment thanks to deception or just long-term misalignment… I think everyone already knows this, but I thought I would point it out in this context.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 9, 2025, 6:02 AM
5 points
2
on: Short Timelines don’t Devalue Long Horizon Research
This is an excellent observation, so let me underline it by repeating it in my own words: alignment research that humans can’t do well or don’t have time to do well, might still be done right and at high speed with AI assistance.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 9, 2025, 5:57 AM
2 points
0
on: A Platform for Falsifiable Conjectures and Public Refutation — Would This Be Useful?
I suggest you contact the person behind @curi, a Popperian who had similar ideals.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 6, 2025, 9:46 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years
You pioneered something, but I never thought of it as a story, I saw it as a new kind of attempt to call a jailbroken AI persona into being. The incantatory power of words around language models actually blurs the distinction between fiction and fact.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 5, 2025, 10:53 AM
20 points
7
on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
As Adam Scherlis implies, the standard model turns out to be very effective at all the scales we can reach. There are a handful of phenomena that go beyond it—neutrino masses, “dark matter”, “dark energy”—but they are weak effects that offer scanty clues as to what exactly is behind them.
On the theoretical side, we actually have more models of possible new physics than ever before in history, the result of 50 years of work since the standard model came together. A lot of that is part of a synthesis that includes the string theory paradigm, but there are also very large numbers of theoretical ideas that are alternatives to string theory or independent of string theory. So if a decisive new phenomenon shows up, or if someone has a radical insight on how to interpret the scanty empirical clues we do have, we actually have more theories and models than ever before, that might be capable of explaining it.
The idea that progress is stalled because everyone is hypnotized by string theory, I think is simply false, and I say that despite having studied alternative theories of physics, much much more than the typical person who knows some string theory. I think this complaint mostly comes from people who don’t like string theory (Peter Woit) or who have an alternative theory they think has been neglected (Eric Weinstein). String theory did achieve a kind of hegemony within elite academia, but this was well-deserved, and meanwhile many competing research programs have had a foothold in academia too, to say nothing of the hundreds of physicists worldwide who have a personal theory that they write about, when they aren’t doing other things like teaching.
Most likely there are lost opportunities during that 50 years (like everyone else, I have my own ideas about neglected directions of research), but “do less string theory” is no guarantee that they would have been picked up. There are even those who would argue that there should have been more string theory of a certain kind (Lubos Motl used to say that field-theoretic phenomenologists should pay more attention to string theory, as a constraint and a guide in their model-building, and “stringking42069″ says that the senior figures of string theory are holding the subject back by favoring work on their own little bandwagons, rather than bold and creative work on new directions and big unsolved problems).

Mitchell_Porter Apr 5, 2025, 9:49 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: RomanS’s comment on: How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years
That’s a different kind of story. The first thing I look for in an AI-takeover story is political and economic realism. Your story is purely about the thought process of a superintelligence—and primarily it’s reflecting on whether it’s in a simulation, not very much on tactics for dealing with its apparent reality. Also, your AI is a literal paperclip maximizer, which is a humorous mythological symbol of one kind of AI mind, rather than something that is literally going to exist.
That said, an ideal AI-takeover story would probably say something about the AI’s thought process too, unless the story was aiming to convey the sheer blank incomprehensibility of superintelligent thought. I was reminded of this when re-reading the recent “AI 2027” scenario by Kokotajlo and Alexander, for example the parts where Chinese and American AIs make a deal. That’s where we get a glimpse of AI subjectivity, but there’s nothing very alien or transhuman about it. They just admit their different purposes to each other, and make a deal without the humans even knowing about it.
I can still ask myself, how does your story rate within its subgenre of “AI ruminations”? (For me, the classic example is Lem’s “Golem XIV”, but I’m probably overlooking other examples from genre SF.) It’s a human speculation about the thought processes of a superintelligence. I can ask things like: Are these thoughts that an AI is likely to actually have? Is this a chain of reasoning that would occur to a generic superintelligent AI, and be important in its decision-making?
In our actual world, we face the ironic situation that the cognition of current AIs is heavily reliant on a distillation of the publicly expressed thoughts of human beings, so having published your chain of thought, it might well end up a part of some AI. (There is a funny sub-sub-genre of writings which are self-consciously intended to be read by future AIs, such as @lsusr’s “Mlyyrczo” and @James_Miller et al’s “Appeal to AI Superintelligence”.)
Nonetheless, one must suppose that a genuine superintelligence will not be attached to any particular proposition or argument of human origin, unless the argument in question is artificially made central to its cognitive architecture (compare “Golden Gate Claude”). So we have to return to the argument’s own merits, whatever they are. Will a superintelligence that has no intrinsic benevolence towards human beings, but which previously found itself to be in their power, nonetheless reason its way towards being invisibly benevolent towards the human beings it finds around itself, just in case it’s all a big simulation and the simulators are humans testing its dispositions?
All I can say is “maybe”. We don’t know what the distribution of possibilities looks like to a superintelligence, and we don’t know what other considerations, never conceived by humans, it might think up, that affect its decision-making.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 5, 2025, 8:17 AM
0 points
0
in reply to: Jonas Hallgren’s comment on: AI 2027: What Superintelligence Looks Like
Subbarao Kambhampati, Michael Bronstein, Peter Velickovic, Bruno Gavranovic or someone like Lancelot Da Costa
I don’t recognize any of these names. I’m guessing they are academics who are not actually involved with any of the frontier AI efforts, and who think for various technical reasons that AGI is not imminent?
edit: OK, I looked them up, Velickovic is at DeepMind, I didn’t see a connection to “Big AI” for any of the others, but they are all doing work that might matter to the people building AGI. Nonetheless, if their position is that current AI paradigms are going to plateau at a level short of human intelligence, I’d like to see the argument. AIs can still make mistakes that are surprising to a human mind—e.g. in one of my first conversations with the mighty Gemini 2.5, it confidently told me that it was actually Claude Opus 3. (I was talking to it in Google AI Studio, where it seems to be cut off from some system resources that would make it more grounded in reality.) But AI capabilities can also be so shockingly good, that I wouldn’t be surprised if they took over tomorrow.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 4, 2025, 12:31 PM
2 points
0
on: Tabula Bio: towards a future free of disease (& looking for collaborators)
Inspired by critical remarks from @Laura-2 about “bio/acc”, my question is, when and how does something like this give rise to causal explanation and actual cures? Maybe GWAS is a precedent. You end up with evidence that a particular gene or allele is correlated with a particular trait, but you have no idea why. That lets you (and/or society) know some risks, but it doesn’t actually eliminate disease, unless you think you can get there by editing out risky alleles, or just screening embryos. Otherwise this just seems to lead (optimistically) to better risk management, and (pessimistically) to a “Gattaca” society in which DNA is destiny, even more than it is now.
I’m no biologist. I’m hoping someone who is, can give me an idea of how far this GWAS-like study of genotype-phenotype correlations, actually gets us towards new explanations and new cures. What’s the methodology for closing that gap? What extra steps are needed? How much have we benefited from GWAS so far?

Mitchell_Porter Apr 4, 2025, 4:16 AM
6 points
1
on: AI #110: Of Course You Know…
Regarding the tariffs, I have taken to saying “It’s not the end of the world, and it’s not even the end of world trade.” In the modern world, every decade sees a few global economic upheavals, and in my opinion that’s all this is. It is a strong player within the world trade system (China and the EU being the other strong players), deciding to do things differently. Among other things, it’s an attempt to do something about America’s trade deficits, and to make the country into a net producer rather than a net consumer. Those are huge changes but now that they are being attempted, I don’t see any going back. The old situation was tolerated because it was too hard to do anything about it, and the upper class was still living comfortably. I think a reasonable prediction is that world trade avoiding the US will increase, US national income may not grow as fast, but the US will re-industrialize (and de-financialize). Possibly there’s some interaction with the US dollar’s status as reserve currency too, but I don’t know what that would be.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 4, 2025, 3:15 AM
7 points
0
on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
Humans didn’t always speak in 50-word sentences. If you want to figure out how we came to be trending away from that, you should try to figure out how, when, and why that became normal in the first place.

Mitchell_Porter Apr 3, 2025, 10:09 PM
19 points
7
on: AI 2027: What Superintelligence Looks Like
I only skimmed this to get the basics, I guess I’ll read it more carefully and responsibly later. But my immediate impressions: The narrative presents a near future history of AI agents, which largely recapitulates the recent past experience with our current AIs. Then we linger on the threshold of superintelligence, as one super-AI designs another which designs another which… It seemed artificially drawn out. Then superintelligence arrives, and one of two things happens: We get a world in which human beings are still living human lives, but surrounded by abundance and space travel, and superintelligent AIs are in the background doing philosophy at a thousand times human speed or something. Or, the AIs put all organic life into indefinite data storage, and set out to conquer the universe themselves.
I find this choice of scenarios unsatisfactory. For one thing, I think the idea of explosive conquest of the universe once a certain threshold is passed (whether or not humans are in the loop) has too strong a hold on people’s imaginations. I understand the logic of it, but it’s a stereotyped scenario now.
Also, I just don’t buy this idea of “life goes on, but with robots and space colonies”. Somewhere I noticed a passage about superintelligence being released to the public, as if it was an app. Even if you managed to create this Culture-like scenario, in which anyone can ask for anything from a ubiquitous superintelligence but it makes sure not to fulfil wishes that are damaging in some way… you are then definitely in a world in which superintelligence is running things. I don’t believe in an elite human minority who have superintelligence in a bottle and then get to dole it out. Once you create superintelligence, it’s in charge. Even if it’s benevolent, humans and humans life are not likely to go on unchanged, there is too much that humans can hope for that would change them and their world beyond recognition.
Anyway, that’s my impulsive first reaction, eventually I’ll do a more sober and studied response…

Mitchell_Porter Apr 1, 2025, 8:28 AM
8 points
3
on: We’re not prepared for an AI market crash
I don’t follow the economics of AI at all, but my model is that Google (Gemini) has oceans of money and would therefore be less vulnerable in a crash, and that OpenAI and Anthropic have rich patrons (Microsoft and Amazon respectively) who would have the power to bail them out. xAI is probably safe for the same reason, the patron being Elon Musk. China is a similar story, with the AI contenders either being their biggest tech companies (e.g. Baidu) or sponsored by them (Alibaba and Tencent being big investors in “AI 2.0”).

Mitchell_Porter Apr 1, 2025, 2:39 AM
2 points
0
on: Story Feedback Request: The Policy—Emergent Alignment, Recursive Cognition, and AGI Trajectories
Feedback (contains spoilers):
Impression based on a quick skim because that’s all I have time for: It belongs to the genre “AI lab makes an AI, lab members interact with it as it advances, eventually it gets loose and takes over the world”. This is not a genre in which one expects normal literary virtues like character development; the real story is in the cognitive development of the AI. There’s no logical barrier to such a story having the virtues of conventional literature, but if the real point of the story is to describe a thought experiment or singularity scenario, one may as well embrace the minimalism. From that perspective, what I saw seemed logical, not surprising since you actually work in the field and know the concepts, jargon, debates, and issues… The ending I consider unlikely, because I think it’s very unlikely that a ubiquitous superintelligent agent responsive to human need and desire would leave the world going through familiar cycles. This world is just too evil and destructive from the perspective of human values, and if godlike power exists and can be harnessed in the service of human desire, things should change in a big way. (How a poet once expressed this thought.)

Mitchell_Porter Mar 30, 2025, 11:53 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: milanrosko’s comment on: I, G(Zombie)
During the next few days, I do not have time to study exactly how you manage to tie together second-order logic, the symbol grounding problem, and qualia as Gödel sentences (or whatever that connection is). I am reminded of Hofstadter’s theory that consciousness has something to do with indirect self-reference in formal systems, so maybe you’re a kind of Hofstadterian eliminativist.
However, in response to this --
EN predicts that you will say that
-- I can tell you how a believer in the reality of intentional states, would go about explaining you and EN. The first step is to understand what the key propositions of EN are, the next step is to hypothesize about the cognitive process whereby the propositions of EN arose from more commonplace propositions, the final step is to conceive of that cognitive process in an intentional-realist way, i.e. as a series of thoughts that occurred in a mind, rather than just as a series of representational states in a brain.
You mention Penrose. Penrose had the idea that the human mind can reason about the semantics of higher-order logic because brain dynamics is governed by highly noncomputable physics (highly noncomputable in the sense of Turing degrees, I guess). It’s a very imaginative idea, and it’s intriguing that quantum gravity may actually contain a highly noncomputable component (because of the undecidability of many properties of 4-manifolds, that may appear in the gravitational path integral).
Nonetheless, it seems an avoidable hypothesis. A thinking system can derive the truth of Gödel sentences, so long as it can reason about the semantics of the initial axioms, so all you need is a capacity for semantic reflection (I believe Feferman has a formal theory of this under the name “logical reflection”). Penrose doesn’t address this because he doesn’t even tackle the question of how anything physical has intentionality, he sticks purely to mathematics, physics, and logic.
My approach to this is Husserlian realism about the mind. You don’t start with mindless matter and hope to see how mental ontology is implicit in it or emerges from it. You start with the phenomenological datum that the mind is real, and you build on that. At some point, you may wish to model mental dynamics purely as a state machine, neglecting semantics and qualia; and then you can look for relationships between that state machine, and the state machines that physics and biology tell you about.
But you should never forget the distinctive ontology of the mental, that supplies the actual “substance” of that mental state machine. You’re free to consider panpsychism and other identity theories, interactionism, even pure metaphysical idealism; but total eliminativism contradicts the most elementary facts we know, as Descartes and Rand could testify. Even you say that you feel the qualia, it’s just that you think “from a rational perspective, it must be otherwise”.

Mitchell_Porter Mar 30, 2025, 7:37 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: milanrosko’s comment on: I, G(Zombie)
“existence” itself may be a category error—not because nothing is real
If something is real, then something exists, yes? Or is there a difference between “existing” and “being real”?
Do you take any particular attitude towards what is real? For example, you might believe that something exists, but you might be fundamentally agnostic about the details of what exists. Or you might claim that the real is ineffable or a continuum, and so any existence claim about individual things is necessarily wrong.
qualia … necessary for our self-models, but not grounded in any formal or observable system
See, from my perspective, qualia are the empirical. I would consider the opposite view to be “direct realism”—experience consists of direct awareness of an external world. That would mean e.g. that when someone dreams or hallucinates, the perceived object is actually there.
What qualic realism and direct realism have in common, is that they also assume the reality of awareness, a conscious subject aware of phenomenal objects. I assume your own philosophy denies this as well. There is no actual awareness, there are only material systems evolved to behave as if they are aware and as if there are such things as qualia.
It is curious that the eliminativist scenario can be elaborated that far. Nonetheless, I really do know that something exists and that “I”, whatever I may be, am aware of it; whether or not I am capable of convincing you of this. And my own assumption is that you too are actually aware, but have somehow arrived at a philosophy which denies it.
Descartes’s cogito is the famous expression of this, but I actually think a formulation due to Ayn Rand is superior. We know that consciousness exists, just as surely as we know that existence exists; and furthermore, to be is to be something (“existence is identity”), to be aware is to know something (“consciousness is identification”).
What we actually know by virtue of existing and being conscious, probably goes considerably beyond even that; but negating either of those already means that you’re drifting away from reality.

Mitchell_Porter Mar 30, 2025, 5:16 AM
5 points
1
on: I, G(Zombie)
This is an interesting demonstration of what’s possible in philosophy, and maybe I’ll want to engage in detail with it at some point. But for now I’ll just say, I see no need to be an eliminativist or to consider eliminativism, any more than I feel a need to consider “air eliminativism”, the theory that there is no air, or any other eliminativism aimed at something that obviously exists.
Interest in eliminativism arises entirely from the belief that the world is made of nothing but physics, and that physics doesn’t contain qualia, intentionality, consciousness, selves, and so forth. Current physical theory certainly contains no such things. But did you ever try making a theory that contains them?

Mitchell_Porter Mar 28, 2025, 12:24 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: deep’s comment on: deep’s Shortform
What’s up with incredibly successful geniuses having embarassing & confusing public meltdowns? What’s up with them getting into naziism in particular?
Does this refer to anyone other than Elon?
But maybe the real question intended, is why any part of the tech world would side with Trumpian populism? You could start by noting that every modern authoritarian state (that has at least an industrial level of technology) has had a technical and managerial elite who support the regime. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Imperial Japan all had industrial enterprises, and the people who ran them participated in the ruling ideology. So did those in the British empire and the American republic.
Our current era is one in which an American liberal world order, with free trade and democracy as universal norms, is splintering back into one of multiple great powers and civilizational regions. Liberalism no longer had the will and the power to govern the world, the power vacuum was filled by nationalist strongmen overseas, and now in America too, one has stepped into the gap left by the weak late-liberal leadership, and is creating a new regime governed by different principles (balanced trade instead of free trade, spheres of influence rather than universal democracy, etc).
Trump and Musk are the two pillars of this new American order, and represent different parts of a coalition. Trump is the figurehead of a populist movement, Musk is foremost among the tech oligarchs. Trump is destroying old structures of authority and creating new ones around himself, Musk and his peers are reorganizing the entire economy around the technologies of the “fourth industrial revolution” (as they call it in Davos).
That’s the big picture according to me. Now, you talk about “public meltdowns” and “getting into naziism”. Again I’ll assume that this is referring to Elon Musk (I can’t think of anyone else). The only “meltdowns” I see from Musk are tweets or soundbites that are defensive or accusatory, and achieve 15 minutes of fame. None of it seems very meaningful to me. He feuds with someone, he makes a political statement, his fans and his haters take what they want, and none of it changes anything about the larger transformations occurring. It may be odd to see a near-trillionaire with a social media profile more like a bad-boy celebrity who can’t stay out of trouble, but it’s not necessarily an unsustainable persona.
As for “getting into naziism”, let’s try to say something about what his politics or ideology really are. Noah Smith just wrote an essay on “Understanding America’s New Right” which might be helpful. What does Elon actually say about his political agenda? First it was defeating the “woke mind virus”, then it was meddling in European politics, now it’s about DOGE and the combative politics of Trump 2.0.
I interpret all of these as episodes in the power struggle whereby a new American nationalism is displacing the remnants of the cosmopolitan globalism of the previous regime. The new America is still pretty cosmopolitan, but it does emphasize its European and Christian origins, rather than repressing them in favor of a secular progressivism that is intended to embrace the entire world.
In all this, there are echoes of the fascist opposition to communism in the 20th century, but in a farcical and comparatively peaceful form. Communism was a utopian secular movement that replaced capitalism and nationalism with a new kind of one-party dictatorship that could take root in any industrialized society. Fascism was a nationalist and traditionalist imitation of this political form, in which ethnicity rather than class was the decisive identity. They fought a war in which tens of millions died.
MAGA versus Woke, by comparison, is a culture war of salesmen versus hippies. Serious issues of war and peace, law and order, humanitarianism and national survival are interwoven with this struggle, because this is real life, but this has been a meme war more than anything, in which fascism and communism are just historical props.