Regardless, it doesn’t have to.
Purplehermann
Karma: 147
Corporal vs jail is overdetermined—the former shocks and horrifies people, most people would also choose the former.
I would caution against torture. I can’t articulate the reasoning, but I feel that torture is worse/ less wholesome (for both the torturer and tortured) than pain caused by straightforward damage.
It is also less scary—the idea of being tortured without any real damage isn’t visceral the way beatings are
P.S. you should care about justice/vengeance, and in those areas I believe corporal punishment >> torture/prison
While I find your analysis mostly correct, I’d be strongly against weakening norms against killing people through legal institutions.
I believe this would increase the value of lawfare, as instead of lengthy drawn out jail time where an enemy could pull a reversal they are simply dead.
This would worry me at the political, ideological and private levels
Lower/Higher risk and reward is the wrong frame.
Your proposal is high cost.
Building infrastructure is expensive. It may or may not be used, and even if used it may not be worthwhile.
R&D for VR is happening regardless, so 0 extra cost or risk.
Would you invest your own money into such a project?
“This is demonstrably false. Honestly the very fact that city rents in many 1st world countries are much higher than rural rents proves that if you reduced the rents more people would migrate to the cities.”
Sure, there is marginal demand for living in cities in general. You could even argue that there is marginal demand to live in bigger vs smaller cities.
This doesn’t change the equation: where are you getting one billion residents—all of Africa? There is no demand for a city of that size.
Right now only low-E tier human intelligences are being discussed, they’ll be able to procreate with humans and be a minority.
Considering current human distributions and a lack of 160+ IQ people having written off sub-100 IQ populations as morally useless I doubt a new sub-population at 200+ is going to suddenly turn on humanity
If you go straight to 1000IQ or something sure, we might be like animals compared to them
Your direction sounds great—but how well can $4M move the needle there? How well can genesmith move the needle with his time and energy?
I think you’re correct about the cheapest/easist strategy in general, but completely off in regards to marginal advantages.
Major labs will already be pouring massive amounts of money and human capital into direct AI alignment and using AIs to align AGI if we get to a freeze, and the further along in capabilities we get the more impactful such research would be.
Genesmith’s strategy benefits much more from starting now and has way less human talent and capital involved, hence higher marginal value
He already addressed this.
If somehow international cooperation gives us a pause on going full AGI or at least no ASI—what then?
Just hope it never happens, like nuke wars?
The answer now is to set later generations up to be more able.
This could mean doing fundamental research (whether in AI alignment or international game theory or something else), it could mean building institutions to enable it, and it could mean making them actually smarter.
Genes might be the cheapest/easist way to affect marginal chances given the talent already involved in alignment and the amount of resources required to get involved politically or in building institutions
A few notes on massive cities:
Cities of 10Ms exist, there is always some difficulty in scaling, but scaling 1.5-2 OOMs doesn’t seem like it would be impossible to figure out if particularly motivated.
China and other countries have built large cities and then failed to populate them
The max population you wrote (1.6B) is bigger than china, bigger than Africa, similar to both American Continents plus Europe .
Which is part of why no one really wants to build something so big, especially not at once.
Everything is opportunity cost, and the question of alternate routes matters alot in deciding to pursue something. Throwing everything and the kitchen sink at something costs a lot of resources.
Given that VR development is currently underway regardless, starting this resource intense project which may be made obsolete by the time it’s done is an expected waste of resources. If VR hit a real wall that might change things (though see above).
If this giga-city would be expected to 1000x tech progress or something crazy then sure, waste some resources to make extra sure it happens sooner rather than later.
Tl;dr:
Probably wouldn’t work, there’s no demand, very expensive, VR is being developed and would actually be able to say what you’re hoping but even better
Vr might be cheaper
Have you thought about how to get the data yourself?
Perhaps offering payment to people willing to get iq tested and give a genetic sample, and paying more for higher scores on the test?
I understand that money is an issue, but as long as you’re raising this seems like an area you could plug infinite money into and get returns
This seems… evil or at the very least zero-sum thinking to me.
Would you want to stop the successful from paying for their children’s education? Spending their time on raising their children? Do you want to take all children away from their parents to make sure they aren’t put on different footing? Perhaps genetically enforce equality?
I would much rather governments try to preserve hereditary positive dynamics, while getting involved with negative ones.
We’ll have won once all trees are positive and successful, and bad apples do not create generations of bad trees
There is something fundamentally compelling about the idea that every generation should start fresh, free from the accumulated advantages or disadvantages of their ancestors. ... ... The death tax does not punish success—it prevents success from becoming hereditary. It ensures that the cycle of opportunity begins anew with each generation.
Keeping humans around is the correct move for a powerful AGI, assuming it isn’t being existentially threatened.
For a long while human inputs will be fairly different from silicon inputs, and humans can do work—intellectual or physical—and no real infrastructure is necessary for human upkeep or reproduction (compared to datacenters).
Creating new breeds of human with much higher IQs and creating (or having them create) neuralink-like tech to cheaply increase human capabilities will likely be a very good idea for AGIs.
Most people here seem worried about D tier ASIs, ASIs should see the benefits of E tier humans (250+ IQ and/or RAM added through neuralink-like tech) and even D tier humans (genesmith on editing, 1500+ IQs with cybernetics vastly improving cognition and capability)
‘Sparing a little sunlight’ for an alternative lifeform which creates a solid amount of redundancy as well as being more effecient for certain tasks and allowing for more diverse research, as well as having minimal up-front costs is overdetermined
The Fønix team is just heating water, which is great but actual distillation (with automated re-adding of specific minerals) is probably what you’re actually going to want so as to avoid all contamination not just biological.
In this size of structure growing food isn’t really worth it, storing food for 10 years is actually easier (according to claude). It does need to come stocked though
It’s more that it stops being relevant to humans, as keeping humans in the loop slows down the exponential growth
I do think VR and neuralink-like tech will be a very big deal though, especially in regards to allowing people experiences that would otherwise be expensive in atoms
At what IQ do you think humans are able to “move up to higher levels of abstraction”?
(Of course this assumes AIs don’t get the capability to do this themselves)
Re robotics advancing while AI intelligence stalls, robotics advancing should be enough to replace any people who can’t take advantage of automation of their current jobs.
I don’t think you’re correct in general, but it seems that automation will clear out at least the less skilled jobs in short order (decades at most)
I very much hope the computers brought in were vetted and kept airgapped.
You keep systems separate, yes.
For some reason I assumed that write permissions were on user in the actual system/secure network and any data exporting would be into secured systems. If they created a massive security leak for other nations to exploit, that’s a crux for me on whether this was reckless.
Added: what kind of idiot purposely puts data in the wrong system purposely? The DOGE guys doing this could somehow make sense, governmental workers??
No.
I’m not familiar with public documentation on this.
I know people who have gotten access to similarly important governmental systems at younger ages.
Don’t worry about it too much.
If they abuse it, it’ll cost their group lots of political goodwill. (Recursive remove for example)
Musk at least is looking to upgrade humans with Neuralink
If he can add working memory can be a multiplier for human capabilities, likely to scale with increased IQ.
Any reason the 4M$ isn’t getting funded?
Hitler
Trump—if killing people on short time lines was accepted...
Girl owes guy money, gets him killed for rape. (Her friends join in)
People who were canceled?
I could see nasty business issues, mafias using this etc—but that sounds like a novel so we’ll leave it aside