woodchopper

Karma: 7

woodchopper 26 Jun 2018 0:12 UTC
3 points
on: Duplication versus probability
If an exact copy of you were to be created, it would have to be stuck in the hole as well. If the ‘copy’ is not in the hole, then it is not you, because it is experiencing different inputs and has a different brain state.

woodchopper 25 Jun 2018 12:23 UTC
−16 points
on: Wirehead your Chickens
> identify and surgically or chemically remove the part of the brain that is responsible for suffering,
There is no part of the brain responsible for consciousness. Consciousness is a process and it involves the entire system from the inputs to your brain (like me telling you that you’re ignorant) to the peripheral nerves to the complex sub-sectors of the brain.
> breed animals who enjoy pain, not suffer from it
You cannot enjoy pain. That’s quite literally a contradiction.
> Many of these are probably way easier and more practical than shaming people into giving up tasty steak
None of the ideas you have posited are easy, practical, or make any sense whatsoever. Shaming people into giving up tasty steak is a weird way to frame the problem. Shaming people for placing a momentary experience given to them by steak on their taste buds as worth torturing cows to death for is a viable and important strategy, because it is fundamentally sound.
> Because most people do not truly care about reducing animal suffering, they care about a different metric altogether, a visible human proxy for animal suffering that they find immediately relatable.
The best way of reducing animal suffering would be to reduce the number of animals currently in existence and reduce the number brought into existence. Ending factory farming is a very effective way of doing this, considering that an extremely large proportion of the most sentient creatures on the planet (mainly mammals with very complex brains) are brought into existence by the direct action of humans, for meat consumption.
One of your ideas, shrinking or even removing the brain, is already being developed. We are making meat without the animal, which means without the brain. We are using technology to do so. This is cultured meat. We are also replicating most of the properties of meat and making plant based meat (see Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat). Both of these approaches are effective and practical.
Is it practical to wirehead tens of billions of chickens every year? No, it’s not. It’s impossible with current technology. We could surgically implant carfentanil secreting devices in the spinal cords of every chicken, but the process of doing this would drive chicken meat costs up so high that the world would just go vegan instead of paying for them.
I urge you to think more clearly about this issue, instead of trying to find ways to justify your current lifestyle.

woodchopper 6 May 2017 17:59 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: The AI Alignment Problem Has Already Been Solved(?) Once

and more specifically you should not find yourself personally living in a universe where the history of your experience is lost. I say this because this is evidence that we will likely avoid a failure in AI alignment that destroys us, or at least not find ourselves in a universe where AI destroys us all, because alignment will turn out to be practically easier than we expect it to be in theory.

Can you elaborate on this idea? What do you mean by ‘the history of your experience is lost’? Can you supply some links to read on this whole theory?

woodchopper 6 May 2017 17:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: contravariant’s comment on: The AI Alignment Problem Has Already Been Solved(?) Once

Could you qualify that statement?

Can you make an AGI given only primordial soup?

woodchopper 6 May 2017 17:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: tukabel’s comment on: The AI Alignment Problem Has Already Been Solved(?) Once
An AI will have a utility function. What utility function do you propose to give it?

What values would we give an AI if not human ones? Giving it human values doesn’t necessarily mean giving it the values of our current society. It will probably mean distilling our most core moral beliefs.

If you take issue with that all you are saying is that you want an AI to have your values, rather than humanity’s, as a whole.

woodchopper 6 May 2017 17:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: AI arms race
Developing an AGI (and then ASI) will likely involve a serious of steps involving lower intelligences. There’s already an AI arms race between several large technology companies and keeping your nose in front is already practiced because there’s a lot of utility in having the best AI so far.

So it isn’t true to say that it’s simply a race without important intermediate steps. You don’t just want to get to the destination first, you want to make sure your AI is the best for most of the race for a whole heap of reasons.

woodchopper 30 Apr 2017 5:21 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Apr. 24 - Apr. 30, 2017
That’s a partial list. It also takes good universities, a culture that produces a willingness to take risks, a sufficient market for good products, and I suspect a litany of other things.

I think once you’ve got a society that genuinely innovates started, it can be hard to kill that off, but it can be and has been done. The problem is, as you mentioned, very few societies have ever been particularly innovative.

It’s easy to use established technology to build a very prosperous first world society. For example: Australia, Canada, Sweden. But it’s much harder for a society to genuinely drive humanity forwards and in the history of humanity it has only happened a few times. We forget that for a very long time, very little invention happened in human society anywhere.

woodchopper 28 Apr 2017 11:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Open thread, Apr. 24 - Apr. 30, 2017
I think it’s an interesting point about innovation actually being very rare, and I agree. It takes a special combination of things for to happen and that combination doesn’t come around much. Britain was extremely innovative a few hundred years ago. In fact, they started the industrial revolution, literally revolutionising humanity. But today they do not strike me as particularly innovative even with that history behind them.

I don’t think America’s ability to innovate is coming to end all that soon. But even if America continues to prosper, will that mean it continues to innovate? It takes more than prosperity for innovation to happen. It takes a combination of factors that nobody really understands. It takes a particular culture, a particular legal system, and much more.

woodchopper 28 Oct 2016 14:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 24 - Oct. 30, 2016
You have failed to answer my question. Why does anything at all matter? Why does anything care about anything at all? Why don’t I want my dog to die? Obviously, when I’m actually dead, I won’t want anything at all. But there is no reason I cannot have preferences now regarding events that will occur after I am dead. And I do.

woodchopper 27 Oct 2016 0:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 24 - Oct. 30, 2016
Why does anything at all matter?

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 10:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 10 - Oct. 16, 2016
In Australia we currently produce enough food for 60 million people. This is without any intensive farming techniques at all. This could be scaled up by a factor of ten if it was really necessary, but quality of life per capita would suffer.

I think smaller nations are as a general rule governed much better, so I don’t see any positives in increasing our population beyond the current 24 million people.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 10:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Houshalter’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 10 - Oct. 16, 2016
Each human differs in their values. So it is impossible to build the machine of which you speak.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 10:48 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 10 - Oct. 16, 2016
Raid Google and shut them down immediately. Start a Manhattan project of AI safety research.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 10:41 UTC
−1 points
on: The map of agents which may create x-risks
I really like that you mention world government as an existential risk. It’s one of the biggest ones. Competition is a very good risk reduction process. It has been said before that if we all lived in North Korea, it may well be that the future of humanity would be quite bleak indeed. North Korea is less stable now than it would be if it was the world’s government because all sorts of outside pressure contribute to its instability (technology created by more free nations, pressure from foreign governments, etc).

No organisation can ever get it right all the time. Even knowing what right is is pretty hard to do and the main way humans do it is with competition. We know certain things work and certain things don’t simply because of policy diversity between nations—we can look and see which countries are successful and which aren’t. A world government would destroy this. Under a world government I would totally write off humanity. I suspect we would all be doomed to die on this rock. People very much forget how precarious our current civilisation is. For thousands of years humanity floundered until Britain hit upon the ability to create continued progress through the chance development of certain institutions (rule of law, property rights, contracts, education, reading, writing, etc).

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 10:29 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 24 - Oct. 30, 2016
You might not care, but a lot of humans do care, and will continue to care. That’s why we’re discussing it.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 10:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 24 - Oct. 30, 2016
There have been wars over land since humans have existed. And non interaction, even if initially widespread, clearly eventually stopped when it became clear the world wasn’t infinite and that particular parts had special value and were contested by multiple tribes. Australia being huge and largely empty didn’t stop European tribes from having a series of wars increasing in intensity until we had WW1 and WW2, which were unfathomably violent and huge clashes over ideology and resources. This is what happened in Europe, where multiple tribes of comparable strength grew up near each other over a period of time. In America, settlers simply neutralized Native Americans while the settlers’ technological superiority was overwhelming, a much better idea than simply letting them grow powerful enough to eventually challenge you.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 10:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Agential Risks: A Topic that Almost No One is Talking About
Remember also that viruses that kill lots of people tend to rapidly mutate into less lethal strains due to evolutionary pressures. This is what happened with the 1917 pandemic.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 3:21 UTC
0 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Agential Risks: A Topic that Almost No One is Talking About
Extremely low. I have never believed any sort of pathogen could come close to wiping us out. They can be defeated by basic breather and biohazard technology. But the main key is that with improved and more accessible biotechnology, our ability to create vaccines and other defence mechanisms against pathogens is greatly enhanced. I actually think the better biotechnology gets, the less likely any pathogen is to wipe us out, even given the fact that terrorists will be able to misuse it more easily.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 2:45 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 24 - Oct. 30, 2016
Kicking the can down the road doesn’t seem to be a likely action of an intelligent civilisation.

Best to control us while they still can, or while the resulting war will not result in unparalleled destruction.

woodchopper 26 Oct 2016 2:43 UTC
8 points
in reply to: username2’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 24 - Oct. 30, 2016
The development of Native Americans has been stunted and they simply exist within the controlled conditions imposed by the new civilization now. They aren’t all dead, but they can’t actually control their own destiny as a people. Native American reservations seem like exactly the sort of thing aliens might put us in. Very limited control over our own affairs in desolate parts of the universe with the addition of welfare payments to give us some sort of quality of life.