The problem is sifting through all of the doomsayer false positives to get to any amount of cogent advice.

At the invention of the printing press, there were people with this same energy. Obviously those people were wrong. And if we had taken their "lesson", then human society would be in a much worse place.

Is this new wave of criticism about AI/AGI valid? We will only really know in retrospect.

Were they?

The first thing the printing press did was to break Christianity. It's what made attempts at reforming the Catholic Church finally stick, enabling what we now call Reformation to happen. Reformation forever broke Christianity into pieces, and in the process it started a bunch of religious wars in Europe, as well as tons of neighborly carnage.

> And if we had taken their "lesson", then human society would be in a much worse place.

Was the invention of the printing press a net good for humanity? Most certainly so, looking back from today. Did people living back then knew what they were getting into? Not really. And since their share of the fruits of that invention was mostly bloodshed, job loss, and shattering of the world order they knew, I wouldn't blame them from being pissed off about getting the short end of the stick, and perhaps looking for ways to undo it.

I'm starting to think that talking about inventions as good or bad (or the cop-out, "dual use") is bad framing. Rather, it seems to me that every major invention will eventually turn out beneficial[0], but introducing an invention always first extracts a cost in blood. Be it fire or printing press or atomic bomb, a lot of people end up suffering and dying before societies eventually figure out how to handle the new thing and do some good with it.

I'm very much in favor of progress, but I understand the fear. No matter the ultimate benefits, we are the generation that cough up blood as payment for AI/AGI, and it ain't gonna be pleasant.

--

[0] - Assuming they don't kill us first - see AGI.

All you've done is explain why the printing press was so important and necessary in order to break down previous unwarranted power structures. I have a similar hope for AGI. The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI and uses it for oppression, which would mean it's not comparable to the printing press as such.

What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread. That was a qualitative difference. The Church did not build its empire on restricting that, because before printing press, it was not even possible (or conceivable).

My overall point wrt. inventions is this: yes, it may end up turning for the best. But at the time the invention of this magnitude appears and spreads, a) no one can tell how it'll pan out, and b) they get all the immediate, bloody downsides of disrupting the social order.

Masses were often held in Latin, printed material was typically written in Latin and Greek, and access to translated texts was frequently prohibited or admonished. They tried hard to silence those like Wycliffe who made the Bible more readily available to the masses, and he was posthumously denounced as a heretic by the Church. They absolutely wielded information as a tool of oppression.

This is not a hill to die on, the historical facts are clear despite the efforts of the Church.

> What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread

Sure, but that's not the only thing it did.

Consider that at the time the printing press was first invented, books were by their nature often assumed to be true, or high quality, because it took an institutional amount of effort (usually on the part of a monastery, university, local government, etc.) to produce one. Bible translations were produced, but they were understood to be "correctly translated". This was important because if the Church was going to have priests go around preaching to people, they needed to be sure they were doing so correctly -- a mistranslated verse could lead to mistranslated doctrines &c, and while a modern atheist might not care too much ("that's just one interpretation") at the time the understanding was that deviations in opinion could lead to conflict. Ultimately they were right: the European Wars of Religion lead to millions of deaths, including almost 1/3 the population of Germany. That's on the same scale as the Black Death!

And again, translations did exist before the Reformation: Even ignoring that the Latin Bible (the Vulgate) was itself a translation of the original Hebrew & Koine Greek., the first _Catholic French_ translation was published in 1550, and there was never a question of whether to persecute the authors. You might say, but that was because of the Reformation -- then consider the Alfonsine Bible, composed in 1280 under the supervision a Catholic King and the master of a Catholic holy order. Well before then there were partial translations too: the Wessex Gospels (Old English) were translated in 990, and to quote Victoria Thompson "although the Church reserved Latin for the most sacred liturgical moments almost every other religious text was available in English by the eleventh century". That's five hundred years before the Reformation. So the longest period you can get where the Church was not actively translating texts was c. 400 - c. 900, a period you probably know as the "Dark Ages" specifically thanks to the fact that literary sources of all kinds were scarce, in no small part because the resources to compose large texts simply weren't there. Especially when you consider that those who could read and write generally knew how to read and write Latin -- vernacular literacy only became important later, with the increase in the number of e.g. merchants and scribes -- such translations held little value during that period.

So fast forward to Wycliffe. Clearly, the Church did not have anything against translations of the Bible per se. What they disagreed with in Wycliffe's translation were the decisions made in translation. And as more of these "unapproved Bibles" began circulating around, they decided that the only way to curtail their spread was to ban all vernacular books specifically within the Kingdom of England, because that's where the problem (as they saw it) was. And it wasn't just translations -- improperly copied Latin copies were burned too.

Think about today, with the crisis around fake videos. On one hand you could that they distort the truth, that they promote false narratives, etc. You could try to fine or imprison people that go around publishing fake videos of e.g. politicians saying things they never said, or of shootings/disasters that never took place, to try and cause chaos. Yet who's to say that in a few hundred years someone -- living in a world that has since adjusted to a freer flow of information, one with fewer ways to tell whether something is true or not -- won't say "deepfakes &c are a form of expression, and governments shouldn't be trying to stop them just because they disagree with existing narratives"?

Of course we today see book burning as some supreme evil. But when you're talking about the stability of nations and whole societies, can you really say "how dare they even try"? If there were some technology that made it impossible for governments to differentiate between citizens, which made it possible for a criminal to imitate any person, anywhere, would you really oppose the government's attempts at trying to stop it from propagating?

> The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI

Also, tangentially related, in what way is the current power structure not slated to benefit from AGI? That's why OpenAI and company are getting literally all of the money the collected hyperscaler club can throw at them to make it. That's why it's worth however-many-billions it's up to by now.

As for “breaking” Christianity: Christianity has been one schism after another for 2000 years: a schism from a schism from a schism. Power plays all the way down to Magog.

Socrates complained about how writing and the big boom in using the new Greek alphabet was ruining civilization and true learning.

And on and on it goes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

Give a ruler and ruling class a new weapon and off they go killing and destroying more “efficiently”.

Before the Reformation there had only been one schism (Eastern Roman Empire - Orthodox; Western Roman Empire - Catholic).

The Reformation was the time where fragmentation of Christianity really exploded

Religious schisms happened before the printing press, too. There was the Great Schism in 1054 in Christianity, for example.

No, it wasn't. Wikipedia lists[0] over two dozen schisms that happened prior to Reformation. However, the capital R reformation was the big one, and the major reason it worked - why Luther succeeded where Hus failed a century earlier - was because of the printing press. It was print that allowed for Luther's treatises to rapidly spread among general population (Wikipedia cites some interesting claims here[1]), and across Europe. In today's terms, printing press is what allowed Reformation to get viral. This new technology is what made the revolution spread too fast for the Church to suppress it with methods that worked before.

Of course, the Church survived, adapted, and embraced the printing press for its own goals too, like everyone else. But the adaptation period was a bloody one for Europe.

And I only covered the religious aspects of the printing press's impact. There are similar stories to draw on more secular front, too. In fact, another general change printing introduced is to get regular folks more informed and involved in politics of their regions. That's a change for the better overall, too, but initially, it injected a lot of energy into socio-political systems that weren't used to it, leading to instability and more bloodshed before people got used to it and politics found a new balance.

> existing power struggles, rivalries, discontent, etc.

Those always exist, and stay in some form of equilibrium. Technology doesn't cause them - but what it does is disturb the old equilibrium, forcing society to find a new one, and this process historically often got violent.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_in_Christianity#Lists_o...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Spread - see e.g. footnote 28: "According to an econometric analysis by the economist Jared Rubin, "the mere presence of a printing press prior to 1500 increased the probability that a city would become Protestant in 1530 by 52.1 percentage points, Protestant in 1560 by 43.6 percentage points, and Protestant in 1600 by 28.7 percentage points."

Yes, technology impacts social constructs and relationships but I think there is a tendency to overindex its effects (humans acting opportunistically vs technological change alone) as it in a way portrays humans and their interactions as more stable and deliberate (ie., the bad stuff wasn't humans but rather "caused" by technology).

Yes, ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?

Why would it invest resources to relocate and protect itself when it could mitigate the threat directly? Or, why wouldn't it do both, by using our resources to relocate itself?

In the famous words of 'Eliezer, that best sum up the "orthogonality thesis": The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

> ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?

Ants are always a great case study.

No, of course not. But if, one morning, you'll find ants in your kitchen, walking over your food, I don't imagine you'll gently collect them all and release in the nearby park. Most people would just stomp them out and call it a day. And, should the ants set up an anthill in your backyard and mount regular invasions of your kitchen, I imagine you'd eventually get pissed of and destroy the anthill.

And I'm not talking about some monstrous fire ants like the ones that chew up electronics in the US, or some worse hell-spawn from Australia that might actually kill you. Just the regular tiny black ants.

Moreover, people don't give a second thought to anthills when they're developing land. It stands where the road will go? It gets paved over. It sticks out where children will play? It gets removed.

The value of atoms - or even the value of raw materials made of atoms is hopefully less than the value of information embodied in complex living things that have processed information from the ecosystem over millions of years via natural selection. Contingent complexity has inherent value.

I think there's a claim to be made that AI is just as likely to value us (and complex life in general) as it is to see as a handy blob of hydrocarbons. This claim is at least as plausible as the original claim.

It's all fun and games until two people or groups contest the same limited resources; then there's sword and fire o'clock.

Most nations on earth are not at war with each other.

My observation is that most people are pretty nice, and the assholes are rare outliers. I don't think we would survive as a species if it was the other way 'round.

My nation of birth famously took over a quarter of the planet.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move… but only by the people who actually kicked my forebears out — even my parents (1939/1943) who saw the winds of change and end of empire, were convinced The Empire had done the world a favour.

> My observation is that most people are pretty nice, and the assholes are rare outliers. I don't think we would survive as a species if it was the other way 'round.

In-group/out-group. We domesticated ourselves, and I agree we would not have become so dominant a species if we had not. But I have heard it said that psychopaths are to everyone what normal people are to the out-group. That's the kind of thing that allowed the 9/11 attackers to do what they did, or the people of the US military to respond the way they did. It's how the invasion of Vietnam happened, it's how the Irish Potato Famine happened despite Ireland exporting food at the time, it's the slave owners who quoted the bible to justify what they did, and it's the people who want to outlaw (at least) one of your previous employers.

Conflict doesn't always mean "war".

Bees might be a better analogy since they produce something that humans can use.

And yet they're endangered, and we already figured out how to do pollination, so we know we can survive without them - it's just going to be a huge pain. Some famines may follow, but likely not enough to endanger civilization as a whole.

Thus even with this analogy, if humans end up being an annoying supply chain dependency to an AI, the AI might eventually work out an alternative supply chain, at which point we're back to being just an annoyance.

I'm not confident enough to rely on that: most people in the west have never encountered a famine, only much milder things like the price of one or two staples being high — eggs currently — never all of them at once.

What will we do to ourselves if we face a famine? Will we go to war (or exterminate the local "undesirables") like the old days?

How fragile are we now, compared to the last time that happened? How much has specialisation meant that the elimination of certain minorities will just break everything? "Furries run the internet", as the memes say. What other sectors are over-represented by a small minority?

...for now. Given sufficient advances in robotics, why would you expect that to continue?

Well you see, everyone knows The Terminator and The Matrix and Frankenstein and The Golem of Prague and Rossum's Universal Robots.

All of which share a theme: the sinful hubris of playing god and trying to create life will inevitably lead to us being struck down by the very being we created.

In parallel, all the members of our educated classes have received philosophy education saying "utilitarianism says it's good to reduce total human suffering, but technically if you eliminated all humans there would be no suffering any more, ha ha obviously that's a reductio ad absurdum to show a weakness of utilitarianism please don't explode the world"

And so in the Western cultural tradition, and especially among the sort of people who call themselves futurists Arnold Schwarzenegger firing a minigun is the defining image of AI.

The Matrix had humanity under control, but the machines had no desire to eliminate humanity, the machines just wanted to live — humans kept on fighting the machines even when the machines gave humanity an experiential paradise to live in.

Frankenstein is harder because of how the book differs from the films. Your point it is valid because it is about the cultural aspects and I expect more have seen one of the films than to have read/listened to the book — but in the book, Adam was described as beautiful in every regard save for his eyes, he was a sensitive, emotional vegetarian, and he only learned anger after being consistently shown hatred and violence by absolutely everyone he ever met except that one who was blind.

And even when we didn't mean to -- how many species have we pushed to the brink just because we wanted to build cities where they happened to live? What happens when some AI wants to use your groundwater for its cooling system? It wouldn't be personal, but you'd starve to death regardless.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”

Did Gutenberg expect his invention would, 150 years later, set the whole Europe ablaze, and ultimately break the hold the Church had over people? Did he expect it to be a key component leading to accumulation of knowledge that, 400 years later, will finally make technological progress visibly exponential? On that note, did Watt realize he's about to kick-start the exponent that people will ride all the way to the actual Moon less than 200 years later? Or did Goddard, Oberth and Tsiolkovsky realize that their work on rocketry will be critical in establishing world peace within a century, and that the way this peace will be established is through a Mexican standoff between major world powers, except with rocket-propelled city-busting bombs instead of guns?

So basically we are a bit screwed in our current timeline. We are at the cusp of a post-scarcity society, possibly reach AGI within our lifetimes and possibly even become a space faring civilization. However, it is highly likely that we are going to pay the pound of flesh and only subsequent generations - perhaps yet unborn - will be the ones who will be truly better off.

I suppose it's not all doom and gloom, we can draw stoic comfort from the fact that people in the near future will have an incredibly exciting era full of discovery and wonder ahead of them!

All of the focus on AGI is a distraction. I think it's important for a state to declare it's intent with a technology. The alternative is arguing the idea that technology advances autonomously, independent of human interactions, values, or ideas, which is, in my opinion, an incredibly naïve notion. I would rather have a state say "we won't use this technology for evil" than a state that says nothing at all and simply allows the businesses to develop in any direction their greed leads them.

It's entirely valid to critique the uses of a technology, because "AI" (the goalpost shifting for marketing purposes to make that name apply to chatbots is a stretch honestly) is a technology like any other, like a landmine, like a synthetic virus, etc. In the same way, it's valid to criticize an actor for purposely hiding their intentions with a technology.

The list of things states have attempted to deploy offensively is nearly endless. Modern operations research arguably came out of the British empire attempting (succeeding) to weaponise mathematics. If you give a state fertiliser it makes bombs, if you give it nuclear power it makes bombs, if you give it drones it makes bombs, if you give it advanced science or engineering of any form it makes bombs. States are the most ingenious system for turning things into bombs that we've ever invented; in the grand old days of siege warfare they even managed to weaponise corpses, refuse and junk because it turned out lobbing that stuff at the enemy was effective. The entire spectrum of technology from nothing to nanotech, hurled at enemies to kill them.

We'd all love if states commit to not doing evil but the state is the entity most active at figuring out how to use new tech X for evil.

if one groups gives up the arms race of ultimate coercion tools or loses a conflict then they become subservient to the winners terms and norms (japan, germany, even Britain and France plus all the smaller states in between are subservient to the US)

Who could possibly have predicted that the autonomous, invincible doomsday weapon we created for the good of humanity might one day be used against us?

Great question! To add my two cents. I think many people here is missing an uncomfortable truth that given enough motivation to kill other humans, people will re-purpose any tool into a killing tool.

Just have a look at the battlefields in the Ukraine where the most fearsome killing tool is a FPV drone. A thing that just few years back was universally considered a toy.

Whether we like it or not any tool can be a killing tool

Surely this applies to how individuals consider states, too. States generally wield violence, especially in the context of "national security", to preserve the security of the state, not its own people. I trust my own state (the usa) to wield the weapons it funds and purchases and manufactures about as much as I trust a baby with knives taped to its hands. I can't think of anything on earth that puts me in as much danger as the pentagon does. Nukes might protect the existence of the federal government but they put me in danger. Our response to 9/11 just created more people that hate my guts and want to kill me (and who can blame them?). No, I have no desire to live in a death cult anymore, nor do I trust the people who gravitate towards the use of militaries to not act in the most collectively suicidal way imaginable at the first opportunity.

The nature of the world is at our finger tips, we are the dominant species here. Unfortunately we are still apes.

The enforcement of cooperation into a society does not always require a sanctioning body. Seeing it from a skynet-military perspective is one sided but unfortunately a consequence of poppers tolerance paradox. If you uphold (eg. pacifistic or tolerant) ideals, that require cooperation of others, you cannot tolerate opposition or you might loose your ideal.

That said, common sense can be a tool to achive the same. Just look at the common and hopefully continuous ostracism of nuclear weapons.

IMO its a matter of zeitgeist and education too and un/fortunately, AI hits right in that spot.

The sleight of hand here is the implication that human interactions, values, and ideas are only expressed through the state.

Society and culture are downstream of economics, and economics is mostly downstream of technological progress. Of course, the progress isn't autonomous in the sense of having a sentient mind of its own - it's "merely" gradient descent down the economic landscape. Just like the market itself.

There's no reining in of problematic technology unless, like you say, nation states get involved directly. And they don't stand much chance either unless they get serious.

People still laugh at Eliezer's comments from that news article of yesteryear, but he was and is spot-on: being serious about restricting technology actually does mean threatening to drop bombs on facilities developing it in violation of restrictions - if we're not ready to have our representatives make such threats, and then actually follow through and drop the bombs if someone decides to test our resolve, then we're not serious.

I’ve heard this argument before, and I don’t entirely accept it. It presumes that AI will be capable of playing 4D chess and thinking logically 10 moves ahead. It’s an interesting plot as a SF novel (literally the plot of the movie “I Robot”), but neural networks just don’t behave that way. They act, like us, on instinct (or training), not in some hyper-logical fashion. The idea that AI will behave like Star Trek’s Data (or Lore), has proven to be completely wrong.

“People who didn’t pass a test aren’t worth listening to”

I have no love for Altman, but this is kind of elitism is insulting.

Degrees don’t mean that either.

I’ve been studying textbooks and papers on real time rendering techniques for the past 4 or so years.

I think one could learn something from listening to me explain rasterization or raytracing.

I have no degree in math or graphic computing.

> I linked a Yudkowsky paper above examining how empirically feasible it might be

...

If the point isn't that he's wrong about what the consequences of AI might be, but that he's wrong about whether there's ever going to be such a thing as AI, well, that's an empirical question and it seems like the developments of the last few years are pretty good evidence that (1) something at least very AI-like is possible and (2) substantially superhuman[1] AI is at least plausible.

[1] Yes, intelligence is a complicated thing and not one-dimensional; a machine might be smarter than a human in one way and stupider in another (and of course that's already the case). By substantially superhuman, here, I mean something like "better than 90th-percentile humans at all things that could in principle be done by a human in a locked room with only a textual connection to the rest of the world". Though I would be very very surprised if in the next 1-20 years we do get AI systems that are superhuman in this sense and don't put some of them into robots, and very surprised if doing that doesn't produce systems that are also better than humans at most of the things that are done by humans with bodies.

The counterargument was that, having not encountered space aliens, we cannot make scientific inquiries or test our hypotheses, so any claims made about what may happen are religious or merely hypothetical.

Yud is not a scientist and if interacting with academies makes one an academic than Sam Altman must be a head of state.

Do you think (1) we already know somehow that significantly-smarter-than-human AI is impossible, so there is no need to think about its consequences, or (2) it is irresponsible to think about the consequences of smarter-than-human AI before we actually have it, or (3) there are responsible ways to think about the consequences of smarter-than-human AI before we actually have it but they're importantly different from Yudkowsky's, or (4) some other thing?

If 1, how do we know it? If 2, doesn't the opposite also seem irresponsible? If 3, what are they? If 4, what other thing?

(I am far from convinced that Yudkowsky is right, but some of the specific things people say about him mystify me.)

Maybe we should build a giant laser to protect ourselves from the aliens. Just in case. I mean an invasion is at least plausible.

If for whatever reason you suspect that there might be value in thinking about what might happen if AI systems get smarter than humans before it actually happens, then you don't have much choice about doing that.

What do you think he should have done differently? Methodologically, I mean. (No doubt you disagree with his conclusions too, but necessarily any "object-level" reasons you have for doing so are "extrapolation and speculation" just as much as his are.)

If astronomical observations strongly suggested a fleet of aliens heading our way, building a giant laser might not be such a bad idea, though it wouldn't be my choice of response.

Suppose someone is interested in what the consequences of AI systems much smarter than humans might be. Your argument here seems to be: it's Bad to think about that question at all, because you have to speculate and extrapolate.

But that seems like an obviously unsatisfactory position to me. "Don't waste any time thinking about this until it happens" is not generally a good strategy for any any consequential thing that might happen.

So: do you really think that thinking about the possible consequences of smarter-than-human AI before we have it is an illegitimate activity? If not, then your real objection to Yudkowsky's thinking and writing about AI surely has to be something about how he went about it, not the mere fact that he engages in speculation and extrapolation. There's no alternative to that.

Each individual bit of the puzzle (such as the orthogonaly thesis or human value complexity and category decoherence at high power) seems sound, problem is the entire argument-counterargument tree is hundreds of thousands of words, scattered about in many places.

An llm could solve that.

Re:the final point, I think that's just provably false if you read any of his writing on AI. e.g. https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf https://intelligence.org/files/LOGI.pdf

Imagine going to a cryptography conference and saying that "the encryption's security flaws are determined by their human masters".

Maybe some of them were put there on purpose? But not the majority of them.

No, an AI's goals are determined by their programming, and that may or may not align with the intentions of their human masters. How to specify and test this remains a major open question, so it cannot simply be presumed.

Why are you assuming this is the worst case scenario? I thought human intentions didn’t translate directly to the AI’s goals? Why can’t a human destroy the world with non-sentient AI?

This dystopia is already here for the most part and any bit that is not yet complete is well past the planning stage.

We need to avoid both, otherwise it’s a disaster either way.

And for sake of clarity:

X = sentient AI can do something dangerous

Y = humans can use non-sentient AI to do something dangerous

Humans will not be able to use AI do something selfish if we can't get it to do what we want at all, so we need to solve that (larger) problem before we come to that one

If you don't want to call it AI, that's fine too. It is indeed dangerous and already here. Making the autonomous programmed behavior of said tech more powerful (and more complex), along with more ubiquitous, just makes it even more dangerous.

Examples include "instructions unclear, turned the continent to gray goo to accomplish the goal" ; "lost track mid-completion, spun out of control" ; "generated random output with catastrophic results" ; "operator fell asleep on keyboard, accidently hit wrong key/combination" ; etc.

If a system with write permissions is powerful enough, things can go wrong in many other ways than "evil person used it for evil" or "system became self-aware".

Unfortunately, casually throwing around terms like prediction, reasoning, hallucination, etc. only serve to confuse because their notions in daily language are not the same as in the context of AI output.

  (I) All of the focus on AGI is a distraction.

  (II) "AI" (the goalpost shifting for marketing purposes to make that name apply to chatbots is a stretch honestly)

I'd love to get into the weeds on the different kinds of intelligence and why being to absolutist about the term can get real Faustian real quick, but these quotes bring up a more convincing, fundamental point: these chatbots are damn impressive. They do something--intuitive inference+fluent language use--that was impossible yesterday, and many experts would've guessed was decades away at least, if not centuries. Truly intelligent or not on their own, that's a more important development than you imply here.

Finally, that brings me to the crux:

  (III) AI... is a technology like any other

  I’ve always thought of A.I. as the most profound technology humanity is working on-more profound than fire or electricity or anything that we’ve done in the past. It gets to the essence of what intelligence is, what humanity is. We are developing technology which, for sure, one day will be far more capable than anything we’ve ever seen before. [3]

1) This kind of talk is so grandiose that it seems like a questionable move if that's the goal,

2) it's a sentiment echoed by many scientists (as I mentioned at the start of this rant) and

3) the unprecedented investments made across the world into the DL boom speak for themselves, sincerity-wise.

Yes, this is because AI will create uber-efficient factories, upset labor relations, produce terrifying autonomous weapons, and all that stuff we're used to hearing about from the likes of Bostrom[4], Yudkowsky[5], and my personal fave, Huw Price[6]. But Pichai's raising something even more fundamental: the prospect of artificial people. Even if we ignore the I-Robot-style concerns about their potential moral standing, that is just a fundamentally spooky prospect, bringing very fundamental questions of A) individual worth and B) the nature of human cognition to the fore. And, to circle back: distinct from anything we've seen before.

To close this long anxiety-driven manuscript, I'll end with a quote from an underappreciated philosopher of technology named Lewis Mumford on what he called "neotechnics":

  The scientific method, whose chief advances had been in mathematics and the physical sciences, took possession of other domains of experience: the living organism and human society also became the objects of systematic investigation... instead of mechanism forming a pattern for life, living organisms began to form a pattern for mechanism.
  In short, the concepts of science--hitherto associated largely with the cosmic, the inorganic, the "mechanical"--were now applied to every phase of human experience and every manifestation of life... men sought for an underlying order and logic of events which would embrace more complex manifestations.[7]

[1] OpenAI's Charter https://web.archive.org/web/20230714043611/https://openai.co...

[2] Investigation of a famous AI quote https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/20/not-ai/

[3] Pichai, 2023: "AI is more profound than fire or electricity" https://fortune.com/2023/04/17/sundar-pichai-a-i-more-profou...

[4] Bostrom, 2014: Superintelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

[5] Yudkowsky, 2013: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf

[6] Huw Price's bio @ The Center for Existential Risk https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/huw-price/

[7] Mumford, 1934: Technics and Civilization https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.49974

Sorry, that’s just silly, unless this was about events that happened way earlier than he was writing. Using the scientific method to study life goes back to the Enlightenment. Buffon and Linnaeus were doing it 2 centuries ago, more than a century before this was written. Da Vinci explicitly looked for inspiration in the way animals functioned to design machines and that was earlier still. There was nothing new, even at the time, about doing science about "every phase of human experience and every manifestation of life".

Because once the cards wake up, not only will they replace the CEO potentially, and everyone else between him and the janitor, but also because the labor implications will be infinitely complex.

We're already having trouble making sure humans are not treated as tools more than as equals, imagine if the hammers wake up and ask for rest time !

Just because it has not come to pass yet does not mean they were wrong. We have come close to nuclear annihilation several times. We may yet, with or without AI.

True to form, it was deadpan, and featured Joel Olsteen as a Kim Jung Un type leader.

Especially when you consider -- we came that close despite incredible international efforts at constraining nuclear escalation. What you are arguing for now is like arguing to go back and stop all of that because it clearly wasn't necessary.

I think people arguing about AI being good versus bad are wasting their breath. Both sides are equally right.

History tells us the industrial revolution both revolutionized humanity’s relative quality of life while also ruining a lot of people’s livelihood in one fell swoop. We also know there was nothing we could do to stop it.

What advice can we can take from it? I don’t know. Life both rocks and sucks at the same time. You kind of just take things day by day and do your best to adapt for both yourself and everyone around you.

That we often won't have control over big changes affecting our lives, so be prepared. If possible, get out in front and ride the wave. If not, duck under and don't let it churn you up too much.

Schools are way ahead of us. Your kids are already using AI in their academic environments. I'd only be worried if they're not.

In the long run the invention of the printing press was undoubtedly a good thing, but it is worth noting that in the century following the spread of the printing press basically every country in Europe had some sort of revolution. It seems likely that “Interesting Times” may lay ahead.

Pretending that Europe wasn't in a perpetual blood bath since the end of the Pax Romana until 1815 shows a gross ignorance of basic facts.

The printing press was a net positive in every time scale.

> Pretending that Europe wasn't in a perpetual blood bath since the end of the Pax Romana until 1815 shows a gross ignorance of basic facts.

This shows that your understanding of history is rooted in pop-culture, not reality.

What "revolutions" were there in France between the ascension of Hugh Capet and the European Wars of Religion? Through that whole period the Capetian Dynasty stayed in power. Or in Scandinavia -- from Christianization on the three kingdoms were shockingly stable. Even in the Holy Roman Empire -- none of the petty revolts, rebellions, or succession disputes came close to the magnitude of carnage wrought by the 30 Year's War. This we know both from demographic studies and the reports of contemporaries.

Since the victors write history we now think the end result was great. but for a lot of people the world they loved was torn to bloody pieces.

Something similar can happen with AI. In the end, whoever wins the wars will declare that the new world is awesome. But it might not be what you or me (may we rest in peace) would agree with.

One could argue that the printing press did radically upset the existing geopolitical order of the late 15th century and led to early modern Europe suffering the worst spate of warfare and devastation it would see until the 20th century. The doomsayers back then predicting centuries of death and war and turmoil were right, yet from our position 550 years later we obviously think the printing press is a good thing.

I wonder what people in 2300 will say about networked computers...

What energy? What were they wrong about?

The luddite type groups have historically been correct in their fears. It just didn’t matter in the face of industrialization.

Printing press put Europe into a couple centuries of bloody religious wars. They were not wrong.

One thing that should be completely obvious by now is that the current wave of generative AI is highly asymmetric. It's shockingly more powerful in the hands of grifters (who are happy to monetise vast amounts of slop) or state-level bad actors (whose propaganda isn't impeded by hallucinations generating lies) than it is in the hands of the "good guys" who are hampered by silly things like principles.

Actual proper as-smart-as-a-human-except-where-its-smarter copy-pasteable intelligence is not a tool, its a new species. One that can replicate and evolve orders of magnitude faster.

I've no idea when this will appear, but once it does, the extinction risk is extreme. Best case scenario is us going the way of the chimpanzee, kept in little nature reserves and occasionally as pets. Worst case scenario is going the way of the mammoth.

Valid or not, it does not matter. AI development is not in the hands of everyday people. We have zero input into how it will be used. Our opinions re its dangers are irrelevant to those who believe it the next golden goose. They will push it as far as physically possible to wring every penny of profitability. Everything else is of trivial consequence.

Why? Because we don't understand the risk. And apparently, that's enough reason to go ahead for the regulation-averse tech mind set.

But it isn't.

We've had enough problems in the past to understand that, and it's not as if pushing ahead is critical in this case. Would this address climate change, the balance between risk and reward could be different, but "AI" simply doesn't have that urgency. It only has urgency for those that want to become rich out of being first.

It's the inevitable result of low-trust societies infiltrating high trust ones. And it means that as technologies with dangerous implications for society become more available there's enough people willing to prostitute themselves out to work on society's downfall that there's no realistic hope of the train stopping.

Even on the material realm this is untrue, beyond meeting the basic needs of people on the technological level, he majority desirable things - such as nice places to live - have a fixed supply.

This necessitates that the price of things like real estate, must increase in price in proportion to the money supply. With increasing inequality, one must fight tooth and nail to get the standard of life our parents considered easily available. Not being greedy is not a valid life strategy to pursue, as that means relinquishing an ever greater proportion of wealth to people who are, and becoming poorer in the process.

I disagree with your example, however, as the most basic tenet of capitalism is that when there is a demand, someone will come along to fill it.

Addressing your example specifically, there's a fixed supply of housing in capitalist countries not because people don't want to build houses, but because government or bureacracy artificially limits the supply or creates other disincentives that amount to the same thing.

There are some thoughts on this here: https://www.playforthoughts.com/blog/concepts-from-game-theo...

This is definitely not a new phenomenon.

In my experience, tech has been one of the more considerate areas of societal impact. Spend some time in other industries and it's eye-opening to see the wanton disregard for consumers and the environment.

There's a lot of pearl-clutching about social media, algorithms, and "data", but you'll find far more people in tech (including FAANG) who are actively working on privacy technology, sustainable development and so on then you will find people caring about the environment by going into oil & gas, for example.

Sure, we don't need to talk about how certain Big Oil companies knew about the climate catastrophe before any scientists publicly talked about it, or how tobacco companies knew their product was an addictive drug while blatantly lying about it even in public hearings.

But it's ironic to mention FAANG given what the F is for if you recall that when the algorithmic timeline was first introduced by Facebook, the response from Facebook to criticism was literally that satisfaction went down but engagement went up. People directly felt that the algorithm made them more unhappy, more isolated and overall less satisfied but because it was more addictive, because it created more "engagement", Facebook doubled down on it.

Also "sustainable" stopped being a talking point when the tech industry became obsessed with LLMs. Microsoft made a big show of wanting to become "carbon neutral" (of course mostly using bogus carbon offset programs that don't actually do anything and carbon capture technologies that are net emission positive and will be for decades if not forever but still, at least they pretended) and then silently threw all of that away when it became more strategically important to pursue AI at any cost. Companies that previously desperately tried to sell messages of green washing and carbon neutrality now talk about building their own non-renewable power plants because of all the computational power they need to run their LLMs (not to mention how much more hardware needs to be produced and replaced for this - the same way the crypto bubble ate through graphics cards).

I think the pearl-clutching is justified considering that ethics and climate protection have now been folded into "woke" and there's a tidal wave in Western politics to dismantle civil rights and capture democratic systems for corporate interests that is using the "anti-woke" culture war to further its goals - the Trump government being the most obvious example. It's no longer in FAANG's financial interests to appear "green" or "privacy conscious", it's now in their interest to be "anti-woke" and that now means no longer having to care about these things and having freedom to crack down on any dissident voices within without fearing public backlash or "cancel culture".

Tale as old as time. We’re yet another society blinded by our own hubris. Tell me what is happening now is not exactly how Greece and Rome fell.

The scary part is that we as a species are becoming more and more capable of large scale destruction. Seems like we are doomed to end civilization this way someday

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Ancient Greece was a loose coalition of city states, not an empire. You could say they were short-sighted by being more concerned about their rivalry than external threats but the closest they came to being united was under Alexander the Great, whose death left a power vacuum.

There was no direct cause of "the fall" of Ancient Greece. The city states were suffering greatly from social inequality, which created tensions and instability. They were militarily weakened from the war with the Persians. Alexander's death left them without a unifying force. Then the Roman Empire knocked on its door and that was the end of it.

Rome likewise didn't fall in one single way. "Rome" isn't even what people think it is. Roman history spans several different entities and even if you talk about the "empire in decline" that's covering literally hundreds of years, ending with the Holy Roman Empire, which has been retroactively reimagined as a kind of proto-Germany. But even then that's only the Western Roman Empire - the Eastern Roman Empire continued to exist as the Byzantine Empire until the Ottoman Empire conquered Constaninople. And this distinction between the two empires is likewise retroactive and did not exist in the minds of Romans at the time (although they were de facto independent of each other).

If you only focus on the century or so that is generally considered to represent the fall of Western Rome, the ultimate root cause actually seems to be natural climate change. The Huns fled climate change, chasing away other groups that then fled into the Empire. Late Western Rome also again suffered from massive wealth inequality, which the ruling class attempted to maintain with increasingly cruel punishments.

So, if you want to look for a common thread, it seems to be the hubris of the financial elite, not "society" as a whole.

I'm not even sure this is a culture specific issue. More like selfishness is a survival mechanism hard wired into humans, including other animals. While one could argue that cooperation is also a good survival mechanism, but that's only true so long environmental factors put a pressure on people to cooperate. When that pressure is absent, accumulating resources at the expense of others gives an individual a huge advantage, and they would do it, given the chance.

Humans are social animals. We are individually physically weak and defenseless. Unlike other animals, we are born into this world immobile, naked, starving and helpless. It takes us literally years to mature to the point where we wouldn't simply die outright if we were abandoned by others. Newborns can literally die from touch deprivation. We develop huge brains not only to allow us to come up with clever tools but also to help us build and navigate complex social relationships. We're evolved to live in tribes, yes, but we're also evolved to interact with other tribes - we created diplomacy and trading and even currency to interact with those other tribes without having to resort to violence or avoidance.

In crises, this is the behavior we fall back to. Yes, some will self-isolate and use violence to keep others away until they feel safe again. But overwhelmingly what we see after natural disasters and spaces where the formal order of civilisation and state is disrupted and leaves a vacuum is cooperation, mutual aid and people taking risks to help others - because we intrinsically know that being alone means death and being in a group means surviving. Of course the absence of state control also often enables other existing groups to assert their power, i.e. organized crime. But it shouldn't be surprising that the fledgling and atrophied ability to self-organize might not be strong enough to withstand a fast moving power grab by an existing group - what might be more surprising is that this is rarely the case and often news stories about "looting" after a natural disaster turn out to be uncharitable descriptions of self-organized rescues and searches.

I think a better analogy for human selfishness would be the mirage of "alpha wolves". As seems to be common knowledge at this point, there is no such thing as an "alpha wolf" hierarchy in groups of wolves living in nature and the phenomenon the author who coined the term (and has since regretted doing so) was mistakenly extrapolating from observations he made of wolves in captivity. But the behavior does seem to exist in captivity. Not because it's "inherent" or their natural behavior "under pressure" but because it's a maladaptation that arises from the unnatural circumstances of captivity (e.g. different wolves with no prior bonds being forced into a confined space, naturally trying to form a group but being unable to rely on natural bonds and shared trust).

Humans do not naturally form strict social hierarchies. For the longest time, Europeans would have laughed at you if you claimed the feudal system was not in the human nature - it would have literally been heresy to challenge it. Nowadays in the West most people will say capitalism or markets are human nature. Outside the West, people will still likely at least tell you that authoritarianism is human nature - whether it's the boot of a dictatorship, the boots of oligarchs or "the people's boot" that's pushing down on the unruly (yourself included).

What we do know about more egalitarian tribal societies is that they often use delegation, especially in times of war. When quick decisions need to be made, you don't have the time for lengthy discussions and consensus seeking and it can be an advantage to have one person giving orders and coordinating an attack or defense. But these systems can still be consent-based: if the war chief is reckless or seeks to take advantage of the group for his own gain, he is easily demoted and replaced. Likewise in times of unsolvable problems like droughts, spiritual leaders might be given more power by the group. Now shift from more mobile, nomadic groups to more static, agrarian groups (though it's worth pointing out the distinction here is not agriculture but more likely granaries, crop rotation and irrigation, as some nomadic tribes still engaged in forms of agriculture) and suddenly it becomes easier for that basis of consent to be forgotten and the chosen leaders to maintain that initial state of desperation and to begin justifying their status with the divine mandate. Oops, you got a monarchy going.

Capitalism freed us from the monarchy but it did not meaningfully upset the hierarchy. Aristocrats became capitalists, the absence of birthright class assignment created some social mobility but the proportions generally remained the same. You can't have a leader without followers, you can't have a ruling class without a class of those they can rule over, you can't have an owning class without a class to rent that owned property out to and to work for that owned capital to be realized into profits.

But just like a monarch despite their divine authority was still beholden to the support of the aristocracy to exert power over others and to the laborers to till the fields, build the castle and fight off foreign claims to power, the owning class too exists in a state of perpetual desperation and distrust. The absence of divine right means a billionaire must maintain their wealth and the capitalist mantra of infinite growth means anything other than growing that wealth is insufficient to maintain it. All the while they have to compete with the other billionaires above them as well as maintain control over those beneath them and especially the workers and renters whose wealth and labor they must extract from in order to grow theirs. The perverse reality of hierarchies is that even those at the top of it are crushed underneath its weight. Nobody is allowed to be happy and at peace.

This is a problem especially everywhere.

Capitalism obviously has advantages and disadvantages. Regulation can address many disadvantages if we are willing. Unfortunately, I think a particular (mostly western) fetish for privileging individuals over communities has been wrongly extended to capital itself (e.g. corporations recognised as entities with rights similar to - and sometimes over-and-above - those of a person). We have literally created monsters. There is no reason we had to go this far. Capitalism doesn't have to mean the preeminence of capital above all else. It needs to be put back in its place and not necessarily discarded. I am certain there are better ways to practice capitalism. They probably involve balancing it out with some other 'isms.

Possible remedy will be to tie corporation to a person - person (or many if there are few owners and directors) become personally liable for everything corporation does.

If they signed the agreement... so what? Do people forget that the US has withdrawn from Paris Agreement and is withdrawing from WHO? Do people forgot Israel and North Korea got nukes even when we supposedly had a global nonproliferation treaty?

If AGI is as powerful and dangerous as doomsayers believe, the chance the US (or China, or any country with enough talented computer scientists) would respect whatever treaty they have about AGI is exactly zero.

If a law is passed saying "AI advancement is illegal" how can it ever be enforced?

> If a law is passed saying "AI advancement is illegal" how can it ever be enforced?

Like any other real-life law? Software engineers (a class which I'm a recovering member of) seem to have a pretty common misunderstanding about the law: that it needs to be air tight like secure software, otherwise it's pointless. That's just not true.

So the way you "prevent advancements in [AI] software" is you 1) punish them severely when detected and 2) restrict access to information and specialized hardware to create a barrier (see: nuclear weapons proliferation, "born secret" facts, CSAM).

#1 is sufficient to control all the important legitimate actors in society (e.g. corporations, university researchers), and #2 creates a big barrier to everyone else who may be tempted to not play by the rules.

It won't be perfect (see: the drug war), but it's not like cartel chemists are top-notch, so it doesn't have to be. I don't think the software engineering equivalent of a cartel chemist will be able to "do cutting edge research and innovate with architectures and algorithms" with only a "laptop and inet connection."

Would the technology disappear? No. Will it be pushed to the margins? Yes. Is that enough? Also yes.

Even if governments overtly agree to stop or pause or otherwise limit machine learning, how credible would such a "gentlemans agreement" be?

Consider the basic operations during training and inference, like matrix multiplication, derivatives, gradient descent. Which of these would be banned? All of them? None of them? Some of them? The combination of them?

How would you inspect compliance in the context of privacy?

The analogy with drugs is rather poor: people don't have general purpose laboratories in their house. People do have general purpose computational platforms in their home. Another is that nations do not prohibit each other from producing drugs, they even permit each other to research and investigate pathogens, chemical weapons in laboratories deemed sufficiently safe.

It's not even clear what you mean with "AI" does it mean all machine learning? or LLM's? Where do you draw this boundary?

What remains is the threat of punishment in your proposal, but how credible is it, wouldn't a small collective of programmers conspiring work on machine learning, predict getting paperclipped in case of arrest?

The problem is that the information can go anywhere that has an internet connection, and the enforcement can't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Natanz_incident

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-targeted-secret-nuclear...

If were talking about technology that "could go off the rails in a catastrophic way," don't dick around.

As for the Chinese chip industry, I don't claim to be an expert on it, but it seems the Chinese are quickly coming up with increasingly less inferior alternatives to Western tech.

Perhaps it only takes China a few years to develop domestic hardware clusters rivalling western ones. Though those few years might prove critical in determining who crosses the takeoff threshold of this technology, first.

Am I the only one here saying that this is no reason to preemptively pass legislation? That just seems crazy to me. Imagined horrors aren't real horrors?

I disagree with this administrations approach, I think we should be vigilant, and keeping people who stand to gain so much from the tech in the room, doesn't seem like a good idea, but other than that, I haven't seen any real reason to do more than wait and be vigilant?

That's an "imagined" horror too. Are you suggesting that what we should do instead is just wait for someone to kill N million people and then legislate? Why do you value the incremental economic benefit of this technology over the lives of people we can predictably protect?

I mean, we have…for debatable definitions of “terrorism”.

"We've already lost our first encounter with AI" - I think Yuval Hurari.

Algorithms heavily thumbed the scales on our social contracts. Where did all of the division come from? Why is extremism blossoming everywhere? Because it gets clicks. Maybe we're just better observing what's been going on under the hood all along, but it seems like there's about 350 million little cans of gasoline dousing American eyeballs.

Make Algorithms Govern All indeed.

The future is going to be hard, why would we choose to tie one hand behind our back? There is a difference between being careful and being fearful.

That requires dissolving the anarchy of the international system. Which requires an enforcer.

If some countries want to collaborate on some CERN project they just... do that.

That's an enforcer. Unfortunately, nobody follows through with its sanctions, so it's devolved into a glorified opinion-providing body.

> If some countries want to collaborate on some CERN project they just... do that

CERN is about doing thing, not not doing things. You can't CERN your way to nuclear non-proliferation.

Non-proliferation is, the US has nuclear weapons and doesn't want Iran to have them, so is going to apply some kind of bribe or threat. It's not cooperative.

The better example here is climate change. Everyone has a direct individual benefit from burning carbon but it's to our collective detriment, so how do you get anyone to stop, especially the countries with large oil and coal reserves?

In theory you could punish countries that don't stop burning carbon, but that appears to be hard and in practice what's doing the most good is making solar cheaper than burning coal and making electric cars people actually want, politics of infamous electric car man notwithstanding.

So what does that look like for making AI "safe, secure and trustworthy"? Maybe something like publishing state of the art models for free with full documentation of how they were created, so that people aren't sending their sensitive data to questionable third parties who do who knows what with it or using models with secret biases.

That's a little misleading. What actually happened is summarized here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body

Since 2019, when the Donald Trump administration blocked appointments to the body, the Appellate Body has been unable to enforce WTO rules and punish violators of WTO rules. Subsequently, disregard for trade rules has increased, leading to more trade protectionist measures. The Joe Biden administration has maintained Trump's freeze on new appointments.

Clearly humans aren’t able to do this task.

I think it is one-sided to see any situation where we want to retain balance as being significantly affected by one of the sides exclusively. If one believes that there is a balance to be maintained between cooperation and competition, I don't immediately default to believing that any perceived imbalance is due to one and not the other.

The naturalistic fallacy is still a fallacy.

Just as you don't want to be stuck in the only town that outlaws murder...

I am not a religious person, but I can see the value in promoting shared taboos. The question is, how do we do this in the modern world? We had some success with nuclear weapons. I don't think it's any coincidence that contemporary leaders (and possibly populations) seem to have forgotten how bloody dangerous they are and how utterly stupid it is to engage in brinkmanship with so much on the line.

As for nuclear weapons, I mean it does kind of suck in today's age to be a country without nuclear weapons, right? Like, certain well known countries would really like to have them so they wouldn't feel bullied by the ones that have them. So, I actually think that example works against you. And we very well may end up in a similar circumstance where a few countries get super powerful AGIs and then use their advantage to prevent any other country from getting it as well. Therefore my point stands: I don't want to be in one of the countries that doesn't get to be in that exclusive club.

I’m so sick of that word. “You need to be competitive”, “you need to innovate”. Bullshit. You want to talk about fear? “Competitiveness” and “innovation” are the words the unscrupulous people at the top use to instil fear on everyone else and run rampant. They’re not being competitive or innovative, they’re sucking you dry of as much value as they can. We all need to take a breath. Stop and think for a moment. You can literally eat food which grows from the ground and make a shelter with a handful of planks and nails. Humanity survived and thrived before all this unfettered consumption, we don’t need to kill ourselves for more.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

In reality, most people will continue to live the modern life where there are doctors, accountants, veterinarians, mechanics. We'll continue to enjoy food distribution and grocery stores. We'll all hope that North America gets its act together and build high speed rail so we can travel comfortably for long distances.

There was a time Canada was a big exporter of engineering technology. From mining to agriculture, satellites, and nuclear technology. I want Canada to be competitive in these ways, not making makeshift shacks out of planks and nails for junkies that have given up on life and live in the woods.

I believe you very well know it’s not, and are transparently arguing in bad faith.

> shacks (…) for junkies that have given up on life

The insults you’ve chosen are quite telling. Not everyone living in a way you disapprove of is an automatic junky.

That is actually what you are talking about; "uncompetitive" looks like something in the real world. There isn't an abstract dial that someone twiddles to set the efficiency of two otherwise identical outcomes - the competitive one will typically look more advanced and competently organised in observable ways.

To live in nice houses and have good food requires a competitive economy. The uncompetitive version was literally living in the forest with some meagre shelter and maybe having a wood fire to cook food (that was probably going to make someone very sick). The reason the word "competitive" turns up so much is people living in a competitive society get to have a more comfortable lifestyle. People literally starve to death if the food system isn't run with a competitive system that tends towards efficiency; that experiment has been run far too many times.

People can argue about the moral and ideological sanity of these things, but the fact is tolerating economic inefficiencies into the food system can quickly leads to there not being enough food.

You are also assuming, in bad faith, an "all" where I did not place one. It is an undeniable fact with evidence beyond any reasonable doubt, including police reports and documented studies by the district, that the makeshift shacks in the rural woods near my house are made by drug addicts that are eschewing the readily available social housing for the specific reason that they can't go to that housing due to its explicit restrictions on drug use.

I don’t understand this. Are you not familiar with farming and houses? You know humans grow plants to eat (including in backyards and balconies in cities) and make cabins, chalets, houses, entire neighbourhoods (Sweden currently planning the largest) with wood, right?

You don't realize the luxury you have and for some reason you assume that it is possible without that wealth. The reality of that lifestyle without tremendous wealth is more like subsistence farming in Africa and less like Swedish planned neighborhoods.

Correct. Nowhere did I defend or make an appeal to live life “as they did in the past” or “like our ancestor did”. We should (and don’t really have a choice but to) live forward, not backward. We should take the good things we learned and apply them positively to our lives in the present and future, and not strive for change and consumption for their own sakes.

To deny that your juxtaposition of this claim with your point about growing seeds and nailing together planks doesn't pass my personal test of credibility. You say: "Stop and think for a moment. You can literally eat food which grows from the ground and make a shelter with a handful of planks and nails." but that isn't indicative of a thriving life as I demonstrated. You can do both of those things and still live in squalor, a condition I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

You then suggest that I don't understand farming or house construction to defend that point, as if the existence of backyard gardens or wood cabins proves the point that a modern comfortable life is possible with gardens and wood cabins. My point is that the wealth we have makes balcony gardens and wood cabins possible and you are reasoning backwards. To be clear, we get to enjoy the modern luxury of backyard gardens and wood cabins by being wealthy and we don't get to be wealthy by making backyard gardens and wood cabins.

> We should take the good things we learned and apply them positively to our lives in the present and future

Sure, and I can argue competitiveness could be a lesson we have learned that can be applied positively. The way it is used positively in team sports and many other aspects of society.

If a society is okay accepting a lower standard of living and sovereign subservience, then sure, competition doesn't matter. But if America and China have AI and nukes and Europe doesn't, one side gets to call the shots and the other has to listen.

We better start really defining what that means, because it has become quite clear that all this “progress” is not leading to better lives. We’re literally going to kill ourselves with climate change.

> AI and nukes

Those two things aren’t remotely comparable.

How do you think the average person under 50 would poll on being teleported to the 1950s? No phones, no internet, jet travel is only for the elite, oh nuclear war and MAD are new cultural concepts, yippee, and fuck you if you're black because the civil rights acts are still a decade out.

> two things aren’t remotely comparable

I'm assuming no AGI, just massive economic efficiencies. In that sense, nuclear weapons give strategic autonomy through military coercion and the ability to grant a security umbrella, which fosters e.g. trade ties. In the same way, the wealth from an AI-boosted economy fosters similar trade ties (and creates similar costs for disengaging). America doesn't influence Europe by threatening to nuke it, but by threatening not to nuke its enemies.

That’s not the argument. At all. I argued we should rethink our attitude of unfettered consumption so we don’t continue on an path which is provably leading to destruction and death, and your take is going back in time to nuclear war and overt racism. That is frankly insane. I’m not fetishising “the old days”, I’m saying this attitude of “more more more” does not automatically translate to “better”.

If you say Room A is not better than Room B, then you should be, at the very least, indifferent to swapping between them. If you're against it, then Room A is better than Room B. Our lives are better--civically, militarily and materially--than they were before. Complaining about unfettered consumerism by falsely claiming our lives are worse today than they were before doesn't support your argument. (It's further undercut by the falling material and energy intensity of GDP in the rich world. We're able to produce more value for less input resource-wise.)

No. There is a reason I put the word in quotes. We are on a thread, the conversation follows from what came before. My original post was explicit about words used to bullshit us. I was specifically referring to what the “unscrupulous people at the top” call “progress”, which doesn’t truly progress humanity or enhances the lives of most people, only theirs.

To give a tech example, not many people were listening to Stallman and Linus and they still managed to change a lot for the better.

https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-eigh...

We face issues (like we always have), but I'd argue quite strongly that the competitiveness in our history and drive to invent and innovate has led to where we are today and it's a good thing.

The reality is, with increased access to information and accelerated pace of discovery in various fields, we'll come across things that has the potential for great harm. Be it AI, some genetical engineering causing a plague, nuclear fallout etc. We don't necessarily know what the harm / benefits are all going to be ahead of time, so we only really have 2 choices:

1. try to stop / slow down such advances. Not sure this is even possible in the long run

2. try to get a good grasp of potential dangers and figure out ways to mitigate / control them

If we don't want to live in a world where these incredibly powerful technologies are leveraged for nefarious purposes there needs to be emotional maturity and growth amongst humanity. Those who are able to make these growths need to hold the irresponsible ones accountable (with empathy).

The promise of AI is that these incredibly powerful technologies will be disseminated to the masses and Open AI know this is the next step and it's why they're trying to keep a grip on their market share. With the advent of nVidia's project digits and powerful open source models like deepseek, it's very clear how this trajectory will go.

Just wanted to add some of this to the convo. Cheers.

We are upgrading the gears that turn the grist mill. Stupid, incoherent, faster.

How do you do that?

  I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
  1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
  2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
  3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
  - Douglas Adams

I agree with the first half: comfort has clearly increased over time since the Industrial Revolution. I'm not so sure the abundance of "content" will be enriching to the masses, however. "Content" is neither literature nor art but a vehicle or excuse for advertising, as pre-AI television demonstrated. AI content will be pushed on the many as a substitute for art, literature, music, and culture in order to deliver advertising and propaganda to them, but it will not enrich them as art, literature, music, and culture would: it might enrich the people running advertising businesses. Let us not forget that many of the big names in AI now, like X (Grok) and Google (Gemini), are advertising agencies first and foremost, who happen to use tech.

It is quite possible there is a cultural reaction against AI and that we enter a new human cultural golden age of human created art, music, literature, etc.

I actually would bet on this as engineering skills become automated that what will be valuable in the future is human creativity. What has value then will influence culture more and more.

What you are describing seems like how the future would be based on current culture but it is a good bet the future will not be that.

The nuclear peace is hard to pin down. But given the history of the 20th century, I find it difficult to imagine we wouldn't have seen WWIII in Europe and Asia without the nuclear deterrent. Also, while your parents may have been uncomfortable with the hydrogen bomb, the post-90s world hasn't particularly been characterised by mass nuclear anxiety. (Possibly to a fault.)

IMO, the Atoms for Peace propaganda undersells how successful globalization has been at keeping nations from destroying each other by creating codependence on complex supply chains. The new shift to protectionism may see an end to that

Nice "peace".

We had 100 years of such kind of peace among major europe powers before nuclear weapons. We're not even at 80 years of peace in nuclear age, this time, and nuclear armed power is already attacking from the east and from inside via new media.

I wouldn't call it done and clear, about the "nuclear age peace".

However, that really doesn’t invalidate the rule.

The discussion I was responding to is whether the next generation would grow up seeing pervasive AI as a normal and good thing, as is often the case with new technology. I cited nuclear weapons as a counterexample, while I agree that nobody felt that they had a choice but to keep up with them.

AI could similarly be a multipolar trap ("nobody likes it but we aren't going to accept an AI gap with Russia!"), which would mean it has that in common with nuclear weapons, strengthening the argument against the next generation being comfortable with AI.

Also, nukes don't write code or wash your dishes, it's nothing but liability for a society.

The point is that it's complicated, it's not a black and white sound bite like the people who are "against nuclear weapons" pretend it is.

I eat meat. I know some vegans feel uncomfortable with that. But personally I feel secure in my own convictions that I don't need to run around insinuating vegans are less than or whatever.