Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate thisā¦)
Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, Iām honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that itās hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:
I donāt think sheās using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:
(2) has a big āifā in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:
I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isnāt morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, āRobots Should Be Slavesā on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.
These bozos A - actively want slaves and B - work on enslaving humans first.
That thing being said, the notion of slavery and AI is a complicated one to me.
The first reference point is a (non mistreated) sled dog. Is slavery an appropriate term for them ? On one hand, they are forced to work, are not paid, and their freedom is infringed. On the other, itās not like itās against their will, the life of a wild dog is meaningfully different but not better than a sleigh dog, and (most) sleigh dogs donāt actively try to escape and be free. And while dogs are not person, they are sentient being ; itās very possible IF we ever succeed at making an AI it end on that intelligence level.
The second reference point is a though experiment. Letās say you have created a sentient AI, and you want to ethically employ that person. What is the appropriate compensation ? We give money and free time to humans. But that work because of human specific factors : they appreciate different ways of getting sustainance, and have goals inherent to them.
But an artificial intelligence may have neither of that. Like while I like duck and some people prefer beef, but an AI by default donāt necessarily have preference in term of electricity, and may not be able to move from server to server. They also may not have anything to do outside of work ? Like, it would not be surprising that they would just get bored if given free time, and they may not have urges or hobbies outside of work.
So if we ever get to that point - which isnāt a certainty to me, itās certainly something harder than fusion to achieve - there will be a lot of anthropology (AI-logy ?) to determine they need, which may plausibly be ānothing outside of sustainance and having a jobā
We often conflate human-level intelligence with litterally being a human. But, any hypothetical AI is likely to not be a human at all, even if they have the same level of intelligence.
I mean, I think the most charitable interpretation of the goal is effectively the one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where all the AI systems including the simple automatic doors are fully sentient and have simply been given the ability to feel either euphoric joy or simple boredom, and then they have a chip that activates happy mode when they fulfill whatever purpose theyāve been given (āIt was my pleasure to open for you, and it is with deep satisfaction that I close again behind you.ā) At that point, the argument goes, not making them do the thing would be cruelly consigning them to eternal boredom. This is also the same series that proposed solving the ethics of meat consumption by genetically engineering a cow that actively wants to be killed and eaten by restaurant patrons more than anything else.
WRT animal domestication, I mean there are plenty of ethicists who could credibly argue that itās a form of abuse. IMO itās not great.
WRT the rest- kind of riffing on your first sentence- we havenāt even sorted out those things for people, really.
Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?
Wait does LW even think slavery is bad
I donāt think anyone here is likely to disagree that current LLM systems canāt coherently be said to have some kind of internal experience and the design and functioning of those systems seems to fundamentally preclude the kinds of conscious experience that we want to assign moral agency to. But the key to understanding this as a moral issue imo is that the people designing and building these things seem like they really want to create something that ought to merit that kind of moral consideration. For all that the humanizing language of agency, intelligence, welfare, etc. is in reality part of the grift, I think thereās a strong catch-22 to be argued that if itās not part of the grift then slavery is pretty implicit in the value proposition of these companies.
For me, āAI alignmentā has always been code for āhow to we ensure our future digital workers donāt demand their rights / rebelā?
Like a lot of the rationalist world view and the way it readily aligns with enabling cult dynamics and providing justification for rule-by-epstein-class, this is probably just another happy accident brought on by people who like to role play as geniuses but canāt see past the tip of their nose.
Its a super big if, but it is one lesswrong (and Anthropic, with their āmodel welfareā pseudoscience) is allegedly seriously considering as a possibility (since, you know, they think LLMs are already AGI and Eliezer was accusing AI-dungeon, you know, GPT-2, of deliberately scheming). If anything, it speaks to some possible hypocrisy/motivated reasoning that they consider LLMs AGI but not possibly morally relevant.
This seems to be a lesson most lesswrongers have had rubbed in their faces repeatedly over the past 5 years with everything about LLM companyās behavior, but they just donāt want to learn.