gwern comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: tut 08 January 2014 12:14PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (343)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Stabilizer 13 January 2014 05:19:54PM *  7 points [-]

I don't see any discussion about this blog post by Mike Travern.

His point is that people trying to solve for Friendly AI are doing so because it's an "easy", abstract problem well into the future. He contends that we are already taking significant damage from artificially created human systems like the financial system, which can be ascribed agency and it's goals are quite different from improving human life. These systems are quite akin to "Hostile AI". This, he contends, is the really hard problem.

Here is a quote from the blogpost (which is from a Facebook comment he made):

I am generally on the side of the critics of Singulitarianism, but now want to provide a bit of support to these so-called rationalists. At some very meta level, they have the right problem — how do we preserve human interests in a world of vast forces and systems that aren’t really all that interested in us? But they have chosen a fantasy version of the problem, when human interests are being fucked over by actual existing systems right now. All that brain-power is being wasted on silly hypotheticals, because those are fun to think about, whereas trying to fix industrial capitalism so it doesn’t wreck the human life-support system is hard, frustrating, and almost certainly doomed to failure.

It's a short post, so you can read it quickly. What do you think about his argument?

Comment author: gwern 13 January 2014 06:28:15PM 7 points [-]

Is this the new 'but what about starving Africans?'