By the way, I'm not here to troll, and I do have a serious question that doesn't necessarily have to do with cryonics. The goal of SIAI (Lesswrong, etc) is to learn and possibly avoid a dystopian future. If you truly are worried about a dystopian future, then doesn't that serve as a vote of "No confidence" for these initiatives?
Admittedly, I haven't looked into your history, so that may be a "Well, duh" answer :)
Let's say you're about to walk into a room that contains an unknown number of hostile people who possibly have guns. You don't have much of a choice about which way you're going, given that the "room" you're currently in is really more of an active garbage compactor, but you do have a lot of military-grade garbage to pick through. Do you don some armor, grab a knife, or try to assemble a working gun of your own?
Trick question. Given adequate time and resources, you do all three. In this metaphor, the room outside is the future, enemy soldiers are the prospect of a dystopia or other bad end, AGI is the gun (least likely to succeed, given how many moving parts there are and the fact that you're putting it together from garbage without real tools, but if you get it right it might solve a whole room full of problems very quickly), general sanity-improving stuff is the knife (a simple and reliable way to deal with whatever problem is right in front of you), and cryonics is the armor (so if one of those problems becomes lethally personal before you can solve it, you might be able to get back up and try again).
You could say they died of insufficient friendly AGI, but not from an AGI that was insufficiently friendly.
I'm saying the control systems on the plane constitute an artificial intelligence, advanced enough to do almost all the work of flying the plane but not general enough to do anything unrelated to flying the plane, and (at issue) not friendly enough to tell the pilots "this is likely just a little ice clog, in which case you don't need to do anything" or, later in the catastrophe, "the single most important part of stall recovery is bringing the plane's nose back down," let alone override their panicky incompetence outright and act on such simple suggestions itself.
Superior competitors don't tend to cause widespread unemployment, though. People just go work for the company that's on the rise.
I don't think it's this simple. Suppose skills are nontransferable. Suppose the other company is in a different country. Suppose there's only a limited demand for the goods produced and the other company uses technology that lets it fewer workers than the first one did. None of these seem to have anything to do with supply shortages.
As for uncertainty about a coming war... he's saying that it all comes back to natural resources, access to land, and sure enough that tends to be what wars are about.
Not exactly. Wars are about a lot of things, like fear one will be attacked by a neighbor or the desire to stop Communist ideology. The claim that every war is at root an issue of natural resources is only defensible if you make it extremely complex and thus impossible to falsify. Additionally, like I said before, that kind of situation is less about insufficient supply and more about living under conditions of scarcity which no economy can avoid.
Suppose there's only a limited demand for the goods produced and the other company uses technology that lets it fewer workers than the first one did.
"Labor-saving" innovations are simply increases in efficiency. If the new process allows more of the same (or equivalent) goods to be produced with less inputs, the price will drop and demand will increase. Significantly lower cost might even open up completely new applications for the goods.
Have we worked through the game theory here? It feels like negotiating with terrorists.
My objection is to the 'set amount.' What about the Bunny Ears Lawyer trope, where someone purchases additional weirdness points with a track record of outstanding competence?
Superior competitors don't tend to cause widespread unemployment, though. People just go work for the company that's on the rise.
I don't think it's this simple. Suppose skills are nontransferable. Suppose the other company is in a different country. Suppose there's only a limited demand for the goods produced and the other company uses technology that lets it fewer workers than the first one did. None of these seem to have anything to do with supply shortages.
As for uncertainty about a coming war... he's saying that it all comes back to natural resources, access to land, and sure enough that tends to be what wars are about.
Not exactly. Wars are about a lot of things, like fear one will be attacked by a neighbor or the desire to stop Communist ideology. The claim that every war is at root an issue of natural resources is only defensible if you make it extremely complex and thus impossible to falsify. Additionally, like I said before, that kind of situation is less about insufficient supply and more about living under conditions of scarcity which no economy can avoid.
The neighbor is possibly going to attack... why? Maybe because they want something you have, that they could seize by killing you? Such as your land? The term "lebensraum" comes to mind.
Communist ideology, likewise, exists to promote communist political policies, which have a number of major differences from capitalist (or, say, monarchist) policies when it comes to how natural resources should be exploited on industrial scales and how the products of that industry should be directed. Workers controlling the means of production, and so on.
As for falsifiability, it would be easy enough to imagine people going to war over a set of political issues (let's say, calendar reform or the right to be openly homosexual) which have no clear implications one way or another for industry. It's just, that doesn't happen. Gulf War 2? Oil. American civil war? Cotton, by way of slavery. WWII? Germany and Japan trying to bootstrap. Sub-saharan bloodbaths? Closely correlated to droughts, with a time lag as food scarcity propagates through the system. Without an underlying resource conflict, no war occurs.
There's always more to it than that, of course, because people are complicated. The first world war, for example, was a horrific morass of misplaced optimism and lost purposes, but when you look at the promises the leaders were making, it was always "no, really, we'll be able to push ahead and capture valuable territory at low cost THIS time!" and the reparations afterward were transparently a transfer of resources from the losers to the winners.
I'm slightly less cynical; I think they usually do in fact genuinely believe that you'll change your mind and agree with them many years later. The people I've seen this with tend not to be good at putting feelings into words.
By the way, I'd love to see someone steelman the experience argument (but am too lazy to do myself). Anyone up for it?
I'm not saying that someone making the "understand when you're older" argument is being dishonest. They might not even be incorrect. It's just that, if that's the best case they can come up with, even after thinking it over, you're probably better off making your decision on some basis other than their opinion.
Says "you'll realize that I'm right when you're older". That's not a statement that comes up when people are doing Aumann updates (unless one person is unaware of the other's age).
How do you deal with Professor Quirrel's version of the argument? It seems basically correct to me that people who are mostly rational will manage to learn from their experience things which the young would not guess. Do you think that the risk you're being lied to about their experience is what justifies ignoring this argument? I think that's often true, but not always. Perhaps the best answer is that people who are rational enough to justify your trusting their word over known arguments do not generally exist?
It's not that there aren't any people whose unsupported assertion is more trustworthy than an explicit, persuasive-sounding argument for the opposite side, though certainly individuals of such discernment and integrity are rare. The issue is that any person so reliable would also necessarily have enough underlying intelligence to be able to, in any situation not involving implausibly extreme levels of time pressure, construct a better (or at least more contextually specific) argument than "you'll understand when you're older." The only plausible explanation for being so vague is if they not only don't want to tell you, but are further trying not to provide enough keywords for you to look up the real reason yourself.
His claim that a shortfall in supply can cause a shortfall in demand makes sense. But he goes beyond that and claims without any real justification that every shortfall in demand is the consequence of a shortfall in supply, which contradicts modern economic thought. One reason that quantity demanded might decline other than a production problem would be if there's an increase in production by a competitor whose goods are superior or cheaper than yours. Another potential reason would be an increase in uncertainty - if say, a country is on the brink of war, people in that country will be inclined to hold on to their money rather than to spend it on luxury goods, and this can cause an economic contraction.
I guess in a roundabout nonfalsifiable kind of way it might be hypothetically possible that a shortage in supply on the other side of the globe is the indirect root cause of the war, but this isn't very helpful for figuring out anything useful about the economy even if it does happen to be true, and we have no reason to think that's so.
He kind of comes close to conflating "shortfall in supply" with "scarcity", but those are two different concepts in economic thought. A shortfall in supply is someone not producing as much as they ought to have to maximize their company's profit. Scarcity is the idea that no matter how much is produced people will always want more.
Disclaimer: barely paid attention when this was explained to me in class.
Superior competitors don't tend to cause widespread unemployment, though. People just go work for the company that's on the rise.
As for uncertainty about a coming war... he's saying that it all comes back to natural resources, access to land, and sure enough that tends to be what wars are about.
And, of course, encouraging homeownership makes this worse. Good thing that most of the Western world hasn't made that an explicit policy goal for the past decade...
Homeownership makes employees less willing to relocate, but also more tolerant of short-term decreases in the demand for their skills, since they can postpone maintenance on a house (or perform it inefficiently themselves with the surplus time) more safely than they can miss rent payments to a landlord.
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"We"? You mean: you and me, baby? Or are you asking after a prediction about whether something like CEV will beat the other philosophies about what to do with an intelligent machine?
CEV is an alien document from my perspective. It isn't like anything I would ever write.
It reminds me a bit of the ideal of democracy - where the masses have a say in running things.
I tend to see the world as more run by the government and its corporations - with democracy acting like a smokescreen for the voters - to give them an illusion of control, and to prevent them from revolting.
Also, technology has a long history of increasing wealth inequality - by giving the powerful controllers and developers of the technology ever more means of tracking and controlling those who would take away their stuff.
That sort of vision is not so useful as an election promise to help rally the masses around a cause - but then, I am not really a politician.
Voting prevents revolts in the same sense that a hydroelectric dam prevents floods. It's not a matter of stopping up the revolutionary urge; in fact, any attempt to do so would be disastrous sooner or later. Instead it provides a safe, easy channel, and in the process, captures all the power of the movement before that flow can build up enough to cause damage.
The voters can have whatever they want, and the rest of the system does it's best to stop them from wanting anything dangerous.