There are definitely timelines where privacy and privacy imbalance were eliminated completely and AGI development prevented, possibly indefinitely, or possibly until alignment was guaranteed. (obviously/insignificantly, bare with me)
Imagine that everyone could 'switch' their senses to any other with minimal effort, including sensors like cameras and microphones on devices, drones, persons, or with not too distant technology, any of human senses, and imagine there was some storage system allowing access to those senses back into time, practically there may be some rolling storage window with longer windows for certain sets of the data.
I think a society like this could hold off AGI, that getting to a society like this is possibly easier than alignment first, and that such a society, while still with some difficulties, would be an improvement for most people over an imaginary regular AGI-less society and current society
It is a hard idea to come around to, there are a lot of rather built in notions that scream against it. A few otherwise rational people have told me that they'd rather misaligned AGI, that 'privacy is a human right' (with no further justification for it) etc.
It seems all issues associated with a lack of privacy depend on some privacy imbalance, e.g. your ssh key is leaked (in such a society, they may still be used to protect control), you don't know who has it, and when they abuse it, but if somehow everyone did, and everyone knew everyone did, then it is much less bad. Someone might still abuse what they know against their own best interests, but they could quickly be recognized as someone who does that, and prevented from doing it more via therapy/imprisonment.
Depending on the technology available, there could still be windows for doing small, quick wrongs, e.g. someone could use your ssh key to delete a small amount of some of your data because they don't like your face, simply hoping no one is watching, or will rewatch in the future. I don't know how much of an issue these would be, but I figure that a combination of systems being modified in the context of complete global information freedom to do things like trigger/mark a recording of people accessing the system, and an incentive for efforts to scout wrongdoings and build systems to help scout for them, there is a good potential that the total wrongdoing cost will go down versus the alternative.
I don't think conformity / groupthink / tribalism etc. would get the best of us. They may still have some of their impacts, but it seems that transparency almost always reduces them - strawmen less relevant when actual arguments are replayable, fabricated claims about others easily debunkable, and possibly punished under new laws. Yes, you wouldn't be able to hide from a hateful group that doesn't like an arbitrary thing about you, but they wouldn't be able to circulate falsehoods about you to fuel that hate, they would be an easy cash cow for any wrongdoing scouts (and wrongdoing scouts encouraging these cashcows, a larger cashcow for other wrongdoing scouts), and with a combination of social pressure to literally put ourselves in another's shoes, I think it is reasonable to at least consider these problems won't be worse
Society got along okay with little to no privacy in the past, but if we later decide that we want it back for idk bedroom activities, I think it is possible that abstraction could be used to rebuild some forms of privacy in a way that still prevents us from building a misaligned AGI. For example, it could be only people on the other side of the world who you don't know who can review what happens in your bedroom, and if you abuse your partner there or start building AGI, they could raise it to a larger audience. Maybe some narrow AI could be used to help make things more efficient and allow you private time.
Under this society, I think we could distinguish alignment and capability work, and maybe we'd need to lean heavily towards the safe direction and delay aligned AGI a bunch, but conceivably it would allow us to have an aligned AGI at the end, and we can bring back full privacy.
In timelines with this technology and society structure, I wonder what they looked like to get there. I imagine they could have started with just computer systems and drones. Maybe they had the technology ready and rolled it out only when people were on board, which may have been spurred by widespread fear of misaligned AGI. Maybe they were quite lucky, and there were other dominant cultural forces which all had ulterior incentives for such a system to be in place. I do think it would be quite hard to get everyone on board, but it seems like a reasonable route to aligned AGI worth talking more about to me.
There are definitely timelines where privacy and privacy imbalance were eliminated completely and AGI development prevented, possibly indefinitely, or possibly until alignment was guaranteed. (obviously/insignificantly, bare with me)
Imagine that everyone could 'switch' their senses to any other with minimal effort, including sensors like cameras and microphones on devices, drones, persons, or with not too distant technology, any of human senses, and imagine there was some storage system allowing access to those senses back into time, practically there may be some rolling storage window with longer windows for certain sets of the data.
I think a society like this could hold off AGI, that getting to a society like this is possibly easier than alignment first, and that such a society, while still with some difficulties, would be an improvement for most people over an imaginary regular AGI-less society and current society
It is a hard idea to come around to, there are a lot of rather built in notions that scream against it. A few otherwise rational people have told me that they'd rather misaligned AGI, that 'privacy is a human right' (with no further justification for it) etc.
It seems all issues associated with a lack of privacy depend on some privacy imbalance, e.g. your ssh key is leaked (in such a society, they may still be used to protect control), you don't know who has it, and when they abuse it, but if somehow everyone did, and everyone knew everyone did, then it is much less bad. Someone might still abuse what they know against their own best interests, but they could quickly be recognized as someone who does that, and prevented from doing it more via therapy/imprisonment.
Depending on the technology available, there could still be windows for doing small, quick wrongs, e.g. someone could use your ssh key to delete a small amount of some of your data because they don't like your face, simply hoping no one is watching, or will rewatch in the future. I don't know how much of an issue these would be, but I figure that a combination of systems being modified in the context of complete global information freedom to do things like trigger/mark a recording of people accessing the system, and an incentive for efforts to scout wrongdoings and build systems to help scout for them, there is a good potential that the total wrongdoing cost will go down versus the alternative.
I don't think conformity / groupthink / tribalism etc. would get the best of us. They may still have some of their impacts, but it seems that transparency almost always reduces them - strawmen less relevant when actual arguments are replayable, fabricated claims about others easily debunkable, and possibly punished under new laws. Yes, you wouldn't be able to hide from a hateful group that doesn't like an arbitrary thing about you, but they wouldn't be able to circulate falsehoods about you to fuel that hate, they would be an easy cash cow for any wrongdoing scouts (and wrongdoing scouts encouraging these cashcows, a larger cashcow for other wrongdoing scouts), and with a combination of social pressure to literally put ourselves in another's shoes, I think it is reasonable to at least consider these problems won't be worse
Society got along okay with little to no privacy in the past, but if we later decide that we want it back for idk bedroom activities, I think it is possible that abstraction could be used to rebuild some forms of privacy in a way that still prevents us from building a misaligned AGI. For example, it could be only people on the other side of the world who you don't know who can review what happens in your bedroom, and if you abuse your partner there or start building AGI, they could raise it to a larger audience. Maybe some narrow AI could be used to help make things more efficient and allow you private time.
Under this society, I think we could distinguish alignment and capability work, and maybe we'd need to lean heavily towards the safe direction and delay aligned AGI a bunch, but conceivably it would allow us to have an aligned AGI at the end, and we can bring back full privacy.
In timelines with this technology and society structure, I wonder what they looked like to get there. I imagine they could have started with just computer systems and drones. Maybe they had the technology ready and rolled it out only when people were on board, which may have been spurred by widespread fear of misaligned AGI. Maybe they were quite lucky, and there were other dominant cultural forces which all had ulterior incentives for such a system to be in place. I do think it would be quite hard to get everyone on board, but it seems like a reasonable route to aligned AGI worth talking more about to me.