Sorry, I think it's entirely possible that this is just me not knowing or understanding some of the background material, but where exactly does this diverge from justifying the AI pursuing a goal of maximizing the inclusive genetic fitness of its creators? Which clearly either isn't what humans actually want (there are things humans can do to make themselves have more descendants that no humans, including the specific ones who could take those actions, want to take, because of godshatter) or is just circular (who knows what will maximize inclusive genetic fitness in an environment that is being created, in large part, by the decision of how to promote inclusive genetic fitness?). At some point, your writing started talking about "design goals", but I don't understand why tools / artifacts constructed by evolved creatures, that happen to increase the inclusive genetic fitness of the evolved creatures who constructed them by means other than the design goals of those who constructed them, wouldn't be favored by evolution, and thus part of the "purpose" of the evolved creatures in constructing them; and this doesn't seem like an "error" even in the limit of optimal pursuit of inclusive genetic fitness, this seems to be just what optimal pursuit of IGF would actually do. In other words, I don't want a very powerful human-constructed optimizer to pursue the maximization of human IGF, and I think hardly any other humans do either; but I don't understand in detail why your argument doesn't justify AI pursuit of maximizing human IGF, to the detriment of what humans actually value.

Thank you for writing this. It has a lot of stuff I haven't seen before (I'm only really interested in neurology insofar as it's the substrate for literally everything I care about, but that's still plenty for "I'd rather have a clue than treat the whole area as spooky stuff that goes bump in the night").

As I understand it, you and many scientists are treating energy consumption by anatomical part of the brain (as proxied by blood flow) as the main way to see "what the brain is doing". It seems possible to me that there are other ways that specific thoughts could be kept compartmentalized, e.g. which neurotransmitters are active (although I guess this correlates pretty strongly to brain region anyway) or microtemporal properties of neural pulses; but the fact that we've found any kind of reasonably consistent relationship between [brain region consuming energy] and [mental state as reported or as predicted by the situation] means that brain region is a factor used for separating / modularizing cognition, if not that it's the only such part. So, I'll take brain region = mental module for granted for now and get to my actual question:

Do you know whether anyone has compiled data, across a wide variety of experiments or other data-gathering opportunities, of which brain regions have which kinds of correlations with one another? E.g. "these two tend to be active simultaneously", "this one tends to become active just after this one", etc.

I'm particularly interested in this for the brain regions you mention in this article, those related in various senses to good and/or to bad. If one puts both menthol and capsaicin in one's mouth at the same time, the menthol will stimulate cold receptors and the capsaicin will stimulate heat receptors, and one will have an experience out of range of what the sensors usually encounter: hot and cold, simultaneously in the same location. What I actually want to know is: are good and bad (or some forms of them, anyway) also represented in a way where one isn't actually the opposite of the other, neurologically speaking? If so, are there actual cases that are clearly best described as "good and bad", where to pick a single number instead would inevitably miss the intensity of the experience?

2 years and 2 days later, in your opinion, has what you predicted in your conclusion happened?

(I'm just a curious bystander; I have no idea if there are any camps regarding this issue, but if so, I'm not a member of any of them.)

might put lawyers out of business

This might be even worse than she thought. Many, many contracts include the exact opposite of this clause, i.e., that the section titles are without any effect whatsoever on the actual interpretation of the contract.  I never noticed until just now that this is an instance of self-dealing on the part of the attorneys (typically) drafting the contracts!  They're literally saying that if they make a drafting error, in a way that makes the contract harder to understand and use and is in no conceivable way an improvement to the contract, the courts need to assume "well, one common kind of drafting error is putting a clause in the wrong section, probably that's what happened here" only because the "clauses in wrong section are void" provisions you mentioned are as far as I know literally unheard of!

I was just reading about this, and apparently subvocalizing refers to small but physically detectable movement of the vocal cords. I don't know whether / how often I do this (I am not at all aware of it). But it is literally impossible for me to read (or write) without hearing the words in my inner ear, and I'm not dyslexic (my spelling is quite good and almost none of what's described in OP sounds familiar, so I doubt it's that I'm just undiagnosed). I thought this was more common than not, so I'm kind of shocked that the reacts on this comment's grandparent indicate only about 1/3 (of respondents to the "poll") subvocalize. The voice I hear is quite featureless, and I can read maybe 300 words per minute, which I think is actually faster than average, though needing to "hear" the words does impose an upper bound on reading speed.

Leaving an unaligned force (humans, here) in control of 0.001% of resources seems risky. There is a chance that you've underestimated how large the share of resources controlled by the unaligned force is, and probably more importantly, there is a chance that the unaligned force could use its tiny share of resources in some super-effective way that captures a much higher fraction of resources in the future. The actual effect on the economy of the unaligned force, other than the possibility of its being larger than thought or being used as a springboard to gain more control, seems negligible, so one should still expect full extermination unless there's some positive reason for the strong force to leave the weak force intact.

Humans do have such reasons in some cazes (we like seeing animals, at least in zoos, and being able to study them, etc.; same thing for the Amish; plus we also at least sometimes place real value on the independence and self-determination of such beings and cultures), but there would need to be an argument made that AI will have such positive reasons (and a further argument why the AIs wouldn't just "put whatever humans they wanted to preserve" in "zoos", if one thinks that being in a zoo isn't a great future). Otherwise, exterminating humans would be trivially easy with that large of a power gap. Even if there are multiple ASIs that aren't fully aligned with one another, offense is probably easier than defense; if one AI perceives weak benefits to keeping humans around, but another AI perceives weak benefits to exterminating us, I'd assume we get exterminated and then the 2nd AI pays some trivial amount to the 1st for the inconvenience. Getting AI to strongly care about keeping humans around is, of course, one way to frame the alignment problem. I haven't seen an argument that this will happen by default or that we have any idea how to do it; this seems more like an attempt to say it isn't necessary.

Ah, okay, some of those seem to me like they'd change things quite a lot. In particular, a week's notice is usually possible for major plans (going out of town, a birthday or anniversary, concert that night only, etc.) and being able to skip books that don't interest one also removes a major class of reason not to go. The ones I can still see are (1) competing in-town plans, (2) illness or other personal emergency, and (3) just don't feel like going out tonight. (1) is what you're trying to avoid, of course. On (3) I can see your opinion going either way. It does legitimately happen sometimes that one is too tired for whatever plans one had to seem appealing, but it's legitimate to say that if that happens to you so often that you mind the cost of the extra rounds of drinks you end up buying, maybe you're not a great member for that club. (2) seems like a real problem, and I'm gonna guess that you actually wouldn't make people pay for drinks if they said they missed because they had COVID, there was a death in the family, etc.?

Reads like a ha ha only serious to me anyway.

I started a book club in February 2023 and since the beginning I pushed for the rule that if you don't come, you pay for everyone's drinks next time.

I'm very surprised that in that particular form that worked, because the extremely obvious way to postpone (or, in the end, avoid) the penalty is to not go next time either (or, in the end, ever again). I guess if there's agreement that pretty close to 100% attendance is the norm, as in if you can only show up 60% of the time don't bother showing up at all, then it could work. That would make sense for something like a D&D or other tabletop RPG session, or certain forms of competition like, I dunno, a table tennis league, where someone being absent even one time really does cause quite significant harm to the event. But it eliminates a chunk of the possible attendees entirely right from the start, and I imagine would make the members feel quite constrained by the club, particularly if it doesn't appear to be really required by the event itself. And those don't seem good for getting people to show up, either.

That's not to say the analogy overall doesn't work. I'd imagine requiring people to buy a ticket to go to poker night, with that ticket also covering the night's first ante / blind, does work to increase attendance, and for the reasons you state (and not just people being foolish about "sunk costs"). It's just payment of the penalty after the fact, and presumably with no real enforcement, that I don't get. And if you say it works for your book club, I guess probably it does and I'm wrong somehow. But in any case, I notice that I am confused.