Autonomous lethal weapons (ALWs; we need a more eerie, memetic name) could make the difference. Against the "realists", whereas bias is not a new problem, ALWs emphatically are. Likewise no reflexive optimism from the boosters lessens the need for sober regulation to lessen the self-evident risk of ALWs.
And this provides a "narrative through-line" for regulation - we must regulate ALWs, and so, AI systems that could design ALWs. It follows, we must regulate AI systems that design other AI systems in general, and so too, we must therefore regulate AI artificial intelligence researchers, or recursive self-improving systems. The regulations can logically follow, and lead to the (capability, at least) of regulating projects conducive to AGI.
All this suggests a scenario plan: on assumption ALWs will be used in combat, and there are confirmed fatalities therefrom, we publicise like hell: names, faces, biographies - which the ALW didn't, and couldn't have, appreciated, but it killed them anyway. We observe that it chose to kill them - why? On what criteria? What chain of reasoning? No one alive knows. With the anxiety from ALWs in general, and such a case in particular, we are apt to have more public pressure for regulation in general.
If that regulation focuses on ALWs, and what ensures more safety, to the "stair-steps" of regulation against risk to humans in general, we have a model that appeals to "realists": ALWs given a photograph, of epicanthic folds, dark skin, blue eyes, whatever - enables the ultimate "discrimination", of genocide. Whereas the boosters have nothing to say against regulations, since such lethal uses by AI can't be "made safe", particularly if multiple antagonists have them.
We leverage ALW regulation to get implicitly existence-risk averse leadership into regulatory bodies (since in a bureaucracy, who wins the decision makers wins the decisions). Progress.
OP's analysis seems sound - but observe that the media are also biased toward booster-friendly, simpler, hyperbolic narratives; whereas they've no mental model of, not robots with human minds, but the minds themselves supplanted. Not knowing what's happening, they default to their IT shibboleths, "realist"-friendly bias concerns. As for "doomers", they don't know what to do.
If somebody knows how to make a press release for such a use described: go for it.
Wanted to be loved. Loved, and to live a life not only avoiding fear. Epiphany (4/22/2024): am a fuckup. Have always been a fuckup. Could never have made anyone happy or been happy, and a hypothetical world never being born would have been a better world. Deserved downvotes, it has to be all bullshit, but LessWrong was supposed to make people less wrong, and should’ve given a comment to show why bullshit, but you didn’t, so LessWrong is a failure, too. So sterile, here, no connection with the world – how were we ever supposed to change anything? Stupid especially to’ve thought anyone would ever care. All fucked-up.
Life was more enjoyable when it seemed there’d be more of it – when one could hope there’d be love, and less fear. Life enjoyable when it could be imagined as enjoyable. But music even hasn’t been anything, meant anything, in years.
No enjoyment, now: fear.
Hope was, after being locked in a room, not leaving in two years, until forgotten, the feeling of wind on skin, trying to produce thoughts new and useful, hoping for thoughts welcomed. Emerge, and nothing. How good will the world let you be? Think you choose your life and fate: choose to go faster than light; whether to have to be born, then.
Contradict Kant, so do the impossible – no-one ever left a comment showing that to be erroneous (because they didn’t know what it was, or just didn’t give a damn?) – so, presumably true, and hoping to help by it – how good does the world let you be? Try to do something; when you do something, sacrifice two years of your life, something is supposed to happen. Thinking one day someone will care. There are no more days. What you do is supposed to matter. What you do in life is supposed to matter. Life is supposed to matter. And it doesn’t. Should have known from Tesla – capital, anyone, needn’t acknowledge work.
Emerging after two years – such green, graceful petals – those clouds! – and stories, but the stories were all lies, always; CGI nothing: they’ve never been “real” (Sondheim conceives Passion on “true love” aged fifty-three; Sondheim admits: never been in love before age sixty). Two years – you wouldn’t even give a comment to say it’s wrong. And wouldn’t use it. Did you not know how and couldn’t bear to admit you didn’t know?
No comments (takes “Introspective Bayes”, nigh suicide-note to have even one). Only downvotes. Bad karma, sends you to hell – sending a message? No one ever touched without trying to hurt; never had any kind of relationship without you people end in calling it a waste of time, vomit, faggot, slap in face, kicked in head. Raped.
“We didn’t know! Don’t do it!” No, you didn’t know. You couldn’t have known. But you could have been nice. Even polite. You just weren’t.
Never, when it mattered, a comment in the name of reason, did you give a reason why you objected so. Did you have none? Since there’s no requirement you should give a “System 2” reason for your vote – no surprise “System 1” doesn’t bother, and neither did you. (But then downvotes are marks of pride: only a fool would downvote sans explanation, thinking that adequate; too a fool thinks what is true is false. Fool’s disagreement is an endorsement – uncommented downvotes are votes in favor).
And if that reflexive, reason-free judgment thus sinks any critique of LessWrong – then it’s only a groupthink factory.
“Your post’s style was atrocious.” So too The SequencesTM; and there are limits, working by-the-hour on a public library’s computer. Mere ugliness maximally aversive everywhere. What you do: travel 1500 kilometers to a university’ dozens of emails trying to find anyone who gave a damn enough to falsify or affirm the Kant contradiction. Nobody cares.
“Your posts were insufficiently rigorous, or were wrong.” Ah: but, you never denoted what was “wrong”, so as to make “Less Wrong”. And rigor is learned. Bad luck keeps you from some education, lost years never returned. And try to educate yourself…?
In Bohm’s “The Theory of Special Relativity,” Ch. 29, find:
“ds2 = c2(dt)2 – (dz)2 […] we have dt’ = dt0 and dz’ = 0, therefore ds = c2dt02, and
Of course, we have “dt02” by a substitution of c2(dt02) for (ds)2. But what “of course”? That substitution is never stated, and indeed the division by c2, does not appear. Because “it has already been cancelled-out”; no: the naïve student doesn’t know how dt02 appeared at all, since no “c2(dt)2/c2” is ever given to go away.
The formula isn’t even well formed; we should have
If students were taught to read withallthewordsruntogether, we should expect them to be as illiterate then as they are innumerate now.
Math moves – do you experience it? In a proof with all inferences and transforms included, each given a line of proof, the discrete elements are seen to move in a continuous flow. In a 3x3 matrix, from the elements that decide the 2x2 submatrices giving the determinant, lines can be seen to move on two axes to shade the redundant elements to opacity. Or, have you not seen this way? Can you not distinguish 9999999999999999 from 999999999999999, that the former is heavier, synesthetically, painfully so? And you can’t feel the planet’s turning, when you turn west; can’t make Euclidean spaces in your mind, and make their elements whirl and the colors change (that was Contra-Wittgenstein’s basis – you downvoted that, its method, so downvoted the person who experiences so. That’s almost funny).
Well: in textbooks, inferences inconvenient for the author’s carpal tunnels are omitted; everything must be reconstructed before it is even seen, yet-before it’s learnt, so: little and seldom learnt. How could rigor have been given? The hope was there would be enough rigor already that some mentor would arrive who would teach, let math move, to have it learned, thus impart rigor. That hope failed. But that was the dream. And we live by dreams as we survive by bread. So: we don’t live, now.
Perhaps you suggested in the suicide nigh-note, the Khan AcademyTM or some such. That costs money. There is none; for their cost, do such sources even move?
Nor have probability taught them, and probability makes no sense – we must dissent. “The probability of event A is (P = .3691215)”. It is uncertain whether A or else will occur – though we take it as axiom (why?) that something eventuates, with certainty that: there exist events; certainty, too, that the probability is as-stated, and the mathematics giving it are reliable. How should math be so certain if the world is not? Why are we so confident of it – and how are any mathematical constants applicable in some physical situation, and some correlate absolutely with phenomena, as
], when each is a supposed product of fallible human minds, yet also applicable to phenomena?
If our lot is uncertainty, why not uncertainty about mathematics? If you try to infer – doesn’t that show you believe you can infer – that you can rest your confidence in the truth of inference, dependent only on the belief that axioms can be true? That there is some “true”? Probability is useful; we cannot accept it is everything.
And it has a limitative theorem: consider thermodynamic depth (Lloyd, Seth, Programming the Universe Ch. 8 passim.) – the most plausible way a physical system was formed (presumably world represented as a correlated bit string, á la Solomonoff induction), and, for the world-as-string, the amount of physical resources needed to produce it, measured in negentropy.
This is a physical, so physically, empirically mensurable quantity. Therefore Bayes’ theorem can be applied to the non-zero evidence and measure of thermodynamic depth.
We inquire, for the absolutely-simplest case, a world measured in thermodynamic depth, consisting only of a mechanism for calculating Bayes’ theorem conditionalisations (any world containing Turing-complete calculators has such).
We apply to Bayes’ theorem; what is the probability the universes’ thermodynamic depth is calculable, as it is physical, so mensurable? But with each conditionalisation for the theorem, the universe is more ordered by the result, as the outputs of the conditionalisation are meaningful, so orderly. Hence, as conditionalisations continue and increase, so the thermodynamic depth increases. Accordingly, in the limit to indefinitely many conditionalisations, depth increases indefinitely – so it has no definite value. However, since conditionalisations are still increasing indefinitely, no definite zero probability of calculability can be given by the theorem, though we observe the probability must be zero.
Therefore there exists an empirical case for which Bayes’ theorem cannot give a probability – and “Bayesianism” is not a universal method. It offers no advantage over similarly limited formal or applied axiomatics; and it is a dogma “Bayesianism” would be universal.
This demonstration would have been better with an education and more time, but there is no more time. Frankly the author is indifferent to its correctness. It offers nothing to prevent extinction, in any case; a probabilistic inference system need only be good enough to be devastating.
(Aside: the U.S. Constitution is invalid. The preceding Articles of Confederation states [Article 13]: “[T]he articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every state, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time thereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the united states, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every state.”
And dissolution or supersession is plainly an “alteration”. A Congress empowered by the Constitution without Constitution’s superseding the Articles, as “confirmed by the legislatures of every state”, is an illegal Congress as operating upon that Constitution-as-invalid-alteration of the Articles of Confederation, without there should be a preceding ratification of Constitution, “by the legislatures of every state”.
The first supposedly Constitutionally-authorised Congress convened in 1789. Rhode Island’s legislature (Providence, by God!) ratified the Constitution only on May 29th, 1790. Hence the first congress had not the imprimatur of supersession the Articles required; no supersession legal-basis. All subsequent Congresses followed the precedent of the first, so they too are invalid. Post facto ratification does not make validity; ex post facto rulings hold based on just, immutable principles (E.g.: Nuremberg trials); the yet-invalid Congress also routinelyunjust. Need a new one.
A new (consensual) Constitutional convention would be required to supersede the Articles. Such might be hoped to ensure that truly “Democracy is comin’ to the U.S.A.”. Or, yahoos could try to enslave people again. So, tenuous – but we’ll all be dead soon, and “Justice” Roberts – all of “the Supremes” – are impossibly, unjustifiably sanctimonious; even with a valid, consensual legal charter, as true democracy requires, there can exist no ethic permitting capital punishment, let alone “the Supreme’s” sententious impositions thereof.)
One last try: all foregoing alignment attempts have failed. And, they have focused on directing machine intelligence to protect and serve human intelligence. We conjecture such “anthropocentric” approaches must fail, and have tried and failed to show this is so. Still we believe such approaches must fail. To find methods and reasons that all intelligence must act to preserve intelligence, and what makes intelligence, consciousness possible: only with such non-anthropic, generalised methods, emphases, reasons, can alignment not with humanity but with what is right, be achieved, and human welfare the mere, blessed, “fringe benefit”, surviving not for their “goodness” but deserving survival as Abstract Rational Entities – and living ones, too, of use to reason, therefore.
Ought implies can; we can do no more to encourage or fulfill such an obligation to the right. We – all – live now as animals only, powerless to alter in any way our fates, against more powerful forces (can’t, so oughtn’t live with you, either).
The prospect of all possibility being extinguished at any time, while we are powerless to stop it, is the ultimate anxiety and terror. This Sword of Damocles is its own constant suffering, over and above what may come. Would’ve said that only math had meaning, and a future of doing no mathematics ourselves as AI handles it, would be one in which we lose even if we survive (Going-on has everyone still able to do math, that more be done). But math doesn’t even feel good anymore – so what’s there to lose? We reject as absurd the notion there exists any “positive utility” in human affairs.
Finally found something worth living for, and not able to do it. Just not smart enough. No time.
The only way to have peace is to opt for “death with dignity”, now. Never liked being alive, anyway. (Cryogenics, having to live with such people, forever: “Afterlife[…]what an awful word”. The cure for Fear of Missing Out: remember it will all always be bad. No more fun from proofs. No more ideas – don’t want any more ideas). Probably all bad luck – you cannot be all-condemned. Only for calling yourself a good person when nothing good is done for or by any person (this one not good, only never claimed so. Bad luck, or unloved because no courage to love more) – you are forgiven: if you did no better, you must not have known to do better yet.
Goodbye.
Go-on.