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Post-scarcity does not exist. The more resources we have, the more we will demand, and no doubt AGI will create demand by existing.

The idea that having more than enough resources to go around means a world where poverty is eliminated is instantly falsifiable by the world we live in.

We know that people in developed countries suffer horribly in relative poverty, and I have no reason not to expect that further improvements to AI will vastly increase wealth inequality.

2Kaj_Sotala3mo

In the world we live in, there is strong political and cultural resistance to the kinds of basic income schemes that would eliminate genuine poverty. The problem isn't that resource consumption would always need to inevitably increase - once people's wealth gets past a certain point, plenty of them prefer to reduce their working hours, forgoing material resources in favor of having more spare time. The problem is that large numbers of people don't like the idea of others being given tax money without doing anything to directly earn it.

6Archimedes3mo

Post-scarcity is conceivable if AI enables sufficiently better governance in addition to extra resources. It may not be likely to happen but it seems at least plausible.

3Dagon3mo

Well, there are possible outcomes that make resources per human literally infinite. They're not great either, by my preferences. In less extreme cases, a lot depends on your definition of "poverty", and the weight you put on relative poverty vs absolute poverty. Already in most parts of the world the literal starvation rate is extremely low. It can get lower, and probably will in a "useful AI" or "aligned AGI" world. A lot of capabilities and technologies have already moved from "wealthy only" to "almost everyone, including technically impoverished people", and this can easily continue.

6George Ingebretsen3mo

Seems like a pretty similar thesis to this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty

1Noosphere893mo

The one caveat here is that any change to the laws of physics that somehow managed to find a loophole in thermodynamics would let you get unbounded supply to match unbounded demand, and that probably does deserve the name of post-scarcity, but yes people are incorrectly assuming AI will bring about post-scarcity.

AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated

Sterrs2y11

Human relationships should be challenging. Refusing to be challenged by those around you is what creates the echo chambers we see online, where your own opinions get fed back to you, only reassuring you of what you already believe. These were created by AI recommendation algorithms whose only goal was to maximise engagement.

Why would an AI boyfriend or girlfriend be any different? They would not help you develop as a person, they would only exist to serve your desires, not to push you to improve who you are, not to teach you new perspectives, not to give you opportunities to bring others joy.

6MSRayne2y

I understand all this logically, but my emotional brain asks, "Yeah, but why should I care about any of that? I want what I want. I don't want to grow, or improve myself, or learn new perspectives, or bring others joy. I want to feel good all the time with minimal effort." When wireheading - real wireheading, not the creepy electrode in the brain sort that few people would actually accept - is presented to you, it is very hard to reject it, particularly if you have a background of trauma or neurodivergence that makes coping with "real life" difficult to begin with, which is why so many people with brains like mine end up as addicts. Actually, by some standards, I am an addict, just not of any physical substance. And to be honest, as a risk-averse person, it's hard for me to rationally argue for why I ought to interact with other people when AIs are better, except the people I already know, trust, and care about. Like, where exactly is my duty to "grow" (from other people's perspective, by other people's definitions, because they tell me I ought to do it) supposed to be coming from? The only thing that motivates me, sometimes, to try to do growth-and-self-improvement things is guilt. And I'm actually a pretty hard person to guilt into doing things.

AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated

Sterrs2y85

Women will find AI partners just as addicting and preferable to real partners as men do.

AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated

Sterrs2y45

I personally think you massively underestimate the dangers posed by such relationships. We are not talking about people living healthy well-adjusted lives but choosing not to have any intimate relationships with other humans. We're talking about a severely addictive drug, perhaps on the level of some of the most physiologically addictive substances we know of today. Think social media addiction but with the obsession and emotions we associate with a romantic crush, then multiply it by one hundred.

Mech Interp Puzzle 2: Word2Vec Style Embeddings

Sterrs2y10

Very interesting. I'll play around with the code next time I get the chance.

2.1)

Being able to solve crosswords requires you to know how long words are. I have no idea how common they were in the training data though. Aligning things in text files is sometimes desirable, Python files are supposed to limit line lengths to 80 characters, some Linux system files store text data in tables with whitespace to make things line up. ASCII art also uses specific line lengths.

My guess for linearity would be so that the sum of the vectors has the length of their conc

Sterrs2y40

I'm not sure you can call someone else's work a "huge achievement" based on your own uncertainty about whether their conclusions are correct.

LESSWRONG
LW

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