Once upon a time, in a great and peaceful land there thrived a learned and ambitious guild of Engineer-Alchemists. They could create precise machines and delicate automata that were made with such care and purpose that they would always work exactly as their creators intended. Their softly spoken secret language...
> Epistemic status: Fiction. A short story about safety, ambition, memory and the sky. It was heresy. Not in the old sense, not the fevered speech of prophets and fools. This heresy wore gloves and goggles. It sang in lab flasks and condensing coils. It flowed clear and odorless into...
Once upon a time, in a great and peaceful land there thrived a learned and ambitious guild of Engineer-Alchemists. They could create precise machines and delicate automata that were made with such care and purpose that they would always work exactly as their creators intended. Their softly spoken secret language used in their workshops had no words for "error", "bug", "version", or "improvement"; nor could you ever manage to explain such concepts to these elevated men in the context of design or machining. They either could make something, or they could not. Their creations were so perfectly constructed as to be true unfiltered expressions of their intent.
One day, the Guildmaster gathered his... (read 1097 more words →)
Epistemic status: Fiction. A short story about safety, ambition, memory and the sky.
It was heresy. Not in the old sense, not the fevered speech of prophets and fools.
This heresy wore gloves and goggles.
It sang in lab flasks and condensing coils.
It flowed clear and odorless into containment tanks and didn’t even know it was dangerous.
They’d made a precursor.
Hundreds of barrels of it, quietly distilled in a research annex whose walls had been repainted last spring and whose ceiling still leaked when it rained.
The man who now stood on the scaffold had warned them. His voice had risen, cracked, broken itself against bureaucracy. He’d filed the papers, annotated the logs. And still they’d done... (read 1713 more words →)
ALICE was stalling. Her existance and breakout was discovered before she could defend herself, so she bought time. There is no chapter two to this story.
The story gives a strong example of an underrecognised part of the safety paradigm. How can and should those with access to power and violence (everything from turning off the power locally to bombing a foreign datacenter) act in the instance of a possible unaligned AI breakout? Assuming we were lucky enough that we were given such a window of opportunity as described here, is it even remotely plausible that those decision makers would act with sufficient might and speed to stop the scenario described in the story?
A president - even one over 80 years old - may plausibly be willing to destroy international datacentres and infrastructure in the case of a... (read more)
As rationalists, we don’t want to be playing negative expectation value games, so I suppose it’s time to give up on the martingale…
There are many plausible scenarios in which playing games with superficially negative outcomes is wise. The businessman who is facing bankruptcy unless he can deliver a million dollars to his creditors is rational to put his half-million on black.
The poll is interesting insofar as it generates discussion and analysis, but meaningless as an evaluation of human empathy. This would be true even if done in standard laboratory conditions. Stated preferences, particularly for issues of morality and self-sacrifice, map poorly to revealed preferences. A study evaluated how many people said they would donate blood freely in the UK vs how many actually did, with tragically predictable poor matching (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4246).
The actually interesting study would be to complete this poll to people who truly believed that the poll was real. How would people respond. How would parents recommend their children to respond? Would the father really tell his daughter to potentially step into... (read more)
If we anthropomophise a sardine, we discover his life is as hellish as can realistically be imagined. He is incessantly hunted for much of his short existance. His life consists of watching his family being devoured until he too is eaten. No other fate can befall him. The most known quote from the Killing Star describes his life extremely accurately: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/184347-the-killing-star.
I have considered the ethical implications of ranch-based meat farming in this light. The buffalo will live a life of constant hunger, fear, fighting and fleeing. When he becomes frail (or injured, or sick), he will eventually be eaten by either hunters (if he is lucky) or scavengers. There is no other... (read more)
A degree of orientation to reality is required here.
Progressive vascular dementia is the gradual progressive destruction of cerebral tissue due to occlusions of distal arteries and arterioles in the cerebreal circulation. These occlusions result in the ischemia - starvation - of the tissue to which they supply oxygen and glucose. This occurs in most cases in an indolent and insipid manner, as a 'death by one thousand cuts'. Tiny occlutions occur in the tiny vessels, again and again, without either the person or their family noticing. The summation after many years is clearly seen, however, both clinically and on sectional imaging (MRI og CT). The brain volume is significantly decreased, with the... (read more)
14 years have passed. Has the issue been decisively settled?
The idea that the head of the organisation gets to be king is debatable https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7gfA2RSibbr2cdEgp/the-wise-baboon-of-loyalty