My go-to is this (warning: horrifying) 1 minute comic. I credit it for me viscerally getting just how important s-risks are.
There’s always factory farm footage too. Dominion and Earthlings are the best for this.
I think it’s no surprise that people who were previously in animal welfare end up going into s-risks. It makes you realize how very plausible massive scale suffering is, even if there are no malevolent actors.
Not entirely clear why the sadistic robots would do such a thing.
One thing I liked about the novel ‘Surface Detail’ was that the sadists imposing the suffering had at least some kind of semi-plausible religious rationale for what they were doing—which makes the whole scenario more psychologically plausible and therefore all the more terrifying.
Yeah, I agree it’s not clear why they’d do it. I give the comic writer some slack though, since it’s hard to fit that much into a comic.
Couple reasons that I can think of off the top of my head that that could happen:
Sign flip. Accidentally flip the sign and instead of trying to maximize human flourishing, it’s trying to minimize it.
Punishment. Imagine a dictator created TAI and was using it to punish people that fit a certain demographics (e.g. Uyghurs). Imagine that the human there is a Uyghur, or that they failed to sufficiently specify the demographic and it started doing everybody or large swathes of the world
Honestly though, I think the most probable s-risks are the incidental ones (covered in Tobias’s book and also this blog post here). Basically, something where suffering is a side-product, like factory farming or slavery. I also put highest odds it would be for digital minds, since I think the future will be predominantly digital minds.
But it’d be very hard to make a comic about digital minds that would be emotionally compelling, which is why I like the comic (although “like” is a bit of a strong word. More, “found incredibly psychologically scarring but in a way that helps me remember what I’m fighting for”)
My go-to is this (warning: horrifying) 1 minute comic. I credit it for me viscerally getting just how important s-risks are.
There’s always factory farm footage too. Dominion and Earthlings are the best for this.
I think it’s no surprise that people who were previously in animal welfare end up going into s-risks. It makes you realize how very plausible massive scale suffering is, even if there are no malevolent actors.
Oh no. Very horrifying!
Not entirely clear why the sadistic robots would do such a thing.
One thing I liked about the novel ‘Surface Detail’ was that the sadists imposing the suffering had at least some kind of semi-plausible religious rationale for what they were doing—which makes the whole scenario more psychologically plausible and therefore all the more terrifying.
Yeah, I agree it’s not clear why they’d do it. I give the comic writer some slack though, since it’s hard to fit that much into a comic.
Couple reasons that I can think of off the top of my head that that could happen:
Sign flip. Accidentally flip the sign and instead of trying to maximize human flourishing, it’s trying to minimize it.
Punishment. Imagine a dictator created TAI and was using it to punish people that fit a certain demographics (e.g. Uyghurs). Imagine that the human there is a Uyghur, or that they failed to sufficiently specify the demographic and it started doing everybody or large swathes of the world
Honestly though, I think the most probable s-risks are the incidental ones (covered in Tobias’s book and also this blog post here). Basically, something where suffering is a side-product, like factory farming or slavery. I also put highest odds it would be for digital minds, since I think the future will be predominantly digital minds.
But it’d be very hard to make a comic about digital minds that would be emotionally compelling, which is why I like the comic (although “like” is a bit of a strong word. More, “found incredibly psychologically scarring but in a way that helps me remember what I’m fighting for”)