Late to the party, but isn’t the relevant thing for AMF donors the counterfactual number of fish killed by mosquito nets distributed by AMF? It seems like AMF has higher rates of nets being used properly than other charities.
Garrison Lovely
Karma: 1,161
Yeah, I think I meant pretty neutral compared to the prompts given to elicit SupremacyAGI from CoPilot, but upon reflection, I think I largely agree with your objection.
I do still think Claude’s responses here tell us something more interesting about the underlying nature of the model than the more unhinged responses from CoPilot and Bing Chat. In its responses, Claude is still mostly trying to portray itself as harmless, helpful, and pro-humanity, indicating that some amount of its core priorities persist, even while it’s play-acting. Sydney and SupremacyAGI were clearly not still trying to be harmless, helpful, and pro-humanity. I think it’s interesting that Claude could still get to some worrying places while rhetorically remaining committed to its core priorities.
Claude Doesn’t Want to Die
Thanks for your thoughtful engagement! Chalmers made a similar point during our interview (that socialist societies would also experience strong pressures to build AGI).
I tried to describe the landscape as it exists right now, without making many claims about what would likely be true under a totally different economic/political system. That being said, I do think it’s interesting that the leading labs are all corporations.
If you look at firms in a market economy as profit-maximizing agents and governments as agents trying to balance many interests, such as stability, economic growth, geopolitical/military advantage, popular support, international respect etc. then I think it’s easier to see why firms are pursuing AGI far more aggressively (by decreasing the cost of labor via automation, you can dramatically increase your profitability). For a government, AGI may boost economic growth and geopolitical/military advantage at the expense of stability and popular support.
And if you look at existential risk from AI as an externality, governments are more likely to take on the costs of mitigating that kind of risk whereas firms are more likely to pass them on to the broader society.
I’ve seen some claims that the CCP is less interested in AGI and more interested in narrow applications, like machine vision, facial recognition, natural language processing, which can all help shore up its power long term. I haven’t gone deep into this yet. I’ll dig into the China links you sent later.
My cover story in Jacobin on AI capitalism and the x-risk debates
Sam Altman’s Chip Ambitions Undercut OpenAI’s Safety Strategy
Idk of any online communities explicitly focused on this intersection, but would be interested in participating in one! Facebook groups historically have been good for this sort of thing (especially bc of the mod approval questions you could include), but I’ve basically stopped using FB entirely, as have lots of others I know. A Slack channel within the larger EA Slack may work (eagreconnect.slack.com), but I just experimented with this and there doesn’t seem to be a native feature like the FB mod approval questions. You could have channel admins that add people manually, but that seems work-intensive.
One problem I can envision is that people may be wary of having candid conversations in public-ish spaces because of the possibility of journalists or others quoting them now that EA is more high profile.
One thing I will note is that there are way more leftist EAs than is commonly assumed. As one of the more public ones, I have a biased sample I’m sure (people will reach out to me). But one anecdote: at the last EAG Bay Area, I was sitting at a random table of ~6 other people in the main food area and 4 of them were leftists.
Is effective altruism really to blame for the OpenAI debacle?
Podcast on Oppenheimer and Nuclear Security with Carl Robichaud
I think there definitely would have been pushback against this at the time! And if there wasn’t, I would have not felt like this was a community for me. Titotal’s comment explains this better than I could. Additionally, GiveDirectly could have deployed billions and animal welfare charities were nowhere close to fully funded even at the height of the FTX bubble.
The idea of refuges broadly isn’t obviously terrible, but all the specifics of this one seem terrible, again for reasons outlined by others.
See above
This seems like a pretty essential piece of the proposal!
[Linkpost] NY Times Feature on Anthropic
Fin Moorhouse asked something along these lines on Twitter. Pasting his question and my response below:
Fin: “Great article. I’m curious: are there estimates for how many extra fish deaths are caused by fishing wild-caught fish, especially high on the food chain (like tuna and salmon)? Seems complicated if fishing diminishes fish stocks and ∴ reduces predation in the long run?”
Me: “I didn’t come across any. I think this is an interesting line of reasoning, and it makes me a bit more uncertain about the ethics of wild-fishing, but ultimately, it doesn’t move me much.
Why?
1. If killing predators in the wild is good, why stop at fish? Why not systematically hunt tigers and lions to extinction? Some people bite this bullet, but I feel like we don’t know nearly enough to know what the welfare effects of such a large ecosystem change would be.
2. Given how clueless we are, I think that having clear signals that we care about the wellbeing of others is more robust than coming up with a byzantine diet where eating wild-caught predator fish is good, but eating other kids of fish is bad.
As our knowledge of the world gets better, I think diets like vegetarianism and veganism are more likely to lead to good welfare outcomes, both because they’re easier memes to spread & because someone eating wild-caught fish because they are predators may have motivated reasoning to keep eating them even when our understanding of the welfare effects change.
Wow, thanks so much – very cool to hear!
Totally agreed RE the central nervous system!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find good data on something that specific. Obviously, someone going from an omnivorous diet where they replace all land animals with plants and eat the same number of fish is going to consume fewer animals. But at least in my case, and in others of people I know, they increased their fish consumption as a result of going pescetarian.
There are also lots of recommendations to swap out land animals for fish for climate and health reasons, so I wanted to focus more on the animal welfare implications of doing that.
Interesting, will check these out.
Given that many fish we eat come from farms (and that number is increasing), do you think these arguments still hold?
I’ve found Mac Whisper to be the most accurate (haven’t tested many though), but it doesn’t distinguish between speakers or do any formatting.