Hi. I am posting under my real name. I have been effectively banned from less wrong for non actionable reasons. The moderators made a bunch of false accusations publicly without giving me a chance to review or rebut any of them. I believe it was because I don’t think AI is necessarily inevitably going to cause genocide and that obvious existing techniques in software should allow us to control AI. This view seems to be banned from discussion, with downvotes used to silence anyone discussing it. I was curious if this moderation action applied here.
The chief moderator, Raemon, has sanctioned me twice with no prior warning of any misconduct, making up new rules explicitly used against me. He has openly stated he believes in rapid foom—aka extremely rapid world takeover by an AI system which continues to self replicate at an exponential rate, with doubling times somewhere in the days to weeks.
Zach in a hypothetical world that pauses AI development, how many years do you think it would take medical science, at the current rate of progress, which is close to zero, to find
(1) treatments for aging (2) treatments for all forms of dementia
And once treatments are found, what about the practical nature of actually carrying them out? Manipulating thr human body is extremely dangerous and risky. Ultimately all ICUs fail, their patients will always eventually enter a complex failure state that current doctors don’t have the tools or knowledge to stop. (Always fail in the sense that if you release ICU patients and wait a few years and they come back, eventually they will die there)
It is possible that certain hypothetical medical procedures like a series of transplants to replace an entire body, or to edit adult genes across entire organs, are impossible for human physicians to perform without an unacceptable mortality rate. In the same way there are aircraft that human pilots can’t actually fly. It takes automation and algorithms to do it at all.
What I am trying to say is a world free of aging and death is possible, but perhaps it’s 50-100 years away with ASI, and 1000+ years away in AI pause worlds. (Possibly quite a bit longer than 1000 years, see the repression of technology in China.)
It seems like if your mental discount rate counts people who will exist past 1000 years from now with non negligible weight, you could support an AI pause. Is this the crux of it? If a human alive today is worth 1.0, what is the worth of someone who might exist in 1000 years?