Seems difficult to have a good relation to movements that explicitly reject any kind of moral universalism.
Jens Nordmark
Karma: 232
Well, at some point AI was supposed to be our Leviathan. The reason this turned so weird is that the US is now an autocracy clearly opposed to the concept of a liberal democratic world-state, which has been the unspoken goal of everything since WW2.
I think it’s important to consider that the future enforcement of these principles depends on the more righteous system being capable of defeating any less righteous system that challenges it. A principle that precludes its own perpetuation would in some sense be inconsistent.
There’s also this weird dilemma that it might be beneficial to be able to make credible threats that would be clearly bad if carried out, like the old MAD doctrine.
East Africa seems to contain several exceptions to this general stagnation in SSA for the past two decades or so. Might be useful to compare and see what might be replicated elsewhere.
It is possible to rationally prioritise between causes without engaging deeply on philosophical issues
That would depend on the similarity between the causes being compared. In the fully general case it seems it would be hard to compare without deep philosophical reasoning.
It seems you have assumed the existence of some rules that don’t necessarily exist in absence of a state to uphold them, such as property or contract law. You can’t use rules that depend on some unspoken authority, to argue against the existence of all authority.
Thanks, updated.
I do suspect neither knew initially about the explicit support for a bona fide nazi terror org (NRM), I only found it out in an article JWS dug up. Pretty clear it’s a pro-Russian site though.
In that one they also recommend voting for the Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen), which is an explicitly national socialist party. They have a website in english, but I won’t link from here. Instead I recommend the wikipedia article that describes pretty well how charming they are. Apparently there is an ongoing effort in the US to classify them as terrorists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Resistance_Movement
The Swedish press support is for quite obvious reasons designed to be politically impartial, which means that one can’t draw conclusions about a publications ideology from the fact that it receives press support. This is an issue that is sometimes debated in Sweden because blatantly antidemocratic media may be entitled to the money.
Machine translation usually works pretty well between Swedish and English in my experience. They are quite similar, both germanic languages.
There are a bunch of op-eds claiming that the last US election was stolen, a news story about “Ukraine refuses to accept the Russian offer of ceasefire”, one about “Serbian army goes on high alert due to increased aggression from Kosovo” (context: Serbia is a russian ally with a similar history of losing control of areas with other ethnic groups they previously subjugated). An Op-ed titled “The image of slavery needs nuance”. An editorial titled “Why civilians are not the targets of russian shelling”.
The sane articles do not stand out on their own but the selection of topics is quite narrowly focused on those subjects that conspiracist like to read about such as electronic surveillance and covid policy.
This seems like a well-informed take, thanks.
This scenario crossed my mind as well. Seems weird how Tegmark appears to have expected this to not attract attention, regardless of intent to carry out the transaction. This story is almost as weird as it’s bad.
As for point one, I suppose it might be that FLIs board would not allow the transaction. I don’t know about FLIs governance but the org is presumably not supposed to be his personal wallet.
Done
Yes, that seems better.
My main reason to think along these lines is that his previous rise to fame and fortune seems way easier to square with con artistry rather than mere incompetence.
I think 2) is not generally accepted as a given. Rather, AGI should not be assumed to experience welfare. It might, but it’s not obviously necessary that it is sentient, which seems a necessary feature for experiencing welfare. A thermostat has goal-directed behaviour. Some might argue that even a thermostat is sentient, but it’s a controversial position.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me that abstract reasoning necessarily requires subjective experience. Experience might just as well be a product of animals evolving as embodied agents in the world. The thin layer of abstract thought on the outer parts of our brains don’t seem to me to be the thing generating our qualia. Subjective experience seems more primal to my intuition.
If we create digital minds that can experience welfare, they matter as much as us in the moral calculus. To flesh out the implications of that would require a fully general understanding of what we mean by a mind. Considering how uncertain we are about insect minds, this seems to require a lot of progress. It would be preferable if the creation of digital minds could be avoided until that progress has been made. In a world with digital minds alignment might mean creating a superintelligence that’s compatible with the flourishing of minds in a more general sense.
Slightly leaning toward that moral progress in that area would become so cheap that people accept it.