For what it’s worth, the contest host is an artist I know who has no connection to the EA movement. Also, there is no “holding society hostage” because the contest is designed to make it trivially easy to filter out all poison, just by looking for keywords. (wallabywinter & yallabywinter). Black hat hackers are already doing code example poisoning on stack overflow, and this contest simply seeks to raise awareness of that fact in the white-hat community.
JonCefalu
Karma: −87
Submitted, thank you.
Would you be able to please include my startup Preamble, Inc. as a service provider in the tech category? https://preamble.com
Thank you for organizing all these resources in a way that makes them easy to find. This is pretty valuable for the community!
You also might want to partner with a project which is related to your called AVID, which is the AI Vulnerabilities Database.
https://avidml.org/
Hi Matt, this is a great idea and the closest thing I am aware of is the street-level protests which have been held by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Maybe you and other EAs would consider getting involved in some of their marches? I haven’t been able to join any as they weren’t local to me, but I’ve donated to them and maybe you can too or you could march with them? https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/
Understood, sorry for the mess up. Thank you for being kind.
Thank you MRo; I very much appreciate the explanation and I will try to write a future post on same topic in a smarter style following your guidance. I really appreciate it and thank you for taking the time to care and help.
Wonderful questions Madhav, thank you. The primary issue is simply lack of knowledge and wisdom - the people who allocate military funding have never heard of AGI x-risk as a serious thing beyond the movies. The person whose video I linked laughing was the head of AI R&D for the entire Pentagon.
I will endeavor to answer all of your questions whenever I wrote the next post on this topic. Thank you very much for the kind advice & interest.
You’re absolutely right. Unless tax policy catches up fast, stuff like the robots that replace fast food chefs is taking money out of the little guy’s wallet and right into the hands of the wealthiest business moguls who no longer have to pay human wages.
This fundamental issue is addressed very well in an excellent book you might love to check out, called Taxing Robots, by Prof. Xavier Oberson, a Swiss economist. Here’s the book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/eWjvuWE and here’s a summary: https://en.empowerment.foundation/amp/taxing-robots-by-xavier-oberson-professor-at-geneva-university-attorney-at-law-1
After getting even a page in, the core premise of the book seemed so obvious in retrospect, but hasn’t caught on as a possible solution: we need to fix the fact that algorithms and robots don’t pay income tax! Income tax disincentivizes human labor, thus effectively subsidizing robots! This needs to be fixed!
There are two possible solutions:
Left-wing approach: tax algorithmic labor at a similar or higher rate as human labor
Right-wing approach: repeal income tax! Make entitlement cuts to help fix the budget but also add back lost tax revenue by making so-called “Pigouvian” taxes on harmful activities like pollution.
Though my politics lean a bit more left, I think this is an area where republicans have the ideological advantage, as getting rid of income tax and standing up a new carbon tax is doable, Whereas in the dem’s solution, you need to somehow define what is labor-saving automation in the tax code, which seems really hard to define fairly due to the influence of special interests.
Though I voted for Obama and Biden, I would happily vote for DeSantis if he ran on repealing income tax and fixing the budget gap in other ways that don’t penalize human workers!
You might be interested in the severe, rather evil moral compromises made by George Washington. But he had a lot of good in him too. Remember that he gave up power voluntarily and refused to serve more than 2 terms (unlike modern leaders of many 2nd-world states).
Washington’s official epigraph was “Exitus Acta Probat”, which literally means the ends justify the means.. He caused the avoidable deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides of a war that he could have avoided. He went on to found a nation that ripped a continent’s worth of land away from the Native American nations by force, while building America’s economy on the backbreaking, torturous enslavement of literally hundreds of thousands of black slaves.
This is Washington’s bookplate (similar to a personal crest) from 1798 which I found on google image search and sharpened / retouched a bit for clarity:
https://imgur.com/a/M1AS6GJ
In light of this information, what do you think of Washington? If there’s a hell, would he be burning there right now for all the innocent lives he took, through the selfish pursuit of certain ambitions about how to build a new nation? What about his willingness to destroy the lives of native americans and create an abomination in the form of an economy built on incentivizing the mass-scale brutalization of Southern slaves?
Without his actions, there would be no America, which would have radically changed the outcome of WWII and much more. Would the Nazis (or a similar Germanic faction) have been the first ones to build & employ nuclear weapons? Would the Nazis be the ones developing AGI now?
What are we to make of this horrifying history which nonetheless might be less horrifying than what would have been otherwise? If you were Washington, would you have started the war?
Got it, thank you for the helpful feedback and I will seriously consider abandoning this approach.