The plan
Claude Opus has a superiority complex.
I do not try that hard to maximize my positive impact on the world
When I tell people I work on AI safety it is not because I think I am going to make the AI safe
People need to stop building the unsafe AI and I cannot make them stop
I do research I think is fun and interesting and it just so happens that maybe my research will be useful to people who want to do AI safely
I asked a politician about the existential risk posed by artificial superintelligence, specifically the risk of human extinction
He responded by talking about the “existential risk of job loss”
Goddammit
“AI just predicts the next token” sounds deflating — until you consider what predicting the next token involves and start to ask if there’s really such a difference between predicting and learning.
The common words in those articles, “just,” “simply,” “only,” are there because the argument doesn’t stand up without them.
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-is-missing-out-on-ai-sanders-doctorow-bender-bores
Capitalism is a bundle of things that tend to come together historically: free markets with enforced contracts, lending at interest, exponential technological/economic growth, and investor ownership of the means of production.
I don’t think capitalism is inherently good or bad, it’s just a pretty simple attractor state for societies which has good and bad parts. But I’ve been thinking about how automation changes things.
Democracy is fundamentally about distributed power. When human labor is essential everywhere, workers have power (they can strike, etc).
With full automation, workers have nothing to offer that capitalists need. People could theoretically go live off the land and get by, but they’d be powerless. The automated economy would dwarf anything they could produce, and the capitalists could walk all over them whenever they wanted.
So it seems like you can pick two of {automation, capitalism, democracy}, but not all three. If we want to keep democracy as we automate, investor ownership of production probably has to go.
Questions like ‘what if everyone is an investor’ etc follow and are interesting but I haven’t gotten to them quite yet. Also, this models automated human labor replacement as controllable by owners which is unlikely to be the case in practice.
At the moment, feeling very sympathetic to the folks who want to greatly extend the human lifespan, live to see Mars terraformed, etc
This is not normally how I feel
Did Opus think my question was dumb
Does Opus think I’m dumb
A quote from Mark Greif:
What has passed as liberation has often been liberalization.… Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted, creating markets in what you already possess for free. It has a way of making your possessions no longer native to you at the very moment that they’re freed for your enjoyment.
Often times when someone asks me a question I’ll think it through out loud in a way that is completely unintelligible to them.
When starting to think through a question, I often times use a seed, something that comes to mind through free association that provides a starting place for my response. Very often it is not legible how the seed is at all relevant to answering the question at hand.
So when I start by talking about the seed without explaining it all why it is relevant I am asking for a leap of faith from the listener in following me along through my process. Maybe this is not the most respectful use of their time. It certainly seems to annoy some people.
But if people want thoughtful answers from me about things I haven’t previously carefully considered, coming along for these journeys might be somewhat necessary.