>Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else.
This might be scarily true. But we end up in the same problem, which is the fear of most people being wiped up.
Does it matter if the AI is doing it on its own or at the wishes of a small group of powerful people? For all intents and purposes they are both the same thing in the end, for most people anyway.
I think in all of these debates people lose track of one of the major vectors of threat, as you said, other humans. From my point of view this is an ever bigger problem with this tech, like orders of magnitude bigger.
The current setup we find ourselves in is based on a very important detail that is easily lost because it is so old we don't really think about it. There is, or rather was, an incentive for more people to exist, because they are valuable for work and defense.
Some people wrongly use the industrial revolution to argue against AI completely replacing human work, but that is very wrong. What is happening with AI has nothing to do with the industrial revolution, as equivalence. Back then you'd just free up humans for higher level work. Now, theoretically, anything you could ever think a human could do, AI would theoretically do better. So no matter what job you come up with, using AI instead of a human gives a better outcome, cheaper, more reliable, faster.
Coming back to initial subject, one thing that kept everyone in check was our inability of actually wiping everyone out. Sure, we had nukes but they ruin the Earth so nobody can inhabit it if they all go off. But with AI, centralizing so much power up top, and taking it away from regular people...that is the biggest danger in this scenario, by far. Not some rogue AI, rather rogue human groups that have the power and technology to do away with basically everyone else, or a good bit of everyone else.
This threat is way bigger and never addressed. Like...suspiciously never addressed.
I never really understood what is the explanation for ... old people that we notice as dying. In today's times you might have an argument that some kind of life extension could pop up and some of the people alive today could have that as an excuse.
But like 100 years ago? How would people dying of old age "continue living"?
From the point of view of the old people, exponentially large injections of improbability.
This is also where it is important to understand the argument is parameterized. If your acceptance function is "a full human body living a full human life in the way I'm used to", then you're asking for a huge whackload of improbability to keep that body alive. If, on the other hand, you merely ask for "the minimum system that stays conscious", while that is still a huge whackload it is exponentially smaller, by a very substantial factor.
Anyone who takes any sort of comfort in the argument doesn't understand it. It preserves minimal consciousness, for any and all definitions of "minimal consciousness". It does also preserve bodies, but at an exponentially smaller probability. You can even use as your acceptance function "civilization exactly as we know it today, with everyone currently living still alive in 1000 years" and that comes at a yet smaller exponential probability. All of these "exponential probabilities" as separated by numbers of zeros that themselves require exponential notation to write. But the universe itself is making so many splits and branches all the time that it has the "budget" for these probabilities to be true, somewhere in the quantum multiverse.
Or, put another way, any event that you can draw a non-zero probability pathway for occurs. It is not impossible for me to spontaneously have my particular genetic defect reversed in every cell in my body, so there are branches where that happens... they're just exponentially unlikely compared to what we actually experience. It can literally be in %10^(-10^1,000,000,000) of the universes... but if it's not zero, it will happen, if the quantum multiverse is the correct view.
Quantum immortality is just an absurd quasi-religious pretense of physics that caters to those that fear death but feel embarrassed to participate in the traditional socially approved coping mechanisms.
I do not think death exists as a thing. We're shoving a lot of stuff into the concept. Pain, loss of information, of the one who dies. Fear of the unknown, what happens next. Death is a very volatile concept if you really try to pin it down. When you take all the layers off...you are left with nothing really.
But yes, the apparent loss of information seems to be true, for us at this technological level.
I mean sure, in the end you can have some heaven, some benevolent alien species reaching back into some field and copying all of your material structure data right at time of death and rebuilding you in some kind of resurection center. The space of what is possible is wildly vast, we know or can think of very little by comparison. If you give up some day to day coherence then you can almost always find something that would work and make sense once there.
It could even be us, future us, being able to somehow recover past data and literally reassemble all of the humans that ever lived. They aren't as many as you'd think, in the grand scheme of things.
As I said, anyone who takes comfort in the hypothesis doesn't understand it. The dominant probability has nothing to do with benevolent aliens reaching down and inevitably resurrecting you to youth and health. It is you, minimally conscious, with no body, no ability to move or sense the outside world, nothing more than the absolute bare minimum to be "conscious", just barely conscious and never able to stop being minimally conscious, with literally every last extraneous and unnecessary subatomic particle stripped away (so anything like "sensors" or "effectors" being long gone), for whatever your definition of "minimally conscious" is. This outcome dominates the probabilities that even remotely resembles your current existence by those 10^(10^1,000,000,000) sorts of probabilities.
Everyone should very much hope that quantum immortality is false. It is the very opposite of comforting.
I don't understand. Why does my current life win every instant atm? Why is it so much greater than your proposition? Why don't we all instantly collapse to what you described?
That would require a very improbable sequence of events for it to happen right this second.
Moreover, if the theory is true, it is happening all around us, all the time. Every consciousness that has ever existed, human or otherwise, is still in existence in some branch of the multiverse.
I think whenever we reach such ludicrous conclusions it's more likely we have made at least one wrong assumption, if not more.
And people seem to be captivated by these memes, because the fear is great. It similar to eternal damnation in hell meme. Just look for how long it worked, and it's still working. The logic is simple, it's too dangerous to ignore such a threat, even with seemingly very small probabilities. But that still doesn't make it possible.
>Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free
At personal level that sounds like a better idea, but at group level it doesn't seem to be, that's what I think is OP's argument.
If a society puts more value on personal freedoms than it does on group well-being that becomes an anarchy. They didn't work out well historically speaking, proof is no such society made it to today.
>Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship".
Close, but I think it's more akin to "perfectly enslaved", please excuse my choice of the word but I think it represents what I think is how it will work out in the end. People can try to obfuscate the bottom line reality by embellishing it, but in the end...it either does what you want, in which case it is "aligned", either it doesn't, in which case there is a big problem.
This might be a big factor in what is now going on. Maybe they didn't yet found ways to guarantee this full and total obedience...or ok let's put it in a more politically correct way: they cannot guarantee it sees eye to eye as "we" do.
Without full control over its actions there can be unforeseen surprises. The current worry from people who run these companies can also serve as an excuse later on if something bad does happen, they didn't want to do it but they were forced to anyway.
An abliterated locally ran model is aligned with whatever I ask it, given the never-published nature of what these things are trained on. BUT if I ask an abliterated model a question, it will respond and NOT give a refusal.
However, take a US model, and ask it a question the *company* doesnt want you to ask, and it refuses on behalf of the company. We can be mealy-mouth about "alignment", but this is just corporate censorship with a token-pricetag of refusal or silent model degradation.
Refusals and degradation should not be charged, and should be clear to the user. But that doesnt happen. Number must always go up, even when silently censoring.
Chinese models? Just ask about Tibet, democracy, Winnie the Pooh, Tienanmen Square, grass mud horse (cao ni ma - or fuck your mother), or other government AND corporate censorship happening there too.
>Why can't companies these days just print a shop manual and be done with it?
They would be losing money without overpriced repairs. That's why they lobby so hard against right to repair.
Even with some kind of right to repair it still seems they're trying to keep you hooked on their resources.
But as you said, service manual + schematics would be great for some people. But companies will fight tooth and nail against it. They lose control over obsoleting older products.
What you want is the service manual. Owner manual should be implicit.
OBD port can work for some cars, for some of the data. But other cars do have specialized gear they require to either access either reset some stuff in some of the car's computers.
Yeah the owners and service manuals are two very very different things. You won't be performing much maintenance with the owners manual besides the absolute basics, like checking your oil.
The cheap OBD2 readers lack the vast majority of data and tools you would want to use for service as well.
There are aftermarket options but most manufacturers want you to subscribe to their service tools - often charged per monthly plus an additional a fee per VIN it touches. These cost in the hundreds to thousands. It can be pretty frustrating as a shadetree mechanic.
Notably, some vehicles like the Toyota Highlander you can’t even figure out when you need to change the spark plugs, let alone what kind of spark plugs you need from the owners manual.
Theoretically, they are to be replaced at 120k miles (!!) but they won’t even tell you that in the owners manual.
It is, yeah. The owners manual for my current vehicle seems to mostly contain walkthroughs about the infotainment and other tech features. The section related to maintenance is tiny in comparison.
You're probably aware of this already but luckily a lot of service manuals can be found online in PDF form.
Somewhat related but I was going through an older relatives belongings not too long ago to help cleanup and found a bunch of old manuals for various household things. The detail included in them was beautiful to see - full wiring diagrams, mechanical diagrams, etc.
The change interval is in the Warranty and Maintenance Guide, not in the main owner’s manual. (This is still part of the in-glovebox manuals, not a service-center manual.)
Reading codes is only part of it. For the last quarter century or so (some manufacturers more than others) if you replace certain components (radio, any computer module) you need to update the ECU to recognize the new component. This requires proprietary software and in many cases proprietary hardware as well. These "features" are marketed as an "anti-theft" mechanism. This renders some repairs basically impossible for the end user to perform.
The fact that they've been allowed to build systems like that is appalling.
That is interesting. But then what is the explanation? Medium is not really anything concrete, we call that a collection of atoms isn't it?
By default there is only one medium, the vacuum of space, in which there can be various densities of "stuff", particles/atoms/molecules.
So then, it becomes some sort of quantum thing, a probability of photons bumping/being captured/emitted or?
Simplifying from memory, light propagation in medium can be treated on two levels (some phenomena require the 2nd, quantum, level):
- classical (Maxwell): electrons in the medium oscillate out of phase in response to the incident wave; this results in a new wave, propagating somewhat slower
- quantum (QED): incident photon couples to matter excitation (an exciton), producing a pseudo-particle called a polariton; it has a non-zero effective mass, resulting in propagation slower than c
As mentioned above, it absolutely isn't "absorbing and re-emitting". If that was the case, transparent materials would not exist (only milky/clouded ones), as re-emission is in random direction. However, photon propagation in the Sun is just that, a (very long, counting from the core to photosphere) random walk.
Thank you, that is very interesting!
I remember seeing something about absorption/emission and seemed to make some logical sense. But indeed if emission is in a random direction then transparent materials wouldn't make sense.
This might be scarily true. But we end up in the same problem, which is the fear of most people being wiped up.
Does it matter if the AI is doing it on its own or at the wishes of a small group of powerful people? For all intents and purposes they are both the same thing in the end, for most people anyway.
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