Meteuphoric

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

“We can’t prevent progress” say the people for some reason enthusiastically advocating that we just risk dying by AI rather than even consider contravening this law.

I have several problems with this, beyond those unsubtly hinted at above.

First, it seems to be willfully conflating “increasing technology understanding and/or tools” with “things getting better”. The word ‘progress’ generally means ‘things getting better’, but here in a debate about whether it is good or not for society to acquire and spread some specific information and tools, we are being asked to label all increases in information and tools as ‘progress’, which is quite the presumption of a particular conclusion.

(Yes the sub-debate here is more narrowly about whether averting technology is feasible not whether it is good, but the bid here to implicitly grant that the infeasible thing is also reprehensible and backward to want (i.e. anti-”progress”) seems unfriendly.)

If we separate the conflated concepts—i.e. distinguish ‘increasing technological information and tools’ from ‘things getting better’—the statement doesn’t seem remotely true for either of them.

First: Preventing things from getting better is a capability humans have had perhaps at least as far back as the Sea Peoples of Bronze Age collapse fame. (If indeed we go ahead and make machines that do in fact destroy humanity, we will also have prevented ‘progress’ in the normal sense.)

But now let’s consider preventing “increasing technology information and tools”, which seems like the more relevant contention. I’m a bit unsure what the position is here, honestly—do people think for instance that the FDA doesn’t slow down the pharmaceutical industry? Do they think that the pharmaceutical industry is too small and insulated from financial incentives for its slowing down to be evidence about AI?

Perhaps we just don’t usually think of the pharmaceutical industry as ‘slowed down’ because we are used to that as the way it operates? Or perhaps this doesn’t count because the point isn’t to slow it down, it’s just to have it proceed at the rate it can do so safely for people, with the slowness as an unfortunate side-effect. In which case, fine—that would also do for AI!

In case this example is for some reason wanting, here are more examples of technologies slowed down to something more like a halt, from a previous post (more detail here also):

1. Huge amounts of medical research, including really important medical research e.g. The FDA banned human trials of strep A vaccines from the 70s to the 2000s, in spite of 500,000 global deaths every year. A lot of people also died while covid vaccines went through all the proper trials.
2. Nuclear energy
3. Fracking
4. Various genetics things: genetic modification of foods, gene drives, early recombinant DNA researchers famously organized a moratorium and then ongoing research guidelines including prohibition of certain experiments (see the Asilomar Conference)
5. Nuclear, biological, and maybe chemical weapons (or maybe these just aren’t useful)
6. Various human reproductive innovation: cloning of humans, genetic manipulation of humans (a notable example of an economically valuable technology that is to my knowledge barely pursued across different countries, without explicit coordination between those countries, even though it would make those countries more competitive. Someone used CRISPR on babies in China, but was imprisoned for it.)
7. Recreational drug development
8. Geoengineering
9. Much of science about humans? I recently ran this survey, and was reminded how encumbering ethical rules are for even incredibly innocuous research. As far as I could tell the EU now makes it illegal to collect data in the EU unless you promise to delete the data from anywhere that it might have gotten to if the person who gave you the data wishes for that at some point. In all, dealing with this and IRB-related things added maybe more than half of the effort of the project. Plausibly I misunderstand the rules, but I doubt other researchers are radically better at figuring them out than I am.
10. […]

Aside from the seeming disconnect with empirical evidence, I’m confused by the theoretical model here. Do people think the rate of technological development can’t be affected by funding, or by the costs of inputs, or by regulation? Or do they think these factors would affect technology, but that this will never in practice happen because the relevant decisionmakers will never have the will?

Do they also think technology cannot be sped up? If so, how is that different?

Do they just mean you can’t fully grind it to a halt, preventing all progress? That may be so, but in that case, slowing it down a lot would generally suffice!

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

I’ve argued that the AI situation is not clearly an ‘arms race’. By which I mean, going fast is not clearly good, even selfishly.

I think this is a hard point to get across. Like, these people are RACING. They say they are RACING. They are GOING FAST. If they stop RACING the other side will get there first. How is it not a RACE??

Which is a fair response.

It’s like if I said “this isn’t a chess tournament” gesturing at a group of chess champions aggressively playing chess. How could it not be?

Well, maybe all the prizes and recognition available in the circumstances are based on winning at checkers. That would make it, in a very important sense, not a chess tournament. They can play chess all they like, but it doesn’t make the incentive structure into that of a chess tournament. If they want to win at a tournament, their strategy is just badly mistaken.

It’s true that many people are trying to build AI very fast. But many people building AI very fast is different from being in a game where going very fast is the best selfish strategic move.

And this becomes important when “it’s really important to win at the race” becomes justification for a) moving fast at very high costs to other people, and b) giving up instead of trying to coordinate other players not to move fast, since other players are presumed to be immovably committed to winning the race due to that being so incentivized.

These justifications both require the structure of incentives to actually be a race, not just for people to be racing.

‘Is AI really an arms race or are people just racing?’ might sound like an abstract question. But if someone is saying they need to risk your family’s lives to fuel their quest to win an extremely high stakes chess championship, it’s very concretely important whether they are really in a chess championship!

While this is a basic point, my guess is that the distinction between what people are doing and what it is in their interests to do is too subtle and non-memorable to be tracked in the conversation.

So I propose an image I think might keep the incentives and the behavior separate more intuitively: AI as a Trojan horse race.

Various groups are working really hard to get various wooden horses through their own gates, resolute on doing so before their enemies pull in such a prize and outclass them with the contents. It’s an open question whether each horse contains fantastic treasure or a bunch of enemy agents. (This time in history we are even pretty confident that it includes a bunch of agents of some sort, and not at all confident of their loyalty..)

Is it enough to know that other cities are pulling horses through their gates? Are you satisfied then to have the biggest one pulled into your own town square?

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

There is a particular flavor of suffering I fear: where something is not just unpleasant, but is requiring active effort from you to continue having the unpleasant thing happen, and so you have to not only suffer the suffering, but also the constant thinking about whether maybe you should stop right now—and so are also having to dip peripherally into questions of free will and will power and who you are and if you will ever do anything and if you are fundamentally bad, and all this while you are already quite taxed by the original suffering.

The epitome of this kind of suffering to my mind has traditionally been running. What everyday activity was less pleasant than running? Better to be lightly tortured by someone else, than have to do the inflicting as well. (No, I’m probably not a very athletic person.)

But that was years ago. These days running is often one of the most joyous things I do.

(I still don’t do it nearly enough, but often when I do I think “oh wow this is so good, I should do this much more often” rather than “can I stop? can I stop? I’m stopping.. no, oh god, when is it over?”)

What changed?

The first thing that happened—which I’d guess is not crucial but did help me get started—was that a person I had a crush on started inviting me to go on runs. This helped me get a tiny bit better at running, because I was willing to withstand almost arbitrary amounts of suffering to spend time with him. This probably got my running skill from “really wants to stop running within about twenty steps” to “can run for a block or two before hating it”. By the time he stopped inviting me (since he actually wanted to run far and fast) I think I still found running basically unpleasant, but had more of an affordance for doing it for non-negligible stretches.

The real change was from running alone and altering my running protocol.

Here is how to enjoy running, in my experience:

1. Get yourself some good running music. This is key. It’s like the difference between having fuel in your vehicle and not. Ideally you want a playlist consisting entirely of songs which if they came on at a party would send you leaping up and scrambling for the dance floor. My first playlist for this was called “corny”, and my most recent one is a variety of 90s pop punk.
2. Put on shoes. Put on music. Start running.
3. As soon as you don’t feel like running—even if it’s after five steps—walk.
4. As soon as you feel like running again, run. This may be because the music hits a bit that demands it, or the street is sloping downwards, or walking just feels a bit slow, or you regained your energy and bounding along in the sun would feel good.
5. As soon as you feel like leaping, or skipping, or balancing on a low wall with your arms out, do that.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 in any order until feeling like running stops occurring ever.
7. Wander home.
8. Repeat another day, and probably find yourself walking a tiny bit less, and enjoying yourself running a tiny bit more.

I guess the crucial elements are:

• a) There’s a huge experiential difference between running when you don’t feel like it and running when you do feel like it.
• b) Music is compelling, and in particular can compel you to move your body enjoyably (most classically observed in the phenomenon ‘dance’).
• c) If a thing is enjoyable at least sometimes, then you can enjoy it 100% of the time you are doing it by just not doing it when you aren’t feeling it.

Some additional modifications that might help:

1. Be cringe. Dance at stoplights. Smile at strangers. Think grandiose thoughts.
2. Use a fitness device where you can watch your heart rate in real time—it’s somewhat compelling to control it by running when it drops relatively low (and that is coincidentally when you may feel like running again).
3. Use a fitness device where you can track general progress in amount of exercise.
4. End up somewhere you can buy a delicious coffee or something.
5. Instead of slowing down as soon as you feel like it, pick a tree a little way further down the road to make it to first.
6. If you aren’t feeling a song, aggressively skip it.

To be clear, I have not become so good at running as to give up walking for large parts of it. But going for a forty minute walk/run in which half of the time you are running and loving it seems like a huge improvement in my life.

I have no idea how well this is likely to work for other people. I might be unusually compelled by music or unusually horrified by using willpower. (I’m also aware there are many people who just naturally enjoy running.) If you try something like this, I’m curious to hear how it goes.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

Under present norms, if Alice associates with Bob, and Bob is considered objectionable in some way, Alice can be blamed for her association, even if there is no sign she was complicit in Bob’s sin.

An interesting upshot is that as soon as you become visibly involved with someone, you are slightly invested in their social standing—when their social stock price rises and falls, yours also wavers.

And if you are automatically bought into every person you notably interact with, this changes your payoffs. You have reason to forward the social success of those you see, and to suppress their public scrutiny.

And so the social world is flooded with mild pressure toward collusion at the expense of the public. By the time I’m near enough to Bob’s side to see his sins, I am a shareholder in their not being mentioned.

And so the people best positioned for calling out vice are auto-bought into it on the way there. Even though the very point of this practice of guilt-by-association seems to be to empower the calling-out of vice—raining punishment on not just the offender but those who wouldn’t shun them. This might be overall worth it (including for reasons not mentioned in this simple model), but it seems worth noticing this countervailing effect.

Prediction: If consortment was less endorsement—if it were commonplace to spend time with your enemies—then it would be more commonplace to publicly report small wrongs.