LessWrong 2.0 Reader

IMO, a lot of basic cruxes for differing views on the impact of AI in the 21st century ultimately depend on the question "Can AI be a substitute for the majority of economically relevant tasks a human does, and then become a substitute for any new industry?"

If the answer is yes, a lot of the more radical worldviews become on the table. If the answer is no, then I'd probably agree with a lot of the more moderate views on AI impacts.

Indeed, I'd argue AI as substitute for basically all human tasks that are relevant to the economy should replace the AGI notion often flown around, since it's more clear and provides less opportunities for motte and balieys and other bad arguments often thrown around.

note that in the setting of the second paragraph I wrote, every "firing pattern" will eventually emerge. You may have misunderstood my comment as taking the basic premise of your post as true and quibbling about the details, but I am skeptical about even the fundamental idea

Words "Pascal's mugging" are used when the change of success is extremely, almost infinitely small (but the action is defended by a supposed practically infinite reward). Founding a startup is not Pascal's mugging, even if most startups fail. Buying a lottery ticket is not Pascal's mugging, even if only one ticket in a thousand or in a million wins.

So basically, calling cryonics a Pascal's mugging means that you believe that the changes are much smaller than one in a million. Why would you believe that?

I think we had a survey here a few years ago, and the people who believe in cryonics give it like 15% chance on average; they just think it's worth it. As an analogy, imagine dying from some incurable disease, and then someone offers you a pill that has a 15% chance to save you. You probably would want to spend a non-zero amount of money on such pill.

Yes, cryonics requires some sci-fi levels of technology. However, the world around us already is a sci-fi world from the perspective of someone who lived 100 years ago, and a completely fairy tale from the perspective of someone who lived 200 or 500 years ago. It doesn't seem implausible to assume the same about the future in 100 or more years.

Reviving frozen people does not seem to contradict the science as we know it. It seems mostly like a technological problem, and the future will probably contain better technology.

On the other hand, some things such as the speed of light or the second law of thermodynamics seem like hard limits that even the future people will not be able to overcome. Which suggests that the decomposed bodies in the graves will probably not be revived, even using a sci-fi technology. (Maybe there is a chance that something like time travel will be invented, but that chance seems much smaller that the chance of fixing some frozen cells.)

I was under the impression that the biggest cost of grid electricity is stability, that is most of the time the price charged on consumer is much [i.e. about 2x] higher than the average cost on the grid market, but occasionally the grid market price would go up astronomically [ say 1000x] for brief periods of time [say hours], and the household consumer would be insulated from that. I thought that something similar happened in Texas when a cold snap happened?

if you are confident that your battery can hold you over those crunch period I assume you can just import grid energy at grid market price cheaper than the solar can provide [currently you can get paid 0.03/kwh for using electricty at peak solar here is Sydney]. I mean your solar, no matter how cheap, can not beat being given money. or so was the result last I did the math in Australia.

Actually I don't have the number now but the calculation I did suggested that running solar but using the grid as a battery is more cost effective than running your own battery, but my result may not generalise.

I am suprise you can get gas so cheap where you are, in Sydney the cost of electricity is similar to you 0.33/kwh but gas is 0.17/kwh. Have you check if you are receiving some subsidies for it?

In theory, the reward for doing good should be prestige. (Which in turn may translate to more tangible rewards.) But that mostly works in small groups and doesn't scale well.

Some aspect of this seems like a coordination problem. Whatever is your personal definition of "good", you would probably approve of a system that gives good people some kind of prestige, at least among other good people.

For example, people may disagree about whether veganism is good or bad, but from a perspective of a vegan, it would be nice if vegans could have some magical "vegan mark" that would be unfalsifiable and immediately visible to other vegans. That way, you could promote your values not just by practicing and preaching your values, but also by rewarding other people who practice the same values. (For example, if you sell some products, you could give discounts to vegans. If many people start doing that, veganism may become more popular. Perhaps some people would criticize that as doing things for the wrong reasons, but the animals probably wouldn't mind.) Similarly, effective altruists would approve of rewarding effective altruists, open source developers would approve of rewarding open source developers, etc.

These things exist to some degree (e.g. the open source developers can put a link to their projects in a profile), but often the existing solutions don't scale well. If you only have dozen effective altruists, they know each other by name, but if you get thousands, this stops working.

One problem here is the association of "good" with "unselfish" and "non-judgmental", which suggests that good people rewarding other good people is somehow... bad? In my opinion, we need to rethink that, because from the perspective of incentives and reinforcement, that is utterly stupid. The reason for these memes is that the past attempts to reward good often led to... people optimizing to be seen as good, rather than actually being good. That is a serious problem that I don't know how to solve; I just have a strong feeling that going to the opposite extreme is not the right answer.

personally, I found how Beth just kept saying 'not really' and not saying the actual physics very very annoying. 

Worldwide sentiment is pretty against immigration nowadays. Not that it will happen, but imagine if anti-immigration sentiment could be marshalled into a worldwide ban on AI development and deployment. That would be a strange, strange timeline.

Yup, I think research that studies the effect of recommendation algorithms on the brain, from various social media platforms and compares them to the effects of narcotics, would be extremely useful. 
I think we're really really lacking in decent legislation for recommendation algorithms atm - at the absolute bare minimum, platforms which use very addictive algorithms should have some kind of warning label informing users of the possibility of addiction - similarly to cigarettes - so that parents know clearly what might happen to their children. 
This is going to be even more important as things like character.ai grow. 

Nice; I think we're on the same page now. And fwiw, I agree (except that I think you need just a little more than just "fire at the same time"). But yes, if the artificial neurons affect the electromagnetic field in the same way -- so not only fire at the same time, but with precisely the same strength, and also have the same level of charge when they're not firing -- then this should preserve both communication via synaptic connections and gap junctions, as well as any potential non-local ephaptic coupling or brain wave shenanigans, and therefore, the change to the overall behavior of the brain will be so minimal that it shouldn't affect its consciousness. (And note that concerns the brain's entire behavior, i.e., the algorithm it's running, not just its input/output map.)

If you want to work more on this topic, I would highly recommend trying to write a proof for why simulations of humans on digital computers must also be conscious -- which, as I said in the other thread, I think is harder than the proof you've given here. Like, try to figure out exactly what assumptions you do and do not require -- both assumptions about how consciousness works and how the brain works -- and try to be as formal/exact as possible. I predict that actually trying to do this will lead to genuine insights at unexpected places. No one has ever attempted this on LW (or at least there were no attempts that are any good),^[1] so this would be a genuinely novel post.

If the cost of power generation were the main contributor to the overall cost of the system then I think you'd be right: economies of scale and the ability to generate in cheap places and sell in expensive places would do a lot to keep people on the grid. But looking at my bill (footnote [1]) the non-generation costs are high enough that if current trends continue that should flip; see my response to cata, above [LW(p) · GW(p)].