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topic: economics
idea: when building something with local negative externalities, have some mechanism to measure the externalities in terms of how much the surrounding property valuation changed (or are expected to change based, say, through a prediction market) and have the owner of that new structure pay the owners of the surrounding properties.
I wonder what fraction of people identify as "normies"
I wonder if most people have something niche they identify with and label people outside of that niche as "normies"
if so, then a term with a more objective perspective (and maybe better) would be non-<whatever your thing is>
like, athletic people could use "non-athletic" instead of "normies" for that class of people
just a loose thought, probably obvious
some tree species self-slected themselves for height (ie. there's no point in being a tall tree unless taller trees are blocking your sunlight)
humans were not the first species to self-select (although humans can now do it intentionally)
on human self-selection: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309096532_Survival_of_the_Friendliest_Homo_sapiens_Evolved_via_Selection_for_Prosociality
Board game: Medium
2 players reveal a card with a word, then they need to say a word based on that and get points if it's the same word (basically, with some more complexities).
Example at 1m20 here: https://youtu.be/yTCUIFCXRtw?si=fLvbeGiKwnaXecaX
I'm glad past Mati cast a wider net has the specifics for this year's Schelling day are different ☺️☺️
idk if the events are often going over time, but I might pass by now if it's still happening ☺️
I liked reading your article; very interesting! 🙏
One point I figured I should x-post with our DMs 😊 --> IMO, if one cares about future lives (as much as present ones) then the question stops really being about expected lives and starts just being about whether an action increases or decreases x-risks. I think a lot/all of the tech you described also have a probability of causing an x-risk if they're not implemented. I don't think we can really determine whether a probability of some of those x-risk is low enough in absolute terms as those probabilities would need to be unreasonably low, leading to full paralysis, and full paralysis could lead to x-risk. I think instead someone with those values (ie. caring about unborn people) should compare the probability of x-risks if a tech gets developed vs not developed (or whatever else is being evaluated). 🙂
new, great, complementary post: Critical Questions about Patient Care in Cryonics and Biostasis
I love this story so much, wow! It feels so incredibly tailored to me (because it is 😄). I value that a lot! It's a very scarce resource to begin with, but it hardly gets more tailored than that 😄
that's awesome; thanks for letting me know :)
i'd be curious to know how the first event went if you're inclined to share ☺
cars won't replace horses, horses with cars will
12 virtues of rationality: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DAFuuqpDcMztQGt7P/12-virtues-of-rationality-posters-icons?fbclid=IwAR2a8dbjJfl3hIpu0LTCttDzdraKcyyJ1eazs14Mr88hbXkuLjH4GPsWbyI
from ChatGPT
Sounds like a fun challenge! Here are 50 ways
to send something to the moon:
1. Catapult
2. Giant crossbow
3. Balloon with an endless supply of helium
4. A giant seesaw
5. Sky elevator
6. Beam of light (if the object can ride light)
7. Teleportation device
8. Moon magnet
9. Whale blowhole
10. Bubble with a perfect vacuum inside
11. Tornado creator
12. Inflatable space tube
13. A jump by the Hulk
14. Sonic boom from a supersonic plane
15. Floating on a cloud machine
16. Warp drive
17. Ice cannon
18. Rocket rollercoaster
19. A super springboard
20. Fling via a giant trebuchet
21. Antigravity boots
22. Pneumatic tube system
23. Ride on a meteor
24. Build stairs to the moon
25. Giant hamster wheel that propels forward
26. Human pyramid
27. Bounce house to the moon
28. A moon hook and pull system
29. Jetpack
30. Superfast elevator
31. A gigantic yo-yo system
32. Umbrella carried by solar winds
33. Giant's throw
34. Rocket sneakers
35. Bungee cord to the moon
36. Space swing set
37. Moon vacuum
38. Space surfboard
39. Massive drone
40. Launch via space trebuchet
41. Space pogo stick
42. Inflatable space mountain
43. Magnetic repulsion system
44. Time travel to when the moon was closer
45. Huge space slingshot
46. Giant space slinky
47. An extremely powerful fan
48. A chain of trampolines
49. Magic carpet
50. Use a giant's bow and arrow
topics: AI, sociology
thought/hypothesis: when tech is able to create brains/bodies as good or better than ours, it will change our perception of ourselves: we won't be in a separate magistra from our tools anymore. maybe people will see humans as less sacred, and value life less. if you're constantly using, modifying, copying, deleting, enslaving AI minds (even AI minds that have a human-like interface), maybe people will become more okay doing that to human minds as well.
(which seems like it would be harmful for the purpose of reducing death)
I'm surprised this has this many upvotes. You're taking the person that contributed the most to warning humanity about AI x-risks, and are saying what you think they could have done better in what comes across as blamy to me. If you're blaming zir, you should probably blame everyone. I'd much rather if you wrote what people could have done in general rather than targeting one of the best contributors.
ok that's fair yeah! thanks for your reply. I'm guessing a lot of those historical quotes are also taking out of context actually.
you know those lists about historical examples of notable people mistakenly saying that some tech will not be useful (for example)
Elon Musk saying that VR is just a TV on your nose will probably become one of those ^^
related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_panspermia
video on this that was posted ~15 hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Zghdqvxt4
idea: Stream all of humanity's information through the cosmos in hope an alien civ reconstruct us (and defends us against an Earth-originating maligned ASI)
I guess finding intelligent ETs would help with that as we could stream in a specific direction instead of having to broadcast the signal broadly
It could be that maligned alien ASIs would mostly ignore our information (or at least not use it to like torture us) whereas friendly align ASI would use it beneficially 🤷♀️
there remains a credible possibility that grabby aliens would benefit by sending a message that was carefully designed to only be detectable by civilizations at a certain level of technological development
oh wow, after reading this, I came up with the same explanation you wrote in the following 2 paragraphs just before reading them 😄
I really liked the story, and love that you made a video version! I think it was really well made!
I'm impressed by the AI voice!
I just suggested to AI Impacts to add this story to their story repository.
I recommend / suggest considering adding "Agentic Mess (A Failure Story)" in your list.
It was developed at the 8th AI Safety Camp in 2023.
You can see the text-version here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LyJAFBuuEfd4kxgsw/agentic-mess-a-failure-story
You can see the video-version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6edrFdkCEUE
It starts pretty close to our current AI reality and explores the potentiality of AI agents replicating and trying to improve in order to achieve their goal, and, as a result, propagating like a virus. The story explores the selection pressure that would bring and the results that would have.
Thanks for your input :)
idk what CLARITY is, but yeah, I'd love to see room temperature preservation protocols developed for human brain preservation. it also has the possibility of significantly reducing cost given a significant fraction of the cost goes towards paying for indefinite liquid nitrogen refills
Nectome is working on aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation for humans which I think might provide some of those benefits (?) OregonCryo is also trying to do / doing something like that.
i know another researcher working on this which could probably use funding in the near future. if any of you know someone that might be interested in funding this, please lmk so I can put you in touch. i think this is one of the top opportunities for improving cryonics robustness and adoption (and maybe quality)
topic: intellectual discussion, ML tool, AI x-risks
Idea: Have a therapist present during intellectual debate to notice triggers, and help defuse them. Triggers activate a politics mindset where the goal becomes focused on status/self-preservation/appearances/looking smart/making the other person look stupid/etc. which makes it hard to think clearly.
Two people I follow will soon have a debate on AI x-risks which made me think of that. I can't really propose that intervention though because it will likely be perceived and responded as if it was a political move itself.
Another idea I had recently, also based on one of those people, was to develop a neural network helping us notice when we were activated in that way so we became aware of it and helped defuse it. AI is too important for our egos to get in the way (but it's easier said than done).
x-post Facebook
Topics: cause prioritization; metaphor
note I took on 2022-08-01; I don't remember what I had in mind, but I feel like it can apply to various things
from an utilitarian point of view though, i think this is almost like arguing whether dying with a red or blue shirt is better; while there might be an answer, i think it's missing the point, and we should focus on reducing risks of astronomical disasters
Topics: AI, forecasting, privacy
I wonder how much of a signature we leave in our writings. Like, how hard would it be for an AI to be rather confident I wrote this text? (say if it was trained on LessWrong writings, or all public writings, or maybe even private writings) What if I ask someone else to write an idea for me--how helpful is it in obfuscating the source?
Topic: AI strategy (policies, malicious use of AI, AGI misalignment)
Epistemic status: simplistic; simplified line of reasoning; thinking out loud; a proposed frame
A significant "warning shot" from a sovereign misaligned AI doesn't seem likely to me because a human-level (and plausibly a subhuman-level) intelligence can both 1) learn deception, yet 2) can't (generally) do a lot of damage (i.e. perceptible for humanity). So the last "warning shot" before AI learns deception won't be very big (if even really notable at all), and then a misaligned agent would hide (its power and/or intentions) until it's confident it can overpower humanity (because it's easy to gain power that way)--at which point it would cause an omnicide. An exception to that is if an AI thinks other AIs are hiding in the world, then it might want to take a higher risk to overpower humanity before it's confident it can do so because it's concerned another AI will do so first otherwise. I'm not very hopeful this would give us a good warning shot though because I think multiple such AIs trying to overpower humanity would likely be too damaging for us to regroup in time.
However, it seems much more plausible to me that (non-agentic) AI tools would be used maliciously, which could lead the government to highly regulate AIs. Those regulations (ex.: nationalizing AI) preventing malicious uses could also potentially help with negligent uses. Assuming a negligent use (i.e. resulting in AGI misalignment) is much more likely to cause an existential catastrophe than a malicious use of AI, and that regulations against malicious uses are more memetically fit, then the ideal regulations to advocate for might be those that are good at preventing both malicious uses and the negligent creation of a misaligned AGI.
note to self: not posted on Facebook (yet)
Wonderful, thank you! 🙏
I'm 1h20 north of Georgia. I don't think I'll make it this time, but I'd love to connect with people in Georgia, so feel free to reach out ☺
ah, yeah that's true, I did know that actually. What some of the people I know want though is to be thawed after a certain condition rather than simply not being reanimated, and ir I remember correctly, when I asked Alcor, they said they couldn't do that. Conditions included AI progress and family not being preserved (or somethings along those lines)
wow, i like the creativity!
Right, that one is part of "Easier emergency relocation" (I just edited the summary to add it, but it's in the post), but maybe that legal status also has more advantages than just transport.
All the advantages listed in the post are advantages compared to preserving the skull along with the brain.
Advantages of leaving the brain in the skull:
- Additional protection provided by the skull
- Avoid delicate procedure of removing the brain
The post links to this Isolation of the Brain for Human Cryopreservation.
I was told by someone performing cryopreservations that you can remove the brain and just leave a scar at the top of the forehead hidden by hair.
I only read the title, but wanted to record here that I know a few people that would sign up if they could do that.
topic: AI alignment, video game | status: idea
Acknowledgement: Inspired from an idea I heard from Eliezer in zir podcast with Lex Friedman and the game Detroit: Become Human.
Video game where you're in an alternate universe where aliens create an artificial intelligence that's a human. The human has various properties typical of AI, such has running way faster than the aliens in that world and being able to duplicate themselves. The goal of the human is to take over the world to stop some atrocity happening in that world. The aliens are trying to stop the human from taking over the world.
Thanks for the tip! I guess I'm also interested in collecting such games more generally. I'd rather cast my net wider. ☺
Hmmm. I guess the ideal for my immediate desire would be a 2-3 player game that takes less than 30 minutes to play. Goal is just to do something fun, and I find it extra-fun to follow the Schelling Day theme ^^
Nicholas' doc on Cyborgism
do you have a link?
I'd be interested in being added to the Discord
Update: 18% <2033 18% 2033-2043 18% 2043-2053 18% 2050-2070 28% 2070+ or won't happen
see more details on my shortform: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DLepxRkACCu8SGqmT/mati_roy-s-shortform?commentId=KjxnsyB7EqdZAuLri
✨ topic: AI timelines
Note: I'm not explaining my reasoning in this post, just recording my predictions and sharing how I feel.
I'll sound like a boring cliche at this point, but I just wanted to say it publicly: my AGI timelines have shorten earlier this year.
Without thinking about too much about quantifying my probabilities, I'd say the probabilities that we'll get AGI or AI strong enough to prevent AGI (including through omnicide) are:
- 18% <2033
- 18% 2033-2043
- 18% 2043-2053
- 18% 2050-2070
- 28% 2070+ or won't happen
But at this point I feel like not much would surprise me in terms of short timelines. Transformative AI seems really close. Short timelines and AI x-risk concerns are common among people working in AI and among people trying to predict the development of this tech. It's the first time I've been feeling sick to my stomach when thinking about AI timelines. First time that my mind is as focused emotionally on the threat, simulating how the last moments before an AI omnicide would look like.
What fraction of the world would be concerned about AI x-risk 1 second before an AI omnicide? Plausibly very low.
- Will people see their death coming? For example, because a drone breaks their house window just before shooting them in the head. And if so, will people be able to say "Ah, Mati was right" just before they die or will they just think it's a terrorist attack or something like that? I imagine losing access to Internet and cellphone communication, not thinking much of it, while a drone is on its journey to kill me.
- Before AI overpowers humanity, will people think that I was wrong because AI is actually providing a crazy amount of wealth? (despite me already thinking this)
- Will I have time to post my next AI x-risk fiction story before AI kills us all? I better get to it.
To be clear, this fear is not at all debilitating or otherwise pathological.
(I know some of those thoughts are sily; I'm obviously predominantly concerned about omnicide, not about publishing my fiction or being acknowledged)
I'm feeling wanting and finding myself simplifying my life, doing things faster, and focusing even more on AI. (I still care and support cryonics and cause areas adjacent to AI like genetic engineering.)
In a few years, I might live in a constant state of thinking I could drop dead at any time from an AGI.
I used to think the most likely cause of my death would be an insufficiently good cryopreservation, but now I think it's misaligned AGI. It seems likely to me that most people alive today will die from an AI omnicide.
topic: genetic engineering
'Revolutionary': Scientists create mice with two fathers
(I just read the title)
topic: genetic engineering
'Revolutionary': Scientists create mice with two fathers
(I just read the title)
topic: AI
Lex Fridman:
I'm doing podcast with Sam Altman (@sama), CEO of OpenAI next week, about GPT-4, ChatGPT, and AI in general. Let me know if you have any questions/topic suggestions.
PS: I'll be in SF area next week. Let me know if there are other folks I should talk to, on and off the mic.
Damn, that's something I had been worrying about recently.
Eliezer said:
I don't think people realize what a big deal it is that Stanford retrained a LLaMA model, into an instruction-following form, by cheaply fine-tuning it on inputs and outputs from text-davinci-003.
It means: If you allow any sufficiently wide-ranging access to your AI model, even by paid API, you're giving away your business crown jewels to competitors that can then nearly-clone your model without all the hard work you did to build up your own fine-tuning dataset. If you successfully enforce a restriction against commercializing an imitation trained on your I/O - a legal prospect that's never been tested, at this point - that means the competing checkpoints go up on bittorrent.
I'm not sure I can convey how much this is a brand new idiom of AI as a technology. Let's put it this way:
If you put a lot of work into tweaking the mask of the shoggoth, but then expose your masked shoggoth's API - or possibly just let anyone build up a big-enough database of Qs and As from your shoggoth - then anybody who's brute-forced a core unmasked shoggoth can gesture to your shoggoth and say to their shoggoth "look like that one", and poof you no longer have a competitive moat.
It's like the thing where if you let an unscrupulous potential competitor get a glimpse of your factory floor, they'll suddenly start producing a similar good - except that they just need a glimpse of the inputs and outputs of your factory. Because the kind of good you're producing is a kind of pseudointelligent gloop that gets sculpted; and it costs money and a simple process to produce the gloop, and separately more money and a complicated process to sculpt the gloop; but the raw gloop has enough pseudointelligence that it can stare at other gloop and imitate it.
In other words: The AI companies that make profits will be ones that either have a competitive moat not based on the capabilities of their model, OR those which don't expose the underlying inputs and outputs of their model to customers, OR can successfully sue any competitor that engages in shoggoth mask cloning.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1635577836525469697
Interesting video on the topic: The Model That Changes Everything: Alpaca Breakthrough (ft. Apple's LLM, BritGPT, Ernie and AlexaTM)
topic: lifelogging as life extension
pivotal acts might require destroying a lot of hardware (ex.: through EMPs); ideally this would be targeted destruction of hardware, but increases my probability that worlds in which lifelogging as life extension is useful are more likely to require EMP-proof lifelogging
Makes sense
i just read the beginning
I thought Alice wanted bananas for a change, but they weren't ready yet, so ze went for the Cheerios :p
Idea for a line of thinking: What if as a result of automation we could use the ~entire human population to control AI — any way we could meaningfully organize this large workforce towards that goal?
Oh, a lot of what I wrote is for 'cinematic' effect and symbolism. Maybe tagging it as "Rationalist fic" made it seems like this was a prediction; I changed it for just "fiction" and added a note.
But I appreciate your input/perspective!