I'm not an authority on this but it does seem to resonate with people on Tildes or Reddit whenever I share this type of stuff. It's been a while so I may as well. I am a man who grew up with a...
Exemplary
I'm not an authority on this but it does seem to resonate with people on Tildes or Reddit whenever I share this type of stuff. It's been a while so I may as well.
I am a man who grew up with a very unhealthy mindset. I'll spare you the details but I've been through some things and they did a number on me. I spent my first 23 years on Earth being very anxious, needy, generally unhappy and pessimistic. I didn't treat people very well and I felt hopeless much of the time. "A sense of impending doom" would be the phrase I would use to describe how I often felt. I'm 31 now and I'm very content, even on tough days. I finally feel in control of something...myself.
My third attempt at rehab (the one that stuck) really taught me a lot. It was like I finally understood that I couldn't go around feeling that way and that I was responsible for myself, my feelings, my experiences, and my mindset no matter what happened in the world around me.
I don't know how to form all of these into a cohesive thesis in the short time I have, so instead I'm going to share a short smattering of tidbits and quotes that I think may help people understand where I am today:
It's ironic, but as an atheist my favorite thing is the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Abraham Lincoln was afraid of death. I always think of him. He was the most human president we have ever had in my opinion and I really respect him. The entire country was in shambles and he stuck it out somehow. I mean, if he had lost, he'd have been hanged and the country really would have gone down a dark, dark path. I don't know why, but his fear of death completely erased mine. I don't think we "go" anywhere when we die, but I know that whatever happens, everyone has been through it, including Abe Lincoln. I'm just going wherever he went. I'm not alone in whatever happens. If Honest Abe can face the destruction of our nation and stay strong, so can I. He showed me in his diaries that he was truly human just like me.
"Find joy in the little things." When we look back at old photos, we never, ever remember the mortgage payment or the stress we were going through at the time. We look back and realize how nice our smile looked, how youthful our friends were, how beautiful the weather was, or how cozy our grandmother's kitchen was. At any given time, you might have a handful of bad things going on in your life, true. You might even have ten things going terribly on a personal or societal level. But you have quadrillions of things going right. You don't have cancer, or you do but you don't have canker sores today, you're not bald yet, or you're bald but you have your teeth, your best friend is alive, you own a Playstation and can relax later, you had a good lunch, your house is warm, your neighbor shoveled your driveway, etc. etc. etc. You can find endless joy with the right perspective. When you don't, you almost always regret it later when you realize what you weren't appreciating. But don't regret it - just start now. You still have an infinite amount of good things that are and/or bad things that aren't.
Read A Man's Search for Meaning. They told jokes in concentration camps. The ones who stopped joking and smiling were the ones who died soon from illness. They had given up. They had enough. But you know what? So what? The worst that can happen, when it's all said and done, is that you die. We all die. Thankfully, we aren't immortal, so even in the worst possible cases of abuse and torture, there is an escape hatch that is absolutely promised to each and every one of us. If they can laugh in concentration camps, we can find joy in our lives too.
People have been through worse. People still had children and lived their lives. Until recently, wars, famine, starvation, beatings, poverty, oppression, disease, and other unimaginable forms of suffering were normal. Modern medicine just happened, like yesterday, essentially. People still lived their lives. We are not alone in just living our lives during times of turmoil. In fact, we may have been more alone living in immense wealth, comfort, and peace. Not only because it's somewhat rare in history, but also because it literally has caused us to be apart from one another. I don't know what's coming, but I know people will come together when it happens. It's not going to be "good" but there will be a lot of people who will reflect back and say they had some of the best times of their lives (either in spite of this crisis or because of it).
Breathe, focus on the little things, help other people, live your life. The world will be fine with or without America. It'll be fine with or without people even. Just enjoy the now.
Plenty of people go through world-ending events even when the world is totally at peace and everyone is prospering. People get cancer at 13, people die in car crashes, etc. For black folks, gays, etc., America was mostly not great no matter how powerful we were. This might seem shocking to most of us middle class whites, but people have been going through this the entire time the rest of us were enjoying our high. We just may be joining them soon. It's okay.
I won't deny how shitty most of this is. We should obviously fight to make it better. But don't feel doom. Feel empowered. You have the power to change this. If that fails, you still have the power to live a happy life. Nobody can EVER change what you have in your mind or your heart, as long as you don't let them. You have complete and total ownership of the private garden that is your mind.
I ALSO just finished reading a mans search for meaning! My takeaway was, even a man with no agency and no future in a concentration camp can find purpose and make up a future for himself. If he...
I ALSO just finished reading a mans search for meaning!
My takeaway was, even a man with no agency and no future in a concentration camp can find purpose and make up a future for himself. If he can, I can.
I grew up with doom in the Reagan era. There was a far-greater-than-trivial chance that a nuclear bomb exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would not merely kill me, but extinguish all...
Exemplary
I grew up with doom in the Reagan era. There was a far-greater-than-trivial chance that a nuclear bomb exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would not merely kill me, but extinguish all life on Earth more complicated than algae and cockroaches.
The possibility of annihilation of nearly all living things, conscious or not, was a crushing existential weight that tainted all my experiences, plans, relationships, and hopes. I decided not to have children, to exist in the present, to live each day as if it was the last. On the positive side, I treasured every moment in nature, treated my friends and strangers as if each encounter could be a goodbye.
But the negative impacts...
Why not have meaningless sex with near strangers and ghost them afterwards?
Why stay with a job or career or educational plan that isn't quickly gratifying?
What's the point of saving money?
Who needs therapy when you could be dead tomorrow?
Nihilism forever, and perpetual dismal suicide planning...
Waking up one day and wondering, "It's not doom yet, who would I be if doom doesn't actually happen?"
At some point, doom got boring. Acting on the prospect of living with a more realistic probability of life vs. doom opened up a sense of possibility and curiosity that made life lighter. Living, and living well, also satisfied the vengeful urge to spite the doom-seeking fuckers.
It's not complicated, it's a process of releasing the pervasive anxieties about the uncontrollable, and maintaining emotional life within the boundaries of what's individually controllable.
This seems similar to the change of heart I went through when I realized that I’ll probably live to be over 30 years old. I changed my entire life, my career, my education, even my sexual...
This seems similar to the change of heart I went through when I realized that I’ll probably live to be over 30 years old.
I changed my entire life, my career, my education, even my sexual orientation lol cause why spend a long life with someone I don’t truly love.
I wonder why some people took the Cold War more seriously than others? It was in the news and I remember movies like The Day After, but I don't remember it changing my plans at all. There are many...
I wonder why some people took the Cold War more seriously than others? It was in the news and I remember movies like The Day After, but I don't remember it changing my plans at all. There are many other things you could theoretically die of.
But I agree that, having been through that, news about possible impending doom seems like nothing new - it's been true since before any of us were born.
I had insider information from people in the business of nuclear warfare and defense, including family members. It was literally dinner table conversation, with no consideration for the maturity...
I had insider information from people in the business of nuclear warfare and defense, including family members. It was literally dinner table conversation, with no consideration for the maturity of the participants. It may have made more of an impression on me than ordinary media exposure would otherwise have caused.
And frankly, I consider that nuclear/chemical/biological warfare risks have increased in the presence of AI modeling and augmentation, but don't take self-directed AGI risks seriously at this time.
I really dislike LessWrong for reasons I explained at length in a series of comments on a post from February. If you’re curious, you can find my comments by starting here and then looking at the...
I really dislike LessWrong for reasons I explained at length in a series of comments on a post from February. If you’re curious, you can find my comments by starting here and then looking at the replies down the chain.
For those who don’t know, LessWrong is an online forum that has users from around the world, but is also closely connected to an IRL community of people in the San Francisco Bay Area who self-identify as “rationalists”. Rationalists have one primary fixation above all else, which is artificial general intelligence (AGI), and, more specifically, the fear that it will kill all humans sometime in the near future. That’s the “doom” that this LessWrong post is about.
On the topic of AGI, I wrote a post here, in which I expressed frustration at the polarized discourse on AGI and discussed how the conversation could potentially be refined by focusing on better benchmarks for AI performance.
I’ll say a little more on the topic of AGI.
I think there are a number of bad reasons to reject the idea of AGI, such as:
dualism, the idea that the mind is non-physical or supernatural
mysterianism, the idea that the mind can never be understood by science
overly simple or dismissive misunderstandings of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning
the belief that AI research will run out of funding
That said, I also think there are a number of bad reasons to believe that AGI will be created soon:
being overly impressed with ChatGPT and insufficiently critical of its failures to produce intelligent behaviour
a belief that the intelligence of AI systems will rapidly, exponentially increase without plateauing, despite serious empirical and theoretical problems with this idea (such as economic data failing to support that this has been happening so far)
a reliance on poor benchmarks that don’t really measure intelligence
knee-jerk dismissal of well-qualified critics like Yann LeCun and François Chollet
over-reliance on the opinions of other people about AGI, without enough examination of why they hold those opinions (e.g. how much is it circular? How much of those other people’s opinions is based on other people’s opinions?)
It is difficult to find nuanced discussion of AGI online lately because most of the discussion I see is either people taking hardline anti-AI positions (e.g. it’s all just a scam) or people with an extreme, eschatological belief in near-term AGI.
I highly doubt that we will see AGI within ten years. Within a hundred years? Possibly. But there’s a lot of irreducible uncertainty and there’s no way we can really know right now.
Yeah, I don’t consider myself a part of the rationalist community, but I do work with AI for a living. Its already disrupting our society, just not in the way that the rationalist community...
Yeah, I don’t consider myself a part of the rationalist community, but I do work with AI for a living.
Its already disrupting our society, just not in the way that the rationalist community feared.
I can already do more work in less time, allowing my employers to extract more wealth from my labor than they did before. Companies are already using AI as an excuse to lay off workers, purposely understaff teams, and kill projects. You get the point. Its “doomful”
How do you use AI in your work? How does it help you accomplish more in less time? I haven’t seen much evidence that AI has been having an effect on the macroeconomy, on (un)employment, or the...
How do you use AI in your work? How does it help you accomplish more in less time?
I haven’t seen much evidence that AI has been having an effect on the macroeconomy, on (un)employment, or the productivity of individual companies. I am open to seeing statistics that show an impact, though.
I code way faster. Ive been writing code for a good ten years now, so I fall into that category of people who knows design and architecture and often forgets the best way to write some specific...
I code way faster.
Ive been writing code for a good ten years now, so I fall into that category of people who knows design and architecture and often forgets the best way to write some specific thing in whatever language.
So, instead of Googling “best way to parse nested json in python” I throw that into chatgpt and get basically what used to be the top Google result before they sold out to advertisers.
But thats not all!
I can get near perfect regex every time.
I can get it to write unit tests for me.
I can bounce ideas off of it and get responses based on what everyone else is doing (should I write my own parser for this api or is there a library already?)
Best libraries for blah
No actually I need the library to do this too
Does whatever library also have blah feature?
I haven’t had to actually read open source documentation in a long while.
Thanks for explaining that. This is consistent from what I’ve heard from other people who do coding. Basically, it streamlines the process of looking things up on Stack Overflow (or forums or...
Thanks for explaining that. This is consistent from what I’ve heard from other people who do coding.
Basically, it streamlines the process of looking things up on Stack Overflow (or forums or documentation or wherever) and copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow.
The LLM isn’t being creative or solving novel problems (except maybe to a minimal degree), but using existing knowledge to bring speed, ease, and convenience to the coder.
Yes exactly! It also helps people learn to code because it can answer questions faster. unfortunately it can also just write the code for you so lots of students mindlessly use that functionality...
Yes exactly!
It also helps people learn to code because it can answer questions faster.
unfortunately it can also just write the code for you so lots of students mindlessly use that functionality and end up sticking themselves in tutorial land forever cause they’re not learning.
The bar for entry level SWE is already months beyond what college teaches you, graduates are having to fill the gap themselves while they job hunt. So people using chat gpt to basically cheat on their assignments are the ones that end up in r/cscareerquestions wondering why no one will hire them.
At this point I'm inclined to think of LessWrong and the "rationalists" as some kind of collaborative mixed-media sci-fi project, whether they themselves are aware of it or not. It seems obvious...
At this point I'm inclined to think of LessWrong and the "rationalists" as some kind of collaborative mixed-media sci-fi project, whether they themselves are aware of it or not. It seems obvious to me though why Eliezer Yudkowsky would feel threatened by something that so far has shown so much promise in the areas of spitting out pages worth of nonsense in no time.
LessWrong is on of my favorite rationalist bloggers, this is a really great post basically telling us how they are processing all of the hard feelings they’re having about the collapse of the...
LessWrong is on of my favorite rationalist bloggers, this is a really great post basically telling us how they are processing all of the hard feelings they’re having about the collapse of the United States. Many of us aren’t sure how to start digesting some of this, so this blog is a good start.
LessWrong is an Internet forum and the person who wrote this post has username Rudy. It looks like they’ve only posted three articles? You shouldn’t assume they speak for anyone else who posts on...
LessWrong is an Internet forum and the person who wrote this post has username Rudy. It looks like they’ve only posted three articles? You shouldn’t assume they speak for anyone else who posts on the LessWrong forum.
They are likely not talking about the collapse of the US in particular, but rather, about the possibility that AI takes off and dooms all of humanity. People have different beliefs about what they call p(doom), that is, the probability that humanity is doomed.
Maybe current events are putting people in a particularly doomy mood, but I really don't think that's what's going on here. Trade wars and democratic backsliding seem too mundane to be significant...
basically telling us how they are processing all of the hard feelings they’re having about the collapse of the United States
Maybe current events are putting people in a particularly doomy mood, but I really don't think that's what's going on here. Trade wars and democratic backsliding seem too mundane to be significant LessWrong concerns. And indeed, from the footnotes and comments, the "doom" under discussion seems to be an imminent AI apocalypse.
If you were already worried about AI escape velocity then the US government showing it is being run by the most incompetent and corrupt people around (who literally used ChatGPT to come up with...
If you were already worried about AI escape velocity then the US government showing it is being run by the most incompetent and corrupt people around (who literally used ChatGPT to come up with their tariff formula against the unanimous opposition from voters, experts, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley) that means if AI doom happens in the next 4 years, the US government is in no way going to be situated to handle it.
Well, I think the entire point of AI doom is that, once you get there, it's too late to "handle it". But, certainly, you might think that the incompetence of the Trump admin makes them...
if AI doom happens in the next 4 years, the US government is in no way going to be situated to handle it.
Well, I think the entire point of AI doom is that, once you get there, it's too late to "handle it". But, certainly, you might think that the incompetence of the Trump admin makes them ill-positioned to prevent AI doom.
Actually, though, I think the real concern among people who think about this sort of thing is that the Trump admin is much more accelerationist than the Biden admin was, and they're much less concerned with safety oversight.
You are right. Here’s a comment from the Effective Altruism Forum, which has a lot of overlap with the LessWrong forum. There is overlap in terms of the user base, posts (people cross-post to...
Trade wars and democratic backsliding seem too mundane to be significant LessWrong concerns.
You are right.
Here’s a comment from the Effective Altruism Forum, which has a lot of overlap with the LessWrong forum. There is overlap in terms of the user base, posts (people cross-post to both, and there’s even a feature built-in to both forums to make this easier), and discussion topics (particularly AGI). The forums also share the same code base.
This comment is about Daniela Amodei, the President of the AI company Anthropic. The context is a discussion about whether it’s appropriate to look up information on the personal website she created for her wedding and publicly discuss it.
…I will just say that by the "level of influence" metric, Daniela shoots it out of the park compared to Donald Trump. I think it is entirely uncontroversial and perhaps an understatement to claim the world as a whole and EA [effective altruism] in particular has a right to know & discuss pretty much every fact about the personal, professional, social, and philosophical lives of the group of people who, by their own admission, are literally creating God. And are likely to be elevated to a permanent place of power & control over the universe for all of eternity.
Such a position should not be a pleasurable job with no repercussions on the level of privacy or degree of public scrutiny on your personal life. If you are among this group, and this level of scrutiny disturbs you, perhaps you shouldn't be trying to "reshape the lightcone without public consent" or knowledge.
Note that 4 people have voted “agree” (that’s what the check mark symbol means).
This helps put into perspective what people in this community are worrying about right now.
This is one of those things that my mind “plays with” instead of actually having anxiety about it. I just really think that creating an infinite entity would require infinite resources of which...
This is one of those things that my mind “plays with” instead of actually having anxiety about it.
I just really think that creating an infinite entity would require infinite resources of which exist only finitely in this reality.
Whats happening in the united states is connected to whats happening as AI technology advances. We already know people are using it to change votes on social media. But, yeah, for every doom...
Whats happening in the united states is connected to whats happening as AI technology advances. We already know people are using it to change votes on social media.
But, yeah, for every doom scenario theres always a worse one. I think this article helps with any of them, whatever they may be.
I'm not an authority on this but it does seem to resonate with people on Tildes or Reddit whenever I share this type of stuff. It's been a while so I may as well.
I am a man who grew up with a very unhealthy mindset. I'll spare you the details but I've been through some things and they did a number on me. I spent my first 23 years on Earth being very anxious, needy, generally unhappy and pessimistic. I didn't treat people very well and I felt hopeless much of the time. "A sense of impending doom" would be the phrase I would use to describe how I often felt. I'm 31 now and I'm very content, even on tough days. I finally feel in control of something...myself.
My third attempt at rehab (the one that stuck) really taught me a lot. It was like I finally understood that I couldn't go around feeling that way and that I was responsible for myself, my feelings, my experiences, and my mindset no matter what happened in the world around me.
I don't know how to form all of these into a cohesive thesis in the short time I have, so instead I'm going to share a short smattering of tidbits and quotes that I think may help people understand where I am today:
It's ironic, but as an atheist my favorite thing is the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Abraham Lincoln was afraid of death. I always think of him. He was the most human president we have ever had in my opinion and I really respect him. The entire country was in shambles and he stuck it out somehow. I mean, if he had lost, he'd have been hanged and the country really would have gone down a dark, dark path. I don't know why, but his fear of death completely erased mine. I don't think we "go" anywhere when we die, but I know that whatever happens, everyone has been through it, including Abe Lincoln. I'm just going wherever he went. I'm not alone in whatever happens. If Honest Abe can face the destruction of our nation and stay strong, so can I. He showed me in his diaries that he was truly human just like me.
"Find joy in the little things." When we look back at old photos, we never, ever remember the mortgage payment or the stress we were going through at the time. We look back and realize how nice our smile looked, how youthful our friends were, how beautiful the weather was, or how cozy our grandmother's kitchen was. At any given time, you might have a handful of bad things going on in your life, true. You might even have ten things going terribly on a personal or societal level. But you have quadrillions of things going right. You don't have cancer, or you do but you don't have canker sores today, you're not bald yet, or you're bald but you have your teeth, your best friend is alive, you own a Playstation and can relax later, you had a good lunch, your house is warm, your neighbor shoveled your driveway, etc. etc. etc. You can find endless joy with the right perspective. When you don't, you almost always regret it later when you realize what you weren't appreciating. But don't regret it - just start now. You still have an infinite amount of good things that are and/or bad things that aren't.
Read A Man's Search for Meaning. They told jokes in concentration camps. The ones who stopped joking and smiling were the ones who died soon from illness. They had given up. They had enough. But you know what? So what? The worst that can happen, when it's all said and done, is that you die. We all die. Thankfully, we aren't immortal, so even in the worst possible cases of abuse and torture, there is an escape hatch that is absolutely promised to each and every one of us. If they can laugh in concentration camps, we can find joy in our lives too.
People have been through worse. People still had children and lived their lives. Until recently, wars, famine, starvation, beatings, poverty, oppression, disease, and other unimaginable forms of suffering were normal. Modern medicine just happened, like yesterday, essentially. People still lived their lives. We are not alone in just living our lives during times of turmoil. In fact, we may have been more alone living in immense wealth, comfort, and peace. Not only because it's somewhat rare in history, but also because it literally has caused us to be apart from one another. I don't know what's coming, but I know people will come together when it happens. It's not going to be "good" but there will be a lot of people who will reflect back and say they had some of the best times of their lives (either in spite of this crisis or because of it).
Breathe, focus on the little things, help other people, live your life. The world will be fine with or without America. It'll be fine with or without people even. Just enjoy the now.
Plenty of people go through world-ending events even when the world is totally at peace and everyone is prospering. People get cancer at 13, people die in car crashes, etc. For black folks, gays, etc., America was mostly not great no matter how powerful we were. This might seem shocking to most of us middle class whites, but people have been going through this the entire time the rest of us were enjoying our high. We just may be joining them soon. It's okay.
I won't deny how shitty most of this is. We should obviously fight to make it better. But don't feel doom. Feel empowered. You have the power to change this. If that fails, you still have the power to live a happy life. Nobody can EVER change what you have in your mind or your heart, as long as you don't let them. You have complete and total ownership of the private garden that is your mind.
I ALSO just finished reading a mans search for meaning!
My takeaway was, even a man with no agency and no future in a concentration camp can find purpose and make up a future for himself. If he can, I can.
It's the book that I buy for everyone I care about. Reading it is the best medicine when we're confronted with tragedy.
I grew up with doom in the Reagan era. There was a far-greater-than-trivial chance that a nuclear bomb exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would not merely kill me, but extinguish all life on Earth more complicated than algae and cockroaches.
The possibility of annihilation of nearly all living things, conscious or not, was a crushing existential weight that tainted all my experiences, plans, relationships, and hopes. I decided not to have children, to exist in the present, to live each day as if it was the last. On the positive side, I treasured every moment in nature, treated my friends and strangers as if each encounter could be a goodbye.
But the negative impacts...
At some point, doom got boring. Acting on the prospect of living with a more realistic probability of life vs. doom opened up a sense of possibility and curiosity that made life lighter. Living, and living well, also satisfied the vengeful urge to spite the doom-seeking fuckers.
It's not complicated, it's a process of releasing the pervasive anxieties about the uncontrollable, and maintaining emotional life within the boundaries of what's individually controllable.
This seems similar to the change of heart I went through when I realized that I’ll probably live to be over 30 years old.
I changed my entire life, my career, my education, even my sexual orientation lol cause why spend a long life with someone I don’t truly love.
Life is better with long term goals imo
I wonder why some people took the Cold War more seriously than others? It was in the news and I remember movies like The Day After, but I don't remember it changing my plans at all. There are many other things you could theoretically die of.
But I agree that, having been through that, news about possible impending doom seems like nothing new - it's been true since before any of us were born.
I had insider information from people in the business of nuclear warfare and defense, including family members. It was literally dinner table conversation, with no consideration for the maturity of the participants. It may have made more of an impression on me than ordinary media exposure would otherwise have caused.
And frankly, I consider that nuclear/chemical/biological warfare risks have increased in the presence of AI modeling and augmentation, but don't take self-directed AGI risks seriously at this time.
I really dislike LessWrong for reasons I explained at length in a series of comments on a post from February. If you’re curious, you can find my comments by starting here and then looking at the replies down the chain.
For those who don’t know, LessWrong is an online forum that has users from around the world, but is also closely connected to an IRL community of people in the San Francisco Bay Area who self-identify as “rationalists”. Rationalists have one primary fixation above all else, which is artificial general intelligence (AGI), and, more specifically, the fear that it will kill all humans sometime in the near future. That’s the “doom” that this LessWrong post is about.
On the topic of AGI, I wrote a post here, in which I expressed frustration at the polarized discourse on AGI and discussed how the conversation could potentially be refined by focusing on better benchmarks for AI performance.
I’ll say a little more on the topic of AGI.
I think there are a number of bad reasons to reject the idea of AGI, such as:
dualism, the idea that the mind is non-physical or supernatural
mysterianism, the idea that the mind can never be understood by science
overly simple or dismissive misunderstandings of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning
the belief that AI research will run out of funding
That said, I also think there are a number of bad reasons to believe that AGI will be created soon:
being overly impressed with ChatGPT and insufficiently critical of its failures to produce intelligent behaviour
a belief that the intelligence of AI systems will rapidly, exponentially increase without plateauing, despite serious empirical and theoretical problems with this idea (such as economic data failing to support that this has been happening so far)
a reliance on poor benchmarks that don’t really measure intelligence
knee-jerk dismissal of well-qualified critics like Yann LeCun and François Chollet
over-reliance on the opinions of other people about AGI, without enough examination of why they hold those opinions (e.g. how much is it circular? How much of those other people’s opinions is based on other people’s opinions?)
It is difficult to find nuanced discussion of AGI online lately because most of the discussion I see is either people taking hardline anti-AI positions (e.g. it’s all just a scam) or people with an extreme, eschatological belief in near-term AGI.
I highly doubt that we will see AGI within ten years. Within a hundred years? Possibly. But there’s a lot of irreducible uncertainty and there’s no way we can really know right now.
Yeah, I don’t consider myself a part of the rationalist community, but I do work with AI for a living.
Its already disrupting our society, just not in the way that the rationalist community feared.
I can already do more work in less time, allowing my employers to extract more wealth from my labor than they did before. Companies are already using AI as an excuse to lay off workers, purposely understaff teams, and kill projects. You get the point. Its “doomful”
How do you use AI in your work? How does it help you accomplish more in less time?
I haven’t seen much evidence that AI has been having an effect on the macroeconomy, on (un)employment, or the productivity of individual companies. I am open to seeing statistics that show an impact, though.
I code way faster.
Ive been writing code for a good ten years now, so I fall into that category of people who knows design and architecture and often forgets the best way to write some specific thing in whatever language.
So, instead of Googling “best way to parse nested json in python” I throw that into chatgpt and get basically what used to be the top Google result before they sold out to advertisers.
But thats not all!
I can get near perfect regex every time.
I can get it to write unit tests for me.
I can bounce ideas off of it and get responses based on what everyone else is doing (should I write my own parser for this api or is there a library already?)
Best libraries for blah
No actually I need the library to do this too
Does whatever library also have blah feature?
I haven’t had to actually read open source documentation in a long while.
Thanks for explaining that. This is consistent from what I’ve heard from other people who do coding.
Basically, it streamlines the process of looking things up on Stack Overflow (or forums or documentation or wherever) and copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow.
The LLM isn’t being creative or solving novel problems (except maybe to a minimal degree), but using existing knowledge to bring speed, ease, and convenience to the coder.
Yes exactly!
It also helps people learn to code because it can answer questions faster.
unfortunately it can also just write the code for you so lots of students mindlessly use that functionality and end up sticking themselves in tutorial land forever cause they’re not learning.
The bar for entry level SWE is already months beyond what college teaches you, graduates are having to fill the gap themselves while they job hunt. So people using chat gpt to basically cheat on their assignments are the ones that end up in r/cscareerquestions wondering why no one will hire them.
At this point I'm inclined to think of LessWrong and the "rationalists" as some kind of collaborative mixed-media sci-fi project, whether they themselves are aware of it or not. It seems obvious to me though why Eliezer Yudkowsky would feel threatened by something that so far has shown so much promise in the areas of spitting out pages worth of nonsense in no time.
LessWrong is on of my favorite rationalist bloggers, this is a really great post basically telling us how they are processing all of the hard feelings they’re having about the collapse of the United States. Many of us aren’t sure how to start digesting some of this, so this blog is a good start.
LessWrong is an Internet forum and the person who wrote this post has username Rudy. It looks like they’ve only posted three articles? You shouldn’t assume they speak for anyone else who posts on the LessWrong forum.
They are likely not talking about the collapse of the US in particular, but rather, about the possibility that AI takes off and dooms all of humanity. People have different beliefs about what they call p(doom), that is, the probability that humanity is doomed.
Maybe current events are putting people in a particularly doomy mood, but I really don't think that's what's going on here. Trade wars and democratic backsliding seem too mundane to be significant LessWrong concerns. And indeed, from the footnotes and comments, the "doom" under discussion seems to be an imminent AI apocalypse.
If you were already worried about AI escape velocity then the US government showing it is being run by the most incompetent and corrupt people around (who literally used ChatGPT to come up with their tariff formula against the unanimous opposition from voters, experts, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley) that means if AI doom happens in the next 4 years, the US government is in no way going to be situated to handle it.
Well, I think the entire point of AI doom is that, once you get there, it's too late to "handle it". But, certainly, you might think that the incompetence of the Trump admin makes them ill-positioned to prevent AI doom.
Actually, though, I think the real concern among people who think about this sort of thing is that the Trump admin is much more accelerationist than the Biden admin was, and they're much less concerned with safety oversight.
You are right.
Here’s a comment from the Effective Altruism Forum, which has a lot of overlap with the LessWrong forum. There is overlap in terms of the user base, posts (people cross-post to both, and there’s even a feature built-in to both forums to make this easier), and discussion topics (particularly AGI). The forums also share the same code base.
This comment is about Daniela Amodei, the President of the AI company Anthropic. The context is a discussion about whether it’s appropriate to look up information on the personal website she created for her wedding and publicly discuss it.
Note that 4 people have voted “agree” (that’s what the check mark symbol means).
This helps put into perspective what people in this community are worrying about right now.
This is one of those things that my mind “plays with” instead of actually having anxiety about it.
I just really think that creating an infinite entity would require infinite resources of which exist only finitely in this reality.
Whats happening in the united states is connected to whats happening as AI technology advances. We already know people are using it to change votes on social media.
But, yeah, for every doom scenario theres always a worse one. I think this article helps with any of them, whatever they may be.