[ExI] AI thoughts

[William Flynn Wallace]

Good luck telling the unconscious what to do.  Haidt, I think, thought of
ourselves as riding an elephant - the rider being the ego and the elephant
being the unconscious.  The elephant can take over at any point and
overwhelm the ego, like a mad elephant doing exactly what it wants and the
Hell with the rider.  No suggestions on how to alter this.  Rage or lust
comes to mind.  Even hunger.

bill w

On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 4:40 AM efc--- via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Hello Jason,
>
> On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote:
>
> >       > then humans would no longer be in control, even if individual
> LLMs are no smarter than human engineers).
> >
> >       I don't think humans have been in control for a long time,
> certainly
> >       not individual humans, and I just don't believe in "elders" or any
> >       other group that is exerting control.  Every single human is like a
> >       wood chip on a river.
> >
> > I appreciate this analogy very much. I have sometimes thought similar
> things as well, that the greatest and scariest conspiracy
> > theory of all is that no one is in control.
>
> This reminds me of daoist poetry where we are floating on the river.
> Best thing we can do is to adapt to the current, instead of tring to
> swim against it all our lives.
>
> In terms of conspiracies, I am a firm believer in there being no global
> conspiracies. Just like you, I believ in large scale moves and trends,
> and I also believe that groups of people try to take advantage of them.
> They do not control the trends (as individuals) but try and divert small
> currents here and there.
>
> Another reason I do not beleive in global, unified conspiracies is that
> people talk. It would be, in my opinion, impossible, to keep such things
> secret.
>
> > But the river analogy adds another dimension which I think is more
> correct. We are subject to overarching trends and laws of
> > evolution,  technological development, economics, etc. and we individual
> humans are like cells in this greater organism, all in the
> > end replaceable cogs whose presence or absence might make a small
> difference as to when some inevitable discovery might happen, but
> > will not prevent it entirely.
>
> Enter "psycho-history"! ;) I agree. There are fundamental laws that
> govern how we work, and this of course influences us as a species. I
> always thought about if some kind of law of "unification" or
> "centralization" can be verbalized or formalized? It seems, through
> history, that we have an innate tendency to try at unify our knowledge,
> and that our societies keep getting more and more centralized compared
> with individual families or groups on the savannah hundreds of thousands
> of year ago.
>
> Then you also have the mystical psycho-analysts who argue that until we
> consciously realize and take control over our unconscious drives and
> desires, we'll keep making the same mistakes as we always do.
>
> >       > I think depth of reasoning may be one area where the best humans
> are currently dominant, but a small tweak, such as
> >       giving LLMs a working memory and recursion, as well as tightening
> up their ability to make multiple deductive logical
> >       steps/leaps, could quickly change this.
> >
> >       Can you make a case that it would be worse than the current
> situation?
> >
> > I don't believe it will, but if tasked to make the case, I would say the
> greatest present danger is that it amplifies the agency of
> > any user. So that ill-willed people might become more destructively
> capable than they otherwise would (e.g. the common example of a
> > lone terrorist leveraging the AI's expertise in biotechnology to make a
> new pathogen) but the Internet has already done this to a
> > lesser extent. I think agency amplification applies to everyone, and
> since there are more good-intentioned people than
> > ill-intentioned ones, any generally-available amplification technology
> tends to be a net positive for humanity.
>
> I think it is very interesting to think about what current LLMs and
> video generation capabilities are doing to drive down the cost of
> producing fake news. It will cost next to nothing and flood everything.
>
> Open AI and "containing AI" is just a mirage and every single powerful
> nation are likely trying their best to come up with the best AI in order
> to out compete the rivals.
>
> I wonder if we'll have some kind of cold war type situation where the
> most powerful nations have their own AI:s and the rest of the world then
> has to align themselves with them taking one side or the other?
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel
>
>
> >
> > Jason
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20231123/9f49d787/attachment.htm>