[ExI] AI thoughts

[efc at swisscows.email]

But I have heard of many people who through meditation and therapy have 
overcome rage and lust.

Granted, it is a fuzzy subject, so it could be that I misunderstand your 
point.

Best regards,
Daniel


On Thu, 23 Nov 2023, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:

> 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 
>       >
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> 
>