It has to be okay for people to die, because ALL PATHS FORWARD INVOLVE PEOPLE DYING. Any choice you make involves some hidden choice about who gets to suffer and die and who doesn’t.

But no, that’s not what I was saying. Also, are you aware that extinction also involves lots of deaths? Have you thought about what does and doesn’t count as “death” to you? What about responsibility for that death? How indirect does it have to be before you’re free from responsibility? Is it better to have fewer sentient beings living better lives, or more beings living worse lives? Does it matter how much worse? Is there a line where their life becomes a net positive in terms of its contribution to the overall “goodness” of the state of the universe? Once we can ensure a net positive life for people should the goal to be for as many to exist as possible? Should new people only be brought into the world if we can guarantee them a net positive life?

But hey, thanks for the very concrete example of how being in a decent local minima is very hard to break out of.

First, no alternative is required for something to be unacceptable to continue. This is a very common line of reasoning that keeps us stuck in the local minima. Leaving a local minima necessarily requires some backsliding.

Capitalism is unsustainable because every single aspect of it relies on the idea that resources can be owned.

If you were born onto a planet where one single person owned literally everything, would you think that is acceptable? That it makes sense that the choices of people who are long dead and the agreements between them roll forward in time entitling certain people to certain things, despite a finite amount of those things being accessible to us? What if it was just two people, and one claimed to own all land? Would you say that clearly the resources of the planet should be divided up more fairly between those two people? If so, what about three people? Four? Five? Where do you stop and say “actually, people should be able to hoard far more resources than it is possible for anyone to have if things were fair, and we will use an arbitrary system that involves positive feedback loops for acquiring and locking up resources to determine who is allowed to do this and who isn’t”.

Every single thing that is used in the creation of wealth is a shared resource. There is no such thing as a non-shared resource. There is no such thing as doing something “alone” when you’re working off the foundation built by 90+ billion humans who came before you. Capitalism lets the actual costs of things get spread around to everyone on the planet, environmental harm, depletion of resources that can never be regained, actions that are a net negative but are still taken because they make money for a specific individual. If the TRUE COST of the actions taken in the pursuit of wealth were actually paid by the people making the wealth, it would be very clear how much the fantasy of letting people pursue personal wealth relies on distributing the true costs through time and space. It requires literally stealing from the future. And sometimes the past. Often, resources invested into the public good in the past can be exploited asymmetrically by people making money through the magic of capitalism. Your business causes more money in damage to public resources than it even makes? Who cares, you only pay 30% in taxes!

There is no way forward long term that preserves these fantasies and doesn’t inevitably turn into extinction or a single individual owning everything. No one wants to give up this fantasy, and they’re willing to let humanity go extinct to prevent having to.

No, it absolutely should not work. I can’t even imagine what you are imagining when you say that. HOW could it possibly work long term? Are you familiar with any game theory?

Because it’s objectively unsustainable? I don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point. We know, for a fact, that capitalism will lead to disaster if we keep doing what we’re doing. Do you disagree with that? Or do you not care?

What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.

If you imagine that we’re trying to find the best long-term system for humanity, and that the possible solutions exist on a curve on an X/Y plane, and we want to find the lowest point on the function, capitalism is very clearly a local minima. It’s not the lowest point, but it feels like one to the dumbass apes who came up with it. So much so that we’re resistant to doing the work to find the actual minima before this local one kills literally everyone :)

Redact.dev I don’t know if it still works with the API changes and I’m too lazy to look, but I assume it probably is still capable. It can rewrite your comments for you, then delete them.

“Reddit as a hosting service. We provide you the infrastructure and discoverability necessary to build and maintain a growing community. Yours for only $50/month!”

Yes, because AI assistants are going to get too good to not use. And they are going to be made infinitely more powerful by being able to see and hear everything around you.

God we are so fucking far past the point where this will matter. We need to give up the idea that we can still patch our broken governmental system with things that rely on people coming together and agreeing that some things are just bad. The right will defend anything if defending it can give them more power. This legislation would probably be used to kick a democratic judge off for “ethics violations” like giving food to the homeless somewhere that it’s been made illegal before it was used to target republican judges guilty of rape, lying under oath, and bribery.

It would not HAVE to do that, it just is much harder to get it to happen reliably through attention, but it’s not impossible. But offloading deterministic tasks like this to typical software that can deal with them better than an LLM is obviously a much better solution.

But this solution isn’t “in the works”, it’s usable right now.

Working without python:

It left out the only word with an f, flourish. (just kidding, it left in unfathomable. Again… less reliable.)

Nope. I certainly have. It’s the same arguments I’ve been hearing from people dismissing AI alignment concerns for 10 years. There’s nothing new there, and it all maps onto exactly the wishful thinking I’m talking about.

Appealing to authority is useful. We all do it every day. And like I said, all it should do is make you question whether you’ve really thought about it enough.

Every single thing you’re saying has no bearing on how AI will turn out. None.
If a 0 is “we figured it out” and 1 is “we go extinct”, here is what all possible histories look like in terms of “how things that could have made us go extinct actually turned out”:

1
01
001
0001
00001
000001
0000001
00000001
etc.

You are looking at 00000000 and assuming there can’t be a 1 next, because of how many zeroes there have been. Every extinction event will be preceded by a bunch of not extinction events.

But again, it is strange that you can label an appeal to authority, but not realize how much worse an “appeal to the past” is.

This is not like the industrial revolution. You really should examine why you think “we figured other things out in the past” is such an appealing narrative to you that you’re willing to believe the reassurance it gives you over the clear evidence in front of you. But I’ll just quote Hofstadter (someone who has enough qualifications that their opinion should make you seriously question whether you have arrived at yours based on wishful thinking or actual evidence):

“And my whole intellectual edifice, my system of beliefs… It’s a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing. And especially when you think that human beings are soon going to be eclipsed. It felt as if not only are my belief systems collapsing, but it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust soon. People ask me, “What do you mean by ‘soon’?” And I don’t know what I really mean. I don’t have any way of knowing. But some part of me says 5 years, some part of me says 20 years, some part of me says, “I don’t know, I have no idea.” But the progress, the accelerating progress, has been so unexpected, so completely caught me off guard, not only myself but many, many people, that there is a certain kind of terror of an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all humanity off guard.”