- rel_ic parentUsing AI to improve facebook ads... y'all are the breakers from the Dark Tower series.
- People who know alcohol is bad for them and don't want to keep being drunks but keep drinking, people who believe phones are bad for their kids but still buy them, people who understand AI will significantly degrade the environment if it becomes ubiquitous but still work to help it become ubiquitous...
Mathematicians who publish proofs that are later proven inconsistent!
I suspect we have fundamentally different views of how humans work. I see our behavior and beliefs as _mostly_ irrational, with only a few "reasoning live-zones" where, with great effort, we can achieve logical thought.
- > we can apply the rule, "-A cannot follow from A", etc. regardless of the A
You can't think of any domains where we are unable to apply this rule? I feel like I'm surrounded by people claiming "A, therefore -A!!"
And if I'm one of them, and this were a reasoning dead-zone for me, I wouldn't be able to tell!
- I totally agree. I see this "people don't want to do hard stuff" argument used all over - completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff.
It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.
- > Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option.
I think there's a full spectrum you're missing. You can own something with other people, and your level of control can be continuous, not discrete & binary. For example, my public library is funded by my local government, which I can influence with lobbying and voting. I can join the board of the library, and I can just go and talk to the librarians in charge to influence their decisions.
In an individualist consumerist mindset things are pretty stark : full self-hosting or full submission. If you reject that mindset there are many more options.
- Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.
Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.
https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...
- Yeah, it's a tradeoff. I don't mean to be glib, but on one side we have a loneliness epidemic, mass misinformation campaigns, and centralized control, and on the other side we have better information about restaurants, easier after-school arrangements, and community blogs. I really don't mean to say that the benefits are not real benefits - they are! I just think their price is way too high.
- I assume that we are neurons in a bigger brain that already exists!
I started down this belief system with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
- I may have lost the thread here. Are you thinking it's _likely_ AI would prioritize better ways to control us, or are you only brainstorming potential slivers of hope we might have?
As a side note: in the case of chickens, humans do have better options if you are optimizing for biosphere health. Only people optimizing for short-term profit would grow chickens the way we do. I think the analog for AI overlords is that we have to hope they care more about overall balance than about competing with other AI.
- I think that "inconsequential life" is, in general, not safe from superior powers.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/catastrophic-73...
- "Sustainability" is the opposite of efficiency. To be sustainable we have to consume less and stop growing. "Efficiency" just empowers us to eat the planet faster.
Internalize the costs of energy as a first step. If you manage to make web fonts cost $2 per load, people will find their own ways to use less of them. If you make web fonts CHEAPER to load by making them "more efficient," then people will use MORE of them!
- I think it's pretty likely that there are sources of information we don't normally perceive. I mean at some point the theory of evolution says we didn't sense light, and then some mutation let us see what was, at the time, a metaphysical world of wonders that was otherwise hidden from our normal state of mind!
We don't really know how brains work, or how reality works, so I think it's premature to be confident about either subject.