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11 Oct 2026 |
Losing some ground, by the way, always happens when you plot curves of progress.
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11 Oct 2026 |
But when it comes to coordination, something that’s arbitrary can be highly rational.
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11 Oct 2026 |
It’s much easier to think in zero-sum terms than to recognise the unintuitive positive sum benefits of trade and cooperation.
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11 Oct 2026 |
There’s something inherently disinterested and universal about reason.
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11 Oct 2026 |
You didn’t need David Hume in order to go out and capture slaves and, and, uh, and start an empire.
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11 Oct 2026 |
We don’t even think through the meaning of the words.
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11 Oct 2026 |
So I can’t deny that there might be some self-deception simply because I study people and that’s the way people are.
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11 Oct 2026 |
It’s the ideas that count, not the people.
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11 Oct 2026 |
And our social relationships are ratified by common knowledge.
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11 Oct 2026 |
Common knowledge refers to the state in which I know something, you know it, I know that you know it, you know that I know it
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11 Oct 2026 |
There is no argument for driving on the left.
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11 Oct 2026 |
So yes, I’m a big fan of Enlightenment ideals.
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11 Oct 2026 |
which I would say led to some pretty catastrophic consequences.
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11 Oct 2026 |
There’s a big argument for driving on the same side that everyone else is driving on.
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11 Oct 2026 |
It’s not a question of what I think but what the data show.
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11 Oct 2026 |
Human nature doesn’t find them particularly intuitive.
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11 Oct 2026 |
common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for two people to be on the same page and make choices that benefit them both as long as…
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11 Oct 2026 |
Two people are friends or lovers or transactional partners because each one knows that they are.
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11 Oct 2026 |
The conclusion I came to is that direct speech, blurting something out, is common knowledge.
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11 Oct 2026 |
but I can’t convince you that that is a moral imperative.
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11 Oct 2026 |
My own personality should be irrelevant to what’s happening in the world.
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11 Oct 2026 |
That is, you avoid common knowledge.
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11 Oct 2026 |
It doesn’t just mean something that’s widely known, but something that’s known to be known.
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11 Oct 2026 |
I think they’re defensible ideals. They’ve made us better off.
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11 Oct 2026 |
then by veiling your intentions in double-speak or euphemism you preserve the relationship while getting the message across.
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think it’s just a terrible analogy, for a lot of reasons.
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7 Oct 2026 |
But in the case of AI, there is intelligent design, namely us.
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7 Oct 2026 |
the neural networks, especially of the era, were just not very bright.
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7 Oct 2026 |
It’s very hard to think of what those circumstances would be
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7 Oct 2026 |
It assumes exactly what is at issue, namely that these systems are going to be inherently concerned with their own survival.
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7 Oct 2026 |
people let their imaginations run wild to think of intelligence as a miracle, as omniscience, as the ability to solve any problem.
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7 Oct 2026 |
there’s no amount of human welfare that’s worth sacrificing for the welfare of an AI, like, zero
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7 Oct 2026 |
So we can’t know that AIs are not conscious, just as, you know, you can’t know that I’m not conscious.
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7 Oct 2026 |
you get all of these maladaptive outcomes, all this cruelty and waste and competition and aggression, precisely because there was no…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I don’t know what it means to say it’s better than all the things humans can do.
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7 Oct 2026 |
So I would not deny thinking to AI.
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7 Oct 2026 |
I don’t for a moment think that there is an inner life there.
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7 Oct 2026 |
there may be another kind of history of ideas, sociology of ideas, in play, that has only recently come to light in some of the articles in…
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7 Oct 2026 |
Although you’re right that the original founders of Wired magazine would have been, you know, techno-optimists and somewhat, you know, left…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I can’t prove that a lifelike AI or robot would not be conscious.
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7 Oct 2026 |
they were stochastic parrots
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7 Oct 2026 |
that train has kind of left the station when it comes to current AIs, which get a lot of their reactions, their judgements, their…
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7 Oct 2026 |
It’s attributed these near-magical powers.
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7 Oct 2026 |
there may be a kind of dread of AI that I think is somewhat misaligned with the reality – or at least dread of the role of AI in society…
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7 Oct 2026 |
the problem of getting humans, for example, to act at your bidding, you know, short of coercion, is a really tough, maybe unsolvable…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think there’s a tendency to project what is a bogus hierarchy in the first place in evolutionary biology, and then to place AI and humans…
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7 Oct 2026 |
Intelligence always consists of trading off multiple goals against each other.
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7 Oct 2026 |
But these thought experiments are just outside of the world of everyday engineering.
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7 Oct 2026 |
you don’t release a system, you don’t empower a system until you’ve, you know, tested the living daylights out of it.
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7 Oct 2026 |
there are many reasons to think that that is impossible in principle.
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think given the likelihood that there is no sentience going on in AI
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7 Oct 2026 |
I have no standing to challenge their understanding of how the AI works, to put it mildly.
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7 Oct 2026 |
If it did, then I’d be much more worried.
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7 Oct 2026 |
It’s a mechanism, it’s a gadget.
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7 Oct 2026 |
I don’t think I could reasonably deny that a mouse is conscious, by similar logic.
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7 Oct 2026 |
some intellectual discourse is probably contaminated by inter-elite status competition.
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7 Oct 2026 |
since a lot of the progress has been driven by, you know, affluence, by technology, by markets, there’s almost a reflexive recoil among…
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7 Oct 2026 |
some of the scenarios of human extermination kind of attribute near-magical powers to some future AI
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7 Oct 2026 |
the people who develop these tools aren’t necessarily the people who are best equipped to predict what their effects will be.
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7 Oct 2026 |
In some strands, yes, you’re right that there was a kind of techno-liberalism coming out of Silicon Valley.
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7 Oct 2026 |
There was, you know, the social media hostility – one might even say, you know, panic.
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7 Oct 2026 |
Have me back. I will come back.
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7 Oct 2026 |
I don’t use the word cult, but it kind of is a cult, to be honest
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7 Oct 2026 |
it is the people who are most enthralled to the existential risk way of thinking who seem to be most heedless of the everyday risk, the…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think that’s a very precise disanalogy, precisely because if the world consists of an entity like yourself, then you’ve got the luxury of…
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7 Oct 2026 |
It’s my understanding of intelligence as a gadget rather than a superpower.
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7 Oct 2026 |
there’s always a kind of moralistic contempt among intellectuals for technology and for commerce.
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7 Oct 2026 |
So I think we just need more cause-and-effect, mechanical engineering thinking – no awe, no dread, no sci-fi, no thought experiments
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think the closest analogy was Chernobyl, where you did have a disaster caused by the rank incompetence of someone doing, you know, a…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I am sympathetic to that point of view.
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7 Oct 2026 |
But the kind of New York Times crowd was always very cold toward technology.
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7 Oct 2026 |
the problem of subjective experience, you know, it’s the hardest intellectual problem, because we don’t know of any causal story that can…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think it’s a mistake to say that the thing that differentiates one human from another can just be extrapolated as an explanation for how…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think it’s illicit to anthropomorphise AI as being like humans, which are products of natural selection, when AIs are not products of…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I’m not a creationist, I’m not an intelligent design theorist
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7 Oct 2026 |
That isn’t what an intelligent system does – maximising one simply stated goal with monomaniacal determination.
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7 Oct 2026 |
my interest is not in AI except as a tool to understand natural intelligence.
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7 Oct 2026 |
the paperclip argument, the argument that if you give an AI a goal of solving climate change, it’ll exterminate every last human, because…
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7 Oct 2026 |
just to make sure, to reinforce, this is not a straw man
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7 Oct 2026 |
it’s a non sequitur to say it’ll wanna dominate us, wipe us out, whether accidentally or on purpose.
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7 Oct 2026 |
It is completely reasonable to deny it to AIs.
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think it just replicates the same fallacy of a scala naturae defined by intelligence
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7 Oct 2026 |
The previous iterations, like GPT-2, really were kind of bullshit generators that were statistical approximations.
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7 Oct 2026 |
But there’s nothing that puts an AI in zero-sum competition with us.
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7 Oct 2026 |
naturally look down on the people who are changing society without consulting them, like the people in tech, the people in commerce.
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7 Oct 2026 |
doesn’t mean that they have a built-in motive to use them in order to exploit us, dominate us, exterminate us and so on.
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7 Oct 2026 |
If you actually go back, there was always a kind of coolness to technology.
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7 Oct 2026 |
it’s not omniscience, it’s not omnipotence, it’s not an uncanny ability to derive the truth of all propositions, the answer to all…
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7 Oct 2026 |
It is absolutely not the case that any rational agent is willing to wreak any collateral damage in pursuit of one goal.
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7 Oct 2026 |
And say I was wrong. I will do that.
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7 Oct 2026 |
we shouldn’t assume that therefore they can solve any problem, such as, you know, persuade a human to make them immortal and never to cede…
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7 Oct 2026 |
if that happened, then I would certainly reconsider.
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7 Oct 2026 |
we can’t take for granted that with enough intelligence that will just automatically be solvable.
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7 Oct 2026 |
Wipe every last one of them out – I’m not gonna shed any tears.
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7 Oct 2026 |
they’re not thinking in language, but they are thinking, you know, with all of the information embodied in language.
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7 Oct 2026 |
If there was a case of, say, instrumental convergence or misalignment, such that an AI system, given a laudable, desirable goal, ended up…
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7 Oct 2026 |
These are gadgets.
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7 Oct 2026 |
But there’s just no question that the current generation can do remarkable feats of intelligence.
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7 Oct 2026 |
It’s just not a good analogy.
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7 Oct 2026 |
AI intuitions are so contaminated by human intuitions that you really cannot take them at face value.
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