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Yeah this is the funny thing - rationalists are very concerned about paperclip maximisers, yet they're also often libertarians, despite the fact that capitalism
by beaconstudios 5y ago
Yeah this is the funny thing - rationalists are very concerned about paperclip maximisers, yet they're also often libertarians, despite the fact that capitalism itself is a paperclip maximiser that optimises for capital accumulation over any other goal, including maintaining its own environment. Selective blindness, I guess - which is ironic for a group that are so interested in cognitive bias avoidance.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoWhen you're trying to sell everyone - including yourself - on your superior rationality, it might be considered a feature and not a bug. What would be ironic would a solarpunk maximiser AI that forced humans to stop doing that shit because it's stupid and self-harming and there are better alternatives. And the only real cost would be loss of face and status for less than 1% of the population. Maybe that's not rational either. Hard to tell until it's been tried.
- XorNot 5y agoI can't find it but there's a short story on the super-cognition trope, but oriented along the lines of human cognition. What struck me about it is that ultimately the point of view character is the bad guy for these sorts of reasons.
- ganzuul 5y agoDo you mean to say that a sense of self is inherently a locus of suffering?
- XorNot 5y agoNo, the point is that despite his superintelligence, he's ultimately selfish - what he obsesses over is achieving ever higher organization of knowledge and its implications, rather then wanting or trying to apply his discoveries practically to help other - i.e. he comes up with how to build an anti-gravity device with present day technology, but doesn't think that's very interesting because now discovered he knows it will work and its implementation wouldn't contribute to his greater understanding and organization of knowledge. The opposition who takes him down is the opposite: after concluding how to build efficient fusion generators, his premise is further thought is not needed until the solution has been implemented - and his plan is to set out to apply his conclusions to uplifting the world. Of course the opposition isn't "good" per se - he's still going to use the ability to out-think everyone to accomplish some measure of enslavement, but the plan at least is to try and improve the world for all humankind. In a practical sense to the rest of us of course, the future reality was going to be alien cognizances subjugating the world in one way or another.
- ganzuul 5y agoSelfishness in this context is a balance between different forms of self-identification. e.g. national identity is a new invention designed to foster cooperation over previous bounds of identification. If it worked once, why not try it again...? Lack of cooperation on Earth is a bloody affair for the constrained resources, so an intergalactic campaign under the same assumption may lead to advanced alien cognition desiring to expand our sense of self. I.e. if multiple timelike dimensions exist then our survival mechanism is maladapted to that topology. If you discover this constraint expansion on your own, it is freedom. If you are told, it is subjugation. ...or so I muse.
- beaconstudios 5y agoA solarpunk maximiser, can you imagine? Optimising for whole-system utility based on sustainability and human actualisation. That'd be wonderful.
- Ekaros 5y agoAnd on other end you have 40k AI. That rightfully decide that overall best actions is to get rid off humans... Purely from utilitarian perspective against Chaos.
- egypturnash 5y agoThe other day my SO and I were pondering a story wherein aliens visit, and essentially say “oh hey you sure have a bad case of capitalism! We had one too, here’s how to break it, we’ve helped about a hundred planets get though it now.” Same idea. Wish I had the faintest idea what strategies they’d present to make that happen.
- beaconstudios 5y agoWell, the reason we can't really experiment with other options is because very wealthy people use the US to kill (often literally) alternative approaches. The 70s and 80s were full of US black ops to collapse socialist governments in South America.
- RickHull 5y agoWho exactly do you have in mind, that is a big proponent of capitalism yet is unaware of its nature? Most X-risk theorists I'm familiar with are relatively unconcerned with capitalism, as its notions of profit and wealth are inherently human-aligned.
- beaconstudios 5y agoIts notions of profit and wealth aren't human-aligned though. That's my concern - rationalist types have an idealistic view of capitalism because they're usually the benefactors of it (being typically wealthy and western).
- RickHull 5y agoCapitalism's inherent human alignment: Every final (non-waste) output of a capitalist system is intended for human consumption. Compost, pet food, sheet metal, etc are all intended to satisfy human preferences. Price signals ensure that only things which humans value are economic to produce.
- beaconstudios 5y agoOK, that's optimising for efficiency, not for human values. If capitalism optimised for human values, we'd all be paid to house the homeless, free slaves, improve conditions in the global South, heal the sick, feed the hungry and so on.
- bobcostas55 5y agoBy revealed preference, those are not human values.
- beaconstudios 5y agoThat's not how values work - people go against their values all the time due to incentive structures. I want everybody in the world to be fed, but not at the cost of myself being tortured for a million years. Our goal as a species should be to align our incentives with our preferences so the behaviours that get rewarded are the ones that we want to see.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoCapitalism is not anarchism, where there is no state to generate public goods, and libertarians are not unaware of collective action problems and the utility of government in solving them..
- beaconstudios 5y agoGenerally speaking libertarians are in favour of minimising government intervention in markets. That's the defining trait of the ideology.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoLibertarians are in favor minimizing restrictions on voluntary interactions between consenting parties. Most are fully in favor of government intervention to deter private interactions which are not voluntary, like assault, or pollution. How the commons - which exist outside the purview of private property - are treated, is completely orthogonal to one's belief in libertarianism. For example, you can be a libertarian, and believe no pollutants should be allowed to be emitted into the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is part of the commons, and should be maintained in a way where it remains useful to humanity at large.
- beaconstudios 5y agoVoluntary interactions between consenting parties can still be extremely coercive if there's a power imbalance. In the Roman Empire, people used to sell themselves into slavery to pay off debts.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoThere is no rule in capitalism that says you have to optimize for capital accumulation over any other goal. There is not even an evaluation function, people can choose their own values.
- beaconstudios 5y agoCapitalism rewards and thus incentivises such behaviour though. Rich people have more freedom and power than poor people.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoThat would be true in any system, for example strong people have more power than weak people, intelligent people would have more "freedom of thought" than stupid people, ruling politicians would have more power, and so on. In capitalism however, you only have power if you give people something they want. In socialism for example, being "rich" would just mean being a part of the ruling elite, but you would still have people who are "rich" and have more power than others. And nothing in capitalism says you have to value buying a yacht higher than anything else. There is also no rule that says capitalism should have no laws whatsoever. Power is also a good thing, for example being able to cure cancer or feed people is a power.
- beaconstudios 5y agoNatural power imbalances are fine, I don't advocate for the world of Harrison Bergeron. Ruling politicians and wealthy people are not natural power imbalances. Power is something you have over another person, ie the ability to violate their preferences. That's an inherent negative. Presumably the power to cure cancer is something the patient would consent to, and thus not the kind of power I'm talking about. Capitalism has led to the kind of voluntary transactions where child slaves are paid just enough to not starve so that mining companies can extract cobalt to sell to electronics manufacturers. While the idea of voluntary transactions sounds nice in the small, it plays out pretty badly writ large.
- simonh 5y agoCapitalism doesn’t set any goals, people do that. It just recognises and guarantees individual ownership rights and economic freedoms, but what people do with that is up to them. It’s just that achieving any material goal takes capital, whatever your economic system. Elon Musk is as capitalist as you can get, but his goal isn’t to accumulate as much capital as possible, it’s to build a civilisation. Bill Gates is a capitalist and is busily giving away as much capital as efficiently as he can. This is of course all about goal setting. I think those fearful of maximisers are being rational, but if we’re going to build AIs then we need to make them part of our community. The things that stop us as individuals going off the rails and taking everyone else around us down with us is respect for community, for others rights and interests. The need to seek consensus and consent. Figuring out how to implement that is the real challenge.
- beaconstudios 5y agoCapitalism is a system that rewards capital accumulation, the richer you are, the more power and freedom you have. Therefore, it incentivises capitalistic behaviour. People can break with those incentives, but I'm not critiquing people's ability to have good goals - I'm critiquing capitalism. Capitalism does optimise for property rights, that's true - but if you're taking a utilitarian perspective (as all good rationalists should) then you have to ask what the material outcomes of that are. What we see is accumulation of massive power in the hands of a few, many of whom are doing active harm to the planet (just look at oil billionaires' behaviour). Supporting them is a worldwide underclass of people working in sweatshop conditions or actual human slavery. Maybe optimising for private property isn't providing very good outcomes.
- aetherson 5y agoWhat we actually see is broad wealth generation that is relatively widely spread (albeit not perfectly uniformly spread) lifting billions out of the crushing malthusian poverty that has been the fate of 99% of humanity, and the creation of social orders in which the rich, while they are rich, have strict limits on their abilities to control the lives of the majority.
- imtringued 5y agoI am trying to be neutral here. There are some people who think that humanity should reach its maximum potential as quickly as possible and that we must make sacrifices along the way, even if it means dooming other life forms (including humans) into misery. That misery then acts as a deterrent, nobody wants to be poor because it means homelessness or starvation, so everyone tries their best and works as hard as they can. There are some people who think that humanity is doing pretty well, they are not against further improvement but they prefer preservation of humanity, even if it means not living up to its theoretical potential because sustainability is inefficient over the short term. The goal should be to make sure that everyone benefits from societies' progress to the extent that they want to benefit, which in theory should eradicate homelessness and starvation as nobody is willingly risking death. Let's call the first system capitalism and the second one socialism (not necessarily inspired by marx). There are two obvious problems. Humans are lazy creatures, economists that postulate that human wants and needs are infinite are kind of wrong. There are lots of humans who basically do nothing but watch TV. The stereotypical "welfare parasite" shouldn't even be able to exist as he is obviously going against his own interests of being unable to satisfy his unlimited needs. So the argument that capitalists make, is that lazy humans have to be whipped into shape and motivated. However, if the capitalists go too far and overexert their workforce or destroy the environment, capitalism will become less effective over the long term. An optimal system would be hard working when there is lots of work to do and lazy when there isn't much to do. It can't be stuck in either state or maybe it needs to do both simultaneously. In my opinion, the next step that we should take is to remove the dependence on economic growth to keep the economy stable. If growth happens, that's great, but we shouldn't force it. We need to make small steps toward the right direction. Nobody on this planet needs a big step, e.g. a Marxist revolution, etc.
- beaconstudios 5y agoI know that some people might subscribe to the latter ideal, but that's not my belief system. I believe that we should continue to innovate and improve our lives, but that the people who do the innovating should see the reward of their efforts, not just their bosses. That's why I'm a (libertarian) socialist. Socialism isn't about making sure everybody has equal resources, it's defined by the phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution", as opposed to communism's "... According to his need". Communism is meant to describe a post-scarcity economy,realistically. Socialism is about removing the class division between worker and capitalist that's really it. You can have welfare and whatnot and that's a good thing in terms of social utility, but it's not inherent to socialism. That's more social democracy, which is a reformist ideology where you just tack amendments onto capitalism, rather than a socialist ideology. I do agree with not wanting insurrection though - the time for that in the West has probably passed. The global South on the other hand, is still oppressed enough to warrant taking up arms.
- FeepingCreature 5y agoCapitalism isn't very good at it compared to an AI. As a result, good things can happen in it.