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Eschatological cults are not a new phenomenon. And this is what we have with both AI safety and e/acc. They’re different ends of the same horseshoe. Quite fran
by skepticATX 3y ago
Eschatological cults are not a new phenomenon. And this is what we have with both AI safety and e/acc. They’re different ends of the same horseshoe.
Quite frankly, I think for many followers, these beliefs are filling in a gap which would have been filled with another type of religious belief, had they been born in another era. We all want to feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves; something world altering.
From where I stand, we are already in a sort of technological singularity - people born in the early 1900s now live in a world that has been completely transformed. And yet it’s still an intimately familiar world. Past results don’t guarantee future results, but I think it’s worth considering.
- theragra 3y agoPeople who are concerned about global warming or nuclear weapons are also in cults?
- RandomLensman 3y agoAre nuclear weapons and their effects only hypothesized to exist? You could still create cults around them, for example, by claiming nuclear war is imminent or needed or some other end-of-times view.
- ethanbond 3y agoThere were people who were concerned about global annihilation from pretty much the moment the atom was first split. Those people were correct in their concerns and they were correct to act on those concerns.
- RandomLensman 3y agoIn a way, they were not correct so far (in part also because of their actions, but not only due to their actions).
- ethanbond 3y agoPretty much exclusively due to their actions and some particularities of the specific technology which don’t seem to apply to AI.
- RandomLensman 3y agoIf you put, for example, US presidents in the concerned group, i.e., actual decision makers then fair enough. But it wasn't just concerned scientists and the public.
- ethanbond 3y agoUhh correct. Unsurprisingly though, many of the people with the deepest insight and farthest foresight were the people closest to the science. Many more were philosophers and political theorists, or “ivory tower know-nothings.”
- RandomLensman 3y agoMaybe. There were also those scientists working actively on various issues of deterrence, including on how to prevail and fight if things were to happen - and there were quite a few different schools of thought during the cold war (the political science of deterrence was quite different from physical science of weapons, too). But the difference to AI is that nuclear weapons were then shown to exist. If the lowest critical mass had turned out to be a trillion tons, the initial worries would have been unfounded.
- ethanbond 3y agoNone of whom were people saying "there's no risk here just upside baby!"
- RandomLensman 3y agoPeople were on totally opposing sides on how to deal with the risk, not dissimilar to now (with difference that the existential risk was/is actual, not hypothetical).
- thefaux 3y agoThe problem is we have stigmatized the concept of cults into more or less any belief system we disagree with. Everyone has a belief system and in my mind is a part of a kind of cult. The more anyone denies this about themself, the more cultlike (in the pejorative sense) their behavior tends to be.
- __loam 3y agoThe tech cults of the bay area are at least amongst the most obnoxious.
- ummonk 3y agoThey’re nowhere near as obnoxious as evangelicals in small towns in the Bible Belt.
- __loam 3y agoSure but I don't have to live in the Bible belt.
- goatlover 3y agoWhat sort of influence do evangelicals in small towns wield compared to tech giants?
- kridsdale3 3y agoWell a woman was forced to go to the state Supreme Court this week to get a routine medical procedure, and thanks to evangelicals was denied.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- makeitdouble 3y agoBeing concerned and making it part of your identify are two very different things. For the latter, yes it's basically a religion.
- madrox 3y agoI don't think we're dealing with "concerned" citizens in this thread, but with people who presuppose the end result with religious certainty. It's ok to be concerned about the direction AI will take society, but trying to project any change (including global warming or nuclear weapons) too far into the future will put you at extremes. We've seen this over and over throughout history. So far, we're still here. That isn't because we weren't concerned, but because we dealt with the problems in front of us a day at a time.
- ethanbond 3y agoThe people who, from Trinity (or before), were worried about global annihilation and scrambled to build systems to prevent it were correct. The people saying “it’s just another weapon” were incorrect.
- __loam 3y agoIt's kind of infuriating to see people put global thermonuclear conflict or a sudden change in atmospheric conditions (something that has cause 4 of the 5 biggest mass extinctions in the entire history of the planet) on the same pedestal as a really computationally intense text generator.
- ethanbond 3y agoIt’s kind of infuriating to see people put trench warfare or mustard gas on the same pedestal as a tiny reaction that couldn’t even light a lightbulb. There are different sets of concerns for the current crop of “really computationally intense text generators” and the overall trajectory of AI and the field’s governance track record.
- sensanaty 3y agoMy worries about AI are more about the societal impact it will have. Yes it's a fancy sentence generator, the problem is that you already have greedy bastards talking about replacing millions of people with that fancy sentence generator. I truly think it's going to lead to a massive shift in economic equality, and not in favor of the masses but instead in favor of the psychopathic C-suite like Altman and his ilk.
- wishfish 3y agoNot at all. But I think one's feelings on global warming & nukes can be influenced by previous exposure to eschatology. I was raised in American evangelicalism which puts a heavy emphasis on the end of the world stuff. I left the church behind long ago. But the heavy diet of Revelations, etc. has left me with a nihilism I can't shake. That whatever humanity does is doomed to fail. Of course, that isn't necessarily true. I know there's always a chance we somehow muddle through. Even a chance that we one day fix things. But, emotionally, I can't shake that feeling of inevitable apocalypse. Weirdly enough, I feel completely neutral on AI. No doomerism on that subject. Maybe that comes from being old enough to not worry how it's going to shake out.
- staunton 3y agoIt's obvious to me that humans will eventually go extinct. So what? That doesn't mean we should stop caring about humanity. People know they themselves are going to die and that doesn't stop them from caring about things or make them call themselves nihilists...
- wishfish 3y agoAll I was doing in my comment was describing how an overdose of eschatology as a child can warp how one views the future. I never said I didn't care.
- zer00eyz 3y ago> Eschatological cults TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology Thanks for this comment. Personally I have had trouble reconciling the arguments between academics and business people shouting about AIG from upon their ivory tower. It has felt like SO much hubris and self aggrandizing. Candidly a vector map and rand() doesn't strike me as the path to AGI.
- tomrod 3y agoAgreed. Memory and increasing capacity to act in the physical world are necessary conditions. It won't be a single system.
- ethanbond 3y agoWhat about people shouting about AGI from the halls of the most advanced research labs in the field?
- lazide 3y agoWhen has an ivory tower not involved the ‘most advanced research labs’? Or do you mean largest implementors?
- ethanbond 3y agoIvory tower is usually a pejorative term meaning people who are isolated from the reality of the situation. So it doesn’t include the most advanced research labs when those research labs are in touch with the reality of the situation, like right now with AI. Nitpick “most advanced research labs” if you want, it’s obvious what I mean: it is clear that the “shouting” is not coming solely from people who don’t know what’s going on.
- lazide 3y agoEh, from folks isolated from the constraints and practicalities of the real world. Which OpenAI definitely is, and has been for some time. Or do you think infinite money and ‘do whatever you want’ is constraining?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoSingularity means more than that - an unlimited burst in information. Not just a world transformed; an infinite world of technology.
- __loam 3y agoWhenever I see comments like this I wonder if anyone making them has taken a course in Thermodynamics.
- lazide 3y agoLike the folks pushing the grey goo panic? In my experience, nope. Everything’s possible until you have to actually make it work, then surprisingly the actual possibilities end up quite limited. That said, despite micro-nuclear propulsion being a fantasy, the bomb was real.
- __loam 3y agoAI is real too, but the computational capacity of the human race is not limitless. AI is expensive as hell to run, and more advanced systems might require more and more computation. We can only build so many GPUs, and the rate at which those GPUs get faster is likely to slow down over the next decade in the absence of new physics. Infinite is impossible. I also have to wonder how far throwing a shitload of data at a statistical machine will get us, without a much stronger understanding of how these systems work and what the goals should be to achieve "AGI", whatever that means.