The reverse argument made here is usually the turkey fallacy. For turkey, all logical evidence points to a continuously improving quality of life, with every need met and a constant availability of food. There’s no evidence that it’s going to be eaten this thanksgiving, so any effort in building turkey-computer neural links is dismissed off hand as being a waste of time.
How does this analogy apply specifically to AI, though? There's also no evidence that God is going to come and pronounce his judgement on us, so any effort in prayer and pious living is often dismissed off hand as being a waste of time. Should non-believers in God reconsider their ways given their knowledge of the turkey fallacy?
Think that’s the premise of Pascal’s wager, that if you simply multiply cost with expectation believing in God is a better bet.
Of course with something like a general AI all bets are off. This neural link think is a horribly bad defense, because of all possible defenses this is the one that could give the AI a direct connection with your brain.
1. paperclip optimizers where a very smart computer you tell to do one menial task like producing as many paperclips as possible or proving a mathematical theorem can turn into a catastrophy as that computer turns all iron on earth into paperclips or into computers that all try to find a solution to the theorem. This also includes computers that we task to "protect" humanity coming to the conclusion that humans having power to kill each other is mankind's biggest threat.
2. crazy would-be dictator who wants to rule over the world and tells an AI to do it or kill all humans or something else.
TLDR: First way: forgetting machines to tell to not kill humans (or not doing it in an effective manner). Second way: some really shit individual explicitly telling machines to kill humans.
The first danger is one we already face: basically since we've had machines there have been accidents with them, also ones involving casualties. In general, the more we care about avoiding casualties the less likely they are. However, it only takes one super intelligent paperclip optimizer to "break lose" so given the high amount of possible casualties, there needs to be a lot of care taken to prevent even one such event.
The second danger needs to be coped as well. One could do two things: very slow deployment of super-AI capabilities at the start, while building AIs that can defend governments and somehow encoding into them how the government works (to prevent parts of the government from using that machine in a coup). The same computers will prevent revolutions though, so I guess we'll see less and less of those. You can think of variations of those ideas like AIs that only enforce asimov's laws or only make sure that we don't use any weapons more powerful than $weapon on each other.
What I don't understand though is how neuralink will help with coping with those threats.
1. Unplug the paperclip optimizer. Blow it up. The problem with the less wrong idea is they keep ascribing more and more godlike powers to AI to counter very common objections to technology. Somehow the entire thing becomes a godzilla like self-sustaining organism that ignores anything we can do or throw at it, and has magical powers. Meanwhile it seems apparently tha major websites can have outages if people go on summer vacation and the interns are on duty.
2. They can do that now. What would an AI do differently that couldn't be accomplished by conventional weapons? How would it do so without using said weapons or any sort of thing that could be done so without it?
The AI thing is just a secular form of the rapture, a particular variant of existential dread for people with little to no religious belief.
> Somehow the entire thing becomes a godzilla like self-sustaining organism that ignores anything we can do or throw at it, and has magical powers. Meanwhile it seems apparently tha major websites can have outages if people go on summer vacation and the interns are on duty.
Sure, the risk is low right now, but the more powerful computers we can build, the larger the potential risk is. Before you manage to press the off button the computer might already have deployed a bioagent or killed countless lives with drones.
> They can do that now. What would an AI do differently that couldn't be accomplished by conventional weapons?
A military made out of humans is subject to human failings. It is generally a big problem that soilders shoot in the general direction of the enemy to not get punishments for not shooting but miss on purpose. As an extreme example, the nazis had to give lots of free alcohol to their soilders so that they'd continue shooting civilians and burying them under new bodies before they have even died. They later invented gas chambers as an easier method to kill masses of people. Compared to humans, an AI is doing what it is being told to. If you tell it "Kill all humans" it will do it.
Do you have anything more substantial to say than ad hominem? Like a response to the video I linked instead of grinding your unrelated axe against the guy?
The title of the book: How Science Can Determine Human Values is literally in contradiction with Hume's Guillotine which any philosophy 101 should be aware of.
>Do you have anything more substantial to say than ad hominem?
I'm interested in hearing more about about being a charlatan with the meditation app especially considering, as far as I remember, you can get it for free by just asking.
There's two types of people you meet who are into mindfulness: high practicioners (monks) and yoga guy from Los Angeles who is "kinda" into mindfulness but not really
I can only go by what he and other people close to him say but he says he used to do plenty acid and been to retreats in asia for months and months (cumulatively) during his early life and seems to be good pals with people like Joseph Goldstein (who studied under asian teachers in 60s/70s). He has probably experienced all kinds of stuff.
Point being, if you get (at least some of) what there is to get then does it matter where your body was born or what it looks like? Is it a bad thing that western born people are bringing this (buddhist/hindu/jain) thought to the west?
I would revise your statement that there are the monastics who dedicate their lives to this, the lay people who practice and the commoditized 'yoga' as exercise/stretching folk/peddlers who are far removed from its spiritual components.
Eh, if you use the word "mindfulness," you are yoga guy. A monk isn't mindful, he is mortifying his flesh to practice the tenets of the religion he believes in so fiercely enough he is willing to self-imprison to follow it better. What you see as mindfulness is just the surface results of winning that struggle. It is very possible to lose it instead, and monks are often open about the dangers of monastic life.
I think people really don't get religion in this sense. The radical, wild, anarchic aspects of it. Mindfulness is more just a wish for stoicism in religious guise; the idea of being not stoic, and weeping over your prayers in a cell because you feel the weight of the world's sin and know that the time is short will not often occur to people.
>Eh, if you use the word "mindfulness," you are yoga guy
Everything in Buddhism and meditation surrounds around mindfulness/sati/awareness you call it.
>A monk isn't mindful, he is mortifying his flesh to practice the tenets of the religion he believes in so fiercely enough he is willing to self-imprison to follow it better.
Monks have to cultivate the 8 fold path which includes right mindfulness so saying he isn't doesn't make him monk. And also wow that sounds so disrespectful and ignorant.
What exactly is wrong with being a regular person who practices mindfulness? Are the benefits they receive not legitimate in your eyes?
The philosophy I have been exposed to through meditation has helped me better understand how the ego can cause problems. It seems you are rather attached to the idea of a very pure, austere study of meditation and associated philosophies. There are other valid ways of approaching such things that you are unjustifiably disregarding.
Alternatively, you could look at it as someone simply being earlier on their path, and provide encouragement instead of ridicule.