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by MarsIronPI 20 days ago
More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition is actually important and achievable, unlike Altman's and Amodei's. Whether or not any of the three will actually accomplish their ambitions remains to be seen; but of the three I think Musk's is most beneficial to humanity.
2 comments
etc-hosts 20 days ago
> More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition

are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?

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lupire 20 days ago
Or making the world racially pure? According to Elon Musk's public statements on his website Twitter, that's a higher priority.
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sigmarule 20 days ago
Musk's proclaimed ambition is a superset of Amodei's, no? While both are racing towards AGI, only one is also trying to "back up" humanity to Mars, make their fully self-driving cars finally fully self-drive, dabble with a little human brain implant side project, datacenters in space, wars against fake mind virii, political kingmaking, something about tunnels, humanoid robots... His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.

This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).

A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.

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MarsIronPI 19 days ago
> His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.

Leaving out the political ambitions, which would be a separate discussion, I think space bases are _way_ more realistic than machine consciousness (which is what I understand AGI to be). In fact, I can visualize what technology space habitats would require today, whereas I wouldn't even know how to determine whether a machine is conscious.

> An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better.

I'm not sure that saying Musk wants to enrich himself is very fair. AFAICT he doesn't use his wealth in ways that most people would expect a billionaire to. Based on what I can tell of how he spends his money, he seems to genuinely believe in his ambition. So I would argue that any enrichment of himself, in his mind, is for his ambition and therefore for humanity's good.

I think a lot of Musk's actions can be understood as someone who wants to focus on getting humanity to Mars, and who gets tangentially distracted by other things (such as AI, possibly) and who deals with what he considers obstacles (such as the government).

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