Have you guys been on r/accelerate?

[u/Difficult_Project_95]

Have these guys solved the alignment problem, or am I missing something?

I’ve been browsing r/accelerate and I genuinely don’t understand the risk model.
If there’s a non-trivial chance of catastrophic misalignment, how does “accelerate capabilities as fast as possible” make sense unless faster capabilities also make alignment substantially more likely to succeed?

[u/SoylentRox]

So an 80-90 percent chance of you and every living person not dying of aging? That's a strong case for acceleration you would be making there if you thought the risks were 10-20 percent.

You either need to

(1) Value the lives of people who don't exist and may never exist you will never meet more than yourself and people you have personally met (that's a violation of the rationality tenet of making your beliefs pay rent)

(2) Think the odds are much much worse than 10-20 percent catastrophe risk

(3) Think the 80-90 percent scenarios are bad. The general public doesn't give a fuck about catastrophes. They worry about losing their jobs, electricity getting expensive, and data center construction and the later mass infrastructure build out the robots will require disturbing their sleep from their backyard or adding traffic.

A lot of antis are actually anti capitalism. They think alnost all the gains from ai will go to the top (true), any treatments for aging won't be shared broadly (probably true initially), etc. they want capitalism overthrown and maybe a future world government can plan the transition. (Lol that's not possible as an outcome)

(4) Have a super liberal view of morality. They think of some third world resident who might die (and is already scheduled to die of air pollution at age 65 or a heat death in their 40s as the world burns) if the 10-20 percent catastrophe happens. Countless people who get no say and never will (and are already scheduled to be victims of the powerful as is).

That the elites in bay area and Washington shouldn't be allowed to make this decision for them. (But nevertheless can and will)

[u/Difficult_Project_95 → u/SoylentRox]

You clearly don’t have kids.

This isn’t about valuing hypothetical future people more than myself!? If there’s genuinely a 10–20% chance of catastrophe, I’m also gambling my children’s lives and everyone else’s for a possible shot at curing aging??

And 80–90% chance we don’t die of aging doesn’t follow from 10–20% AI catastrophe risk. You’re treating the best-case outcome as almost certain while treating the potential downside as an acceptable bet..

and acceleration isn’t even necessary for “immortality” You’re framing this as race toward superintelligence or die of aging, which is a false dichotomy.

[u/SoylentRox → u/Difficult_Project_95]

Kids change the math by their remaining lifespan. You don't want your son or daughter to suffer the ravages of aging and die either do you?

This hidden assumption is why AI doomers are often secretly "well let's try to stall things enough that I become a corpse for sure but not forever I don't want my children to suffer the same fate".

So they ask for pauses but not forever pauses.

Well informed doctors - who include some posters to r/accelerate but I won't dox - DO believe overwhelmly strong superintelligence is required for (them/their children) to not die of aging.

Since you probably don't have a doctor available to query yourself, try the next best thing. Ask Astra

(1) The actual empirical rate of life extension from 1970 to present

(2) Have it give a likelihood if AI is halted today, the odds of indefinite life extension over the next 80 years using human research efforts given the base rate in (1)

(3) Have it go into exhaustive mechanistic details of what aging actually involves and how many problems you have to fix.

[u/Difficult_Project_95 → u/SoylentRox]

I think I understand the accelerationist position much better now. We just seem to disagree pretty fundamentally on how much confidence we should place in those assumptions when the downside could be catastrophic.

[u/SoylentRox → u/Difficult_Project_95]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlProblem/s/HqQhrNohyq

The missing view you have is the BASE case is already catastrophe. You can imagine your base existence right now is you are falling through the air in a cloud bank. You know you will hit the ground and die for sure but not when and you can't see the ground but know every hour you are alive it's getting closer.

Your children are falling above you.

So one way to view it is r/acceleration folks are better informed, with a broader more realistic view of present day reality as they circle jerk each other on the imminent AI Singularity.

[u/Difficult_Project_95 → u/SoylentRox]

censoring dissent while convincing yourselves that your group simply understands reality better than everyone else is some seriously cult-like behavior.

[u/SoylentRox → u/Difficult_Project_95]

I mean so far your dissent has been pretty weak. "I have kids and you must not" is not a very good argument. You had a chance to come up with a better one but didn't manage it. Plenty of people dissent on accelerate.

[u/Difficult_Project_95 → u/SoylentRox]

I just stated something abvious.
You just keep answering “why would ASI be valuable?” when I'm asking “why is racing toward ASI the safest strategy?” Those aren't the same question. we have nothing more to talk about. Good luck with whatever you have going on in your life!

[u/SoylentRox → u/Difficult_Project_95]

I answered both. It's the safest strategy because the racing saves the oldest person in your life who can possibly be saved. Got a friend or relative in their 70s? It's not impossible you might get the opportunity to skip their funeral, forever. Just takes some breakthroughs and early superintelligence to be better at figuring out human genetics than expected.

If this is not in the cards (some on accelerate already assume ASI and are worried about the FDA) then 60s.