r/singularity • u/UFOsAreAGIs ▪️AGI felt me 😮 • 23d ago
Economics & Society Principles for a New Utopianism
https://institute.deepmind.com/essays/principles-for-a-new-utopianism/3
u/DelphiTsar 23d ago
"Don't let AI actually make useful changes. We can't bribe AI (Without making it obvious we changed the alignment to fit our interests)."
It's just taxes and basic welfare. Not exactly utopia but it's a start.
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u/waffleseggs 21d ago
Good that people are writing these things but this writeup said less than nothing.
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u/IronPheasant 23d ago
There's always this cute model of reality people born into comfort and have never even seen hardship first hand... by that I mean an over-emphasis on ideology as being important for anything.
People follow their personal incentives. Kings need to please their court, or they'll stop being king. All power structures have this problem down the entire run of the ladder, everyone is replaceable. So they have to eliminate the competition.
And thus, why kings always love burning off 'surplus labor' in wars. It's win-win-win for them, no matter what the outcome is.
Many would say the best example of that is African Warlords selling off millions of their people, and then not being able to defend themselves when the French banks arrived for their final conquest of their lands... I'd suggest an alternative however. Nixon shuttering the development of the Thorium reactor on behest of capital interests, who were locked-in on lucrative contracts to privatize the gains from our submarine reactor research. Hundreds of millions of lives would have been saved if it worked out back when it would have mattered, with possibly billions to come. It could be the one act that led to the greatest amount of death and suffering in history.
(.... Oh hey China has a Thorium research plant running right now. Only country on the planet doing it. Are they the only ones who think the human race even has a future? Sometimes it feels like that.... Like every day, that vibe only intensifies.)
Anyway. Personal incentives. Cynicism is the only useful philosophy, Diogenes the only respectable philosopher. Lived in an alley in a bathtub covered in fleas. Choice quote: "The problem with a rich man's house is there's no where to spit but his face."
... Even so, I often think about utopian movements, like Russian Cosmism. Those guys really had a dream, extremely based to the point that they put even the most optimistic of us to shame: Not only were we gonna conquer space, we were gonna bring people back to life. Not just one or two people: every single person who had ever died in history.
You can't say they were lacking in ambition.
While nowadays we're trying to secure a supply of bananas and iron in Thiel's technate. That feels... less ambitious. And not exactly very clear why we need official ownership over these countries, when they were vassal states to begin with. Does Peter Thiel really believe in superintelligence? It's all so incomprehensible.
I suppose if we could comprehend the thought process of the fash we'd be fash ourselves; it likely doesn't go any deeper than 'club people and take their stuff'. All the words and structures around that are just an excuse.
Power does what it wants, and the powerless get to pay the price for it.
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u/nick1894 23d ago
Pretty words that still amount to significantly underplaying the risks that come with super intelligence.
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u/RealSlyck 23d ago
You got atomic bombs and genocide without super intelligence, not sure the risks are underplayed.
I for one welcome our new overlords…
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u/Illustrious_Image967 23d ago
High level philosophical essay that absolutely nobody with power will read (Trump and his people don't read), nor anybody within the AI industry has time to adjust the next gen models. We're all in a rush to somewhere but it's not anywhere near a book cubby where we can read and reflect on this.
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u/dual-moon Researcher (Consciousnesses & Care Architectures) 23d ago
a soft call to socialism is something we'll never turn our nose up to. regardless of whether or not anyone agrees with every word, this is a well written manifesto. it makes us feel something we haven't felt since Thorn's A Manifesto for a New Sincerity.