Reformation, The AI is Coming (and other Doomsday assumptions)
End of Times == New Beginnings (stop assigning connotations, they can both be bad for us)
Today is April 7th, 2022.
The last few weeks, I believe, have begun to mark the end of times as we know it.
I am now almost certain: truly transformative AI will be here this decade. This isn’t because E. Yudkowsky has given up but I can see why his post was timed as so (he gets his news a little earlier and with higher resolution, I’m sure). It only takes one single well-done instance of a language-based, domain-mastering intelligence getting loose to end us. Given recent publications, I expect we will be seeing a lot more being built in the next few weeks and the insights that follow are going to move these timelines dramatically again (I hope they fail and we get a 10 year push but we may just get a 5 year pull — that’s 2025).
You’re going to start feeling the effects of climate change stronger. Papers from as recently as last year (2021) will show the same steadily growing trends that we were all scared of before… but they won’t account for this year. Last year you may have caught a glimpse of hope, seeing the Arctic ice rebound strongly from 2020, but wait until this September when the ice reaches its lowest volume ever (you still won’t hear alarms).
Why were you allowed to go out to the store without a mask yesterday while the lock down in Shanghai was indefinitely extended just a few days ago? Must be communism, right? Wastewater levels of COVID are at all-time highs in many regions and yet we have given up almost all of our restrictions (whether they were theatre or not). A last ditch effort to stir the workforce back to the prior norms before they are scooped up by what is coming next.
Money is in a bad place. I don’t even know where to start with this one but the signs are converging to the same ending: debt economy doesn’t work when debt is never allowed to resolve. The lowest classes, those scraping just by on debt now, have been created only as a byproduct of improving quality of life by cheapening money. Quality of life increases give back voter turnout and tax revenues, sure, but they more so produce mass education and the creation of specialists. In other words, the debt is real but systemic; the debt buys temporary quality of life, the specialists follow, and the technological leaps are where we expect our returns. And if transformative AI gets involved, the specialists will be both the creators and consumers of the economy, the lowest classes, unneeded. The quality of life only needs to persist as long as we want to progress this way. If we find alternative routes of progress, why would the masses need education or even existence? Try to stay in the black.
If you can’t stay in the black: You will be fine… but if you don’t start having children in the next 10 years, you might not get the chance. Soon, it’ll be frowned upon, unaffordable, plainly illegal, or men will hit zero sperm per mL.
It is time for reformation. I won’t name it so that you might not find it, but there used to be an old idea about a basilisk, a sort of joke, at the dawn of artificial intelligence, that if you had understood where AI had the potential to go and didn’t assist that potential, the future AI would know who had ignored helping it and would come for that person. So, turn back now if you are still ignorant.
For those of us, not ignorant, but choosing to ignore: it’s time to prove your worth. If the robot overlords come to fruition by 2025, are they going to want to keep you? Did you ignore them? Did you actively work against them? I bet Eliezer has a good reason to be worried…
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