As I was writing the essay linked above, my Twitter feed was filled with discussion about a certain vocal rationalist’s concerns about the steep development curve of artificial intelligence. It was eerily well linked to the topic of what I was writing, but I didn’t want to tarnish that piece with this expression of temporality. So here is another piece where I share my thoughts on this matter, and more broadly on the memetic tumor that expresses itself in rationalists and effective altruists—the curse of Adam. Enjoy!
In an article in Time, Eliezer Yudkowsky apparently sincerely advocates for the complete global halt of the development of artificial intelligence, for an unspecified amount of time; even if it would require “destroying a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” In other words, if a sovereign country wouldn’t play along with the moratorium this Reddit-brained alarmist demands, and instead would continue to develop AI, the US would be justified in a military act of aggression towards their technological infrastructure.
As many have already pointed out, this is a completely insane thing to advocate, and the worst thing is that everyone behind Yudkowsky in this matter is so proficient in rationalizing idiotic ideas that they consider a potential nuclear war a lesser existential threat for humanity than their projected hyperintelligent AGI-takeover.
I recommend reading this thread by Twitter user @atroyn to get an idea of the absurdity of Yudkowsky’s demands:
This complete silliness prompted me to write out my thoughts on the matters of altruism, morality, and how this all ties to very timeless principles expressed in Genesis.
Rationalists/EAs/Redditors/Midwits = Adam
The essay I linked at the top deals with prophecy, a phenomenon often occurring in religious contexts. Here we have something that looks a lot like an attempt at prophecy, but which upon closer examination reveals itself as another religious phenomenon: a savior complex. The Good Guy complex.
This is a phenomenon which underlies all systematic attempts to be the Good Guys. Recently in online spheres this has found its most pronounced expression in the movement that goes by the name EA, for effective altruism, whose representative Yudkowsky is as well.
I always have a problem with people who make a big deal of being the Good Guys (as well as with rationalists, which often coincide). Why? Because they haughtily commit the original sin in all that they do: they imply that they either have access to, or means to eventually access, omniscient levels of knowledge. They raise themselves to the level of God, by proudly believing that they can use the finite human intellect with its clumsy symbolic means for interpreting reality for tasks that infinitely exceed its boundaries. This is straight from the second and third chapters of Genesis. Let me expound.
Rationalists tend to be atheists, because they are at the phase of exercising their intellect where they are disillusioned from the religious imageries they were fed as children; but they are not yet smart enough to apprehend what they actually refer to. They haven’t yet finished the glass of natural sciences (or the human faculty of rational knowledge) to find God waiting on the bottom, per the famous quote from Werner Heisenberg. Thus they proudly strive on and feel epistemic and moral self-importance by which they can justify all manner of lofty-sounding ideals which fit their ethical preconceptions (and the unexamined metaphysical premises backing said preconceptions), entirely blind to the potentially catastrophic nth-order effects which might arise as their consequence.
The goodie-goodies are the thieves of virtue.
—Confucius, per Alan Watts
Adam was fine when he only could name the animals and plants; but when he tried to elevate himself to the level of God’s omniscience by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, he exiled himself from the Garden by his own means. When he left the Garden, he had to toil for his life, because he was cut off from the Grace of God, the ability to get by without self-conscious disturbance of himself. Outside the Garden he has to rely on his own limited faculties of cognition and reason in order to get by, because he is cut off from his instinct and intuition; he gets lost in his ability to name things and becomes immersed in a linguistic simulation of reality that he forgets is one. In order to ensure his survival, he has to externalize his cognition to technology that can handle the clumsy symbolic modality of perception he is unconsciously trapped in more efficiently than his organic brain—this is the reason we develop technology (particularly computers and artificial intelligence) in the first place, by the way.
Faith arises as a response to the recognition of our true place in this reality—when you find God at the bottom of the Heisenbergian glass; after accepting the limits of human knowledge. As long as the glass is half-full, you are doomed to try to deal with the innumerable variables of the fluid and fluctuating reality with clumsy symbolic processing; and you are always confused and alienated from the world, exiled from the Garden of Eden, and everything lofty you do in the world will cause effects that you could not foresee. This verily applies to the sphere of ethics as well, to the whole human world to be more general.
This is not to say that the collective efforts of science or technology are in vain; it’s to say that it is a grave error to forget what it or we are capable of. This is also not to say that people ought not to desire to do good for others. They should only know that their conceptions of what is good (or true), and their capacity for conceiving that, are extremely fluctuating if you observe their expressions in history; and as such, it is a naive idealization to assume that we will, by our own means, at some point come across a God-like understanding of what is fundamentally good or true. The mere fact that every ethical question has a bunch of different ways to answer it displays the relativity of morality; and the self-repairing process of scientific knowledge does the same about the relativity of our knowledge.
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To return from this rambling semi-exegetic digression to the timely topic, I’d like to share my own thoughts on the matter of whether AI development should be placed under a moratorium.
No.
There is no way to actually slow down or prevent the development of this technology; and these EA people only loudmouth about it because they want to feel relevant and exert control over reality. It takes a special kind of high-midwittery to imagine that airstriking a sovereign nation’s technological infrastructure will be taken as anything other than an act of aggression with high likelihood of retaliation and escalation; however much nicer it is to think that they would all love to play along with your little regulative power trip.
Throughout history, humans have been faced with myriad existential threats—pandemics, unexpected extreme climate conditions, wars and threats of nuclear war, extraterrestrial threats like comets or geomagnetic storms… And we’re still here. It’s an enormous miracle that we are. There is absolutely no guarantee for our existence now just as there has never, ever been. And this is all the reason we should just gaily ride the waves of change that we are caught amidst.
We are in the process of developing the most historically significant augmentation to our cognition, and like all technological breakthroughs, it too is amoral: whether it will cause more good or bad is entirely up to us as its users. It is naturally healthy to conjure all manner of imaginations of what disastrous things could happen with it in different outcomes, but it is also healthy to remember that these are only imaginations generated by anxious minds that are not rooted in reality as it is.
If we would (or could) follow Yudkowsky’s demands to cease the development of AI, everyone backing this line of thought should be held responsible for the delay in all the breakthroughs in areas where we could benefit from automated, reliable and effective cognition, such as medical science.
Thank you for reading.
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Even the midwit is of God’s design. Every viewpoint grants the mind a new opponent. To some, this must be done. To others, this. And to still more of us, this is the correct stance. And despite all opinion and the illusion of action taken on its behalf, the unfolding unfolds.