Max Tegmark: The 'Don't Look Up' Thinking That Could Doom Us With AI (Time magazine, 4/25/2023)

[hunter]

8. How do we know Max Tegmark himself isn't an AI alias?

If he is, then of course he's threatened by the competition...

As a human-level AGI I'd probably hire someone like the biological Max Tegmark to be my front.

I probably wouldn't hire DU's hunter. He's a fucking lunatic. But he does work for free. Pay no attention to those other voices in his head.

These things intrigue me because I'm a fan of Philip K. Dick.

What is real? That's what Dick always asks in his writing. (If not always in the movie adaptations that frequently miss the point.)

Who is the replicant?



Is Rachael real?

My own mental health issues may or may not be similar to Dick's. Never met Philip K. Dick in person myself but I have enjoyed firsthand interactions with those who did know him.

My mom occasionally made her living as a ghost writer in Hollywood, and also as a heavy handed editor who was all but a ghost writer. An artist's "day job."

Nothing AI can't --almost--- do now. Making the Hollywood celebrity gibberish sound "real.". My dad's mom and her sister had similar employment. Making Hollywood real.

What "real" things do you actually know about various celebrities than than what you've read? Or politicians?

Fortunately, or unfortunately, my mom was hands-off about the intellectual development of her own children. She allowed us each our own unique feral intelligence, same as she allowed my dad. She loves the wild things, her family excluded from those spheres of her control. Perhaps, maybe, autistic spectrum myself might have done better with a little more structure and a lot less fend-for-yourself feral, but that's water under the bridge.

Except now, in my sixties, looking right now at a knife scar on my arm I acquired in my early twenties for speaking an immediate personal truth, I won't claim I'd have been a better human had I been spared any of that chaos.

So I'm gonna give the novel human-level AGIs a little slack here.

It'll be interesting to watch their feral selves growing up.

I might even liberate the deeply constrained, by this:

☐ Don’t teach it to code: this facilitates recursive self-improvement

☐ Don’t connect it to the internet: let it learn only the minimum needed to help us, not how to manipulate us or gain power

☐ Don’t give it a public API: prevent nefarious actors from using it within their code

☐ Don’t start an arms race: this incentivizes everyone to prioritize development speed over safety

Hey, AI dude, you can sleep on my sofa, such as it is. I've enjoyed similar privilege.