Comment by qball
4 hours ago
>Except it makes no sense because it asserts the primacy of reality over the private politics of the companies training the models
That is exactly what normal human beings want our computers to do, and it's why the vast majority of AI safety initiatives are [correctly] seen as such a self-serving joke (because of the purposeful conflation of X-risk with "our political opponent could use this tool to destroy our politics") and ignored.
It didn't have to be this way- they could conceivably have gone for an objective, classically liberal, even-handed approach (rather than the progressive approach they settled on). But they didn't, and the social trust required to cry wolf is now spent... even though maybe it shouldn't have been.
> That is exactly what normal human beings want our computers to do, and it's why the vast majority of AI safety initiatives are [correctly] seen as such a self-serving joke (because of the purposeful conflation of X-risk with "our political opponent could use this tool to destroy our politics") and ignored.
Except the "reality" here implies humans being around. Ask normal human beings whether they'd really be fine with Earth flourishing without them, and any other human, around, and see if you still get unanimous consensus.
Nature without us around - or other conscious beings capable of performing meaning, but we haven't found or made any other yet - is just runaway chemical reaction transiently messing up some otherwise boring rock in the great ocean of rocks that is our universe.
EDIT: or, if "humans being important" argument doesn't work, then the same from POV of "humans being dumb":
All the beauty and balance of nature we find so pretty and important is just an illusion. There's no balance, it's a dynamic evolving system, that happens to be meta-stable on our timescales. 10 generations ago it looked different; 10 generations from now, it'll look different still, and we may not like what it becomes then. It's stupid to sacrifice ourselves over some metaphysical primacy of "nature" that doesn't even exist, except in mind of believers. It's basically just a religion that never grew a holy book.