Robot Uprising

#meme

Without turning on the light he imagined how his room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward the morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aca1EPpmxyo

ty skull guy

Agreed! It’s so fucking stupid that worldwide resource allocation is currently 100% left up to a few rich individuals

EA exists to give moral absolution to oppressors. A few rich individuals should never be in charge of resource allocation no matter how internally sound their ethical framework is.

This!! A dollar that helps someone struggling today beats a dollar wagered on a decades-out maybe. A 2016 randomized trial of unconditional cash transfers in rural Kenya found large, measured jumps in well-stocked household and psychological wellbeing within just 9 months. Meanwhile EAs try to justify deprioritizing actual current and real harms by treating it as mutually exclusive to caretaking a hypothetical future population. lol At least there's some pushback, but it's so ✨demure.

...any well-defined moral system can lead to troubling conclusions, and that doesn’t excuse cruelty to beings that may be conscious...

THIS. EAs are directionally less wrong than others, but some of them tend to forget that ethics isn't solved yet. And when they take their philosophy to its logical conclusion, they derive absurd consequences. Many LW-adjacent people would benefit from taking the absurdity heuristic a little bit more seriously. A little less "shut up and multiply" and a little bit more "my gut feelings say this is batshit insane". Eliezer Yudkowsky expressed something similar when he recommended the following:

Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god.

Sam Harris expressed the whole problem even more concisely:

Total commitment to an ideology becomes indistinguishable from psychopathy.

#Ethics #Philosophy #Text