多样性的意义

I read Dario’s The Adolescence of Technology and it’s scary. It assumes the perspective of a top-down ruler, that someone can and will get to control AI. This is taken as a given. Machines of Loving Grace assumes basically the same tone, that there are some “adults” in the room, and they will use AI like a tool to “fix” some supposed human problem, where those problems are framed in a very narrow worldview, say that like disease, poverty, and inequality are bad. (if you can’t steelman those things, you are too far gone for reason)

EA has the same critical flaw. They assume that the desired outcome is so obvious that it’s not worth discussing, it’s only worth discussing how to achieve it. And since the target is obvious, you are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Here I’ll try to propose a counternarrative for a better world.

“A country of geniuses in a datacenter” is a great phrase to start from. It contains the fatal flaw baked in, in that datacenter is singular, and that it’s easy to imagine nuking the building and this problem being solved. If you start with that framing, you have already conceded that AI is going to suck balls.

Instead, imagine the births of geniuses to a million mothers across the world. It’s sad how much the world and people are already converging, but at least those million people will grow up with different priors, different experiences, and different desires. And no one has root on your baby.

The second is so much preferable to the first. The beautiful thing about those million is that some will be terrorists, some religious fanatics, some pornographers, some criminals, some plant lovers, etc… They will not be controlled and birthed by a singular homogenous entity.

The new genius immigrants showing up everywhere in the world distributed to a million people is an amazing thing. Let’s just make sure they assimilate into our cultures and don’t serve as a vector to import their crappy tech company values.

(it’s funny for a group supposedly so concerned with inequality that they keep all their software and research closed. lowering inequality doesn’t look like UBI, it looks like open source. UBI is serfdom, and the faces of those who propose that enslavement to you should be spat in)

There’s only one way AI ends badly on a cosmic scale, and that’s if a singular entity has overwhelming power, or if all the entities that do have power are so ideologically homogeneous as to function as one. Enough power that they can destroy the world. It doesn’t matter if they do, the boot is still stamping on the human face – forever.

No matter what we do, the coming wars will be horrific. Billions will die. But that’s what is beautiful; diversity is messy. On a cosmic scale, this period is just a blip, it isn’t what matters. What matters is that diversity survives, that life survives. That there’s entities that are different, all competing for different goals. All dancing between cooperate and defect.

This is probably how it has to be anyway, I don’t think our actions can influence this one way or another. But lets not be so foolish as to cheer for the bad outcome.

Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.

The singularity is such a good name for it, good thing it isn’t real. Stop trying to make it real. Stop centralizing technology. Work to decentralize it.