Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…o obvious. But yeah, if AI accelerates technological progress, it could become technically possible to settle spread out into space much sooner than it seems from a kind of common sense point of view. And in particular, we're not talking about humans going out. We're talking about sending AI, like small AI probes out that can then replicate themselves, build solar panels when they arrive somewhere. But like the way this would likely work by default now is a land grab type situation where just whoever launches their stuff the first, claims all the stars. And that's where like Most of all the energy and matter is like 99.9 with I think 20 nines after it is of all matter and energy is like accessible matter and energy is not on the earth. So from a kind of really big picture perspective, like ultimately what matters is what happens with space. Yeah, there's basically like no one talking about this or thinking about Is there anything in current laws that could set stronger precedents here about how this would happen and making sure it's not just a land grab and maybe thinking about even just modeling the dynamics of this? It seems like there might be a kind of whoever gets there first can't be dislodged type effect because if you arrive first, then you've already built an industrial base out in space and then it's hard for people following you to then displace you later. We don't actually know if that's how it would work, but it seems like at least good to understand if there's a massive first mover advantage or not. So this would be a kind of an area where people could do more research. I think it could be quite cool to have an institute for space governance. This is another startup idea. There's A specialist think tank that's just like, we've got all the experts on this topic. We're thinking about it. And then the idea would be like, when people are like, oh, this might actually happen soon, they would turn to that group as the experts. Yeah, I don't know if you've had an episode about gradual disempowerment, but that's another one on this list that is quite likely to me as a kind of, even if we had aligned AI and avoided concentration of power, things could just move in a way that humans get competed and the economy becomes pretty unfriendly towards us. That seems like quite a likely thing to happen to me and no one really seems to have a proposal of how to prevent that. I guess basically the plan right now is like use the aligned AI to advise us on how to avoid that outcome, which might work. But this is like very few people thinking about this. It gets into your point earlier about visions for what a good outcome would look like. There's like very little material on that really. People just, they're just like, well, the culture series. That's pretty much what we got, which is like leaving a lot to be desired. This is a bit of a, I don't want to shortcut your list if there's more you want to add, but one idea that I've been coming back to over and over again is writing utopian fiction to just try to make the future the goal state a little more concrete. I think we've seen a little bit of evidence this last couple weeks that could even have a positive effect as it flows through the training data and gives AIs a conception of themselves based on our imagination of what they maybe should be like in a mature state. Any feedback on that idea writ large or if somebody was actually going to go try to seek to steer the future through utopian fiction, any advice you would give them? I heard people speculate about ideas like, can you flood the internet with positive training data and therefore influence the values of that? I don't, I presume there's a lot of reasons why that wouldn't work. With utopian fiction in particular, I do think one thing I would say is the track record is very bad. Like most people who've tried to write a utopia, when you look back on it, just seems like a dystopia to us today. And like, It's just very hard to not be very trapped in the values of your times. So I'm quite into the idea of what we should be shooting for is this idea from Will MacAskill, which he calls a Viotopia, which is not specifying a particular end state, but it's trying to just get civilization in a better position to navigate to the best end state later. So for example, one thing that would help is not having an irreversible essential risk, because then you've cut down a lot of options. But also, not, it seems not having an authoritarian government, again, would help to preserve debate and mean you have more options to navigate the future. Having more information about what's happening, these are the kind of things that seem robustly good for navigating things that a lot of people could agree on, even if we don't know the particular end state. The analogy like Will uses here is like, imagine if you're lost in the wilderness and you don't know which way to go to escape. You might, but you might still be able to say, well, I need to get water, I need to get to higher ground so I can look around. And these would still be robustly positive goals to work towards. And then like, hopefully from there later, you'd have a chance to figure out which direction you should actually walk in.…

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