The Nonlinear Library LW - Deep atheism and AI risk by Joe Carlsmith
Jan 4, 2024
50:13
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Deep atheism and AI risk, published by Joe Carlsmith on January 4, 2024 on LessWrong.
(Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.
This essay is part of a series I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, and for a bit more about the series as a whole.)
In my last essay, I talked about the possibility of "gentleness" towards various non-human Others - for example, animals, aliens, and AI systems. But I also highlighted the possibility of "getting eaten," in the way that Timothy Treadwell gets eaten by a bear in Herzog's Grizzly Man: that is, eaten in the midst of an attempt at gentleness.
Herzog accuses Treadwell of failing to take seriously the "overwhelming indifference of Nature." And I think we can see some of the discourse about AI risk - and in particular, the strand that descends from the rationalists, and from the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular - as animated by an existential orientation similar to Herzog's: one that approaches Nature (and also, bare intelligence) with a certain kind of fundamental mistrust. I call this orientation "deep atheism." This essay tries to point at it.
Baby-eaters
Recall, from my last essay, that dead bear cub, and its severed arm - torn off, Herzog supposes, by a male bear seeking to stop a female from lactating. The suffering of children has always been an especially vivid objection to God's benevolence. Dostoyevsky's Ivan, famously, refuses heaven in protest. And see also, the theologian David Bentley Hart: "In those five-minute patches here and there when I lose faith ... it's the suffering of children that occasions it, and that alone."
Yudkowsky has his own version: "baby-eaters." Thus, he ridicules the wishful thinking of the "group selectionists," who predicted/hoped that predator populations would evolve an instinct to restrain their breeding in order to conserve the supply of prey.
Indeed, Yudkowsky made baby-eating a central sin in the story "Three Worlds Collide," in which humans encounter a crystalline, insectile alien species that eats their own (sentient, suffering) children. And this behavior is a core, reflectively-endorsed feature of the alien morality - one that they did not alter once they could. The word "good," in human language, translates as "to eat children," in theirs.
And Yudkowsky points to less fictional/artificial examples of Nature's brutality as well. For example, the parasitic wasps that put Darwin in problems-of-evil mode[2] (see here, for nightmare-ish, inside-the-caterpillar imagery of the larvae eating their way out from the inside). Or the old elephants who die of starvation when their last set of teeth falls out.
Part of the vibe, here, is that old (albeit: still-underrated) thing, from Tennyson, about the color of nature's teeth and claws. Dawkins, as often, is eloquent:
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.
Indeed: maybe, for Hart, it is the suffering of human children that most challenges God's goodness. But I always felt that wild animals were the simpler case. Human children live, more, in the domain of human choices, and thus, of the so-called "free will defense," according to which God gave us freedom, and freedom gave us evil, and it's all worth it.
"The Forest Fire," by Piero di Cosimo. (Image source here.)
...
(Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.
This essay is part of a series I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, and for a bit more about the series as a whole.)
In my last essay, I talked about the possibility of "gentleness" towards various non-human Others - for example, animals, aliens, and AI systems. But I also highlighted the possibility of "getting eaten," in the way that Timothy Treadwell gets eaten by a bear in Herzog's Grizzly Man: that is, eaten in the midst of an attempt at gentleness.
Herzog accuses Treadwell of failing to take seriously the "overwhelming indifference of Nature." And I think we can see some of the discourse about AI risk - and in particular, the strand that descends from the rationalists, and from the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular - as animated by an existential orientation similar to Herzog's: one that approaches Nature (and also, bare intelligence) with a certain kind of fundamental mistrust. I call this orientation "deep atheism." This essay tries to point at it.
Baby-eaters
Recall, from my last essay, that dead bear cub, and its severed arm - torn off, Herzog supposes, by a male bear seeking to stop a female from lactating. The suffering of children has always been an especially vivid objection to God's benevolence. Dostoyevsky's Ivan, famously, refuses heaven in protest. And see also, the theologian David Bentley Hart: "In those five-minute patches here and there when I lose faith ... it's the suffering of children that occasions it, and that alone."
Yudkowsky has his own version: "baby-eaters." Thus, he ridicules the wishful thinking of the "group selectionists," who predicted/hoped that predator populations would evolve an instinct to restrain their breeding in order to conserve the supply of prey.
Indeed, Yudkowsky made baby-eating a central sin in the story "Three Worlds Collide," in which humans encounter a crystalline, insectile alien species that eats their own (sentient, suffering) children. And this behavior is a core, reflectively-endorsed feature of the alien morality - one that they did not alter once they could. The word "good," in human language, translates as "to eat children," in theirs.
And Yudkowsky points to less fictional/artificial examples of Nature's brutality as well. For example, the parasitic wasps that put Darwin in problems-of-evil mode[2] (see here, for nightmare-ish, inside-the-caterpillar imagery of the larvae eating their way out from the inside). Or the old elephants who die of starvation when their last set of teeth falls out.
Part of the vibe, here, is that old (albeit: still-underrated) thing, from Tennyson, about the color of nature's teeth and claws. Dawkins, as often, is eloquent:
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.
Indeed: maybe, for Hart, it is the suffering of human children that most challenges God's goodness. But I always felt that wild animals were the simpler case. Human children live, more, in the domain of human choices, and thus, of the so-called "free will defense," according to which God gave us freedom, and freedom gave us evil, and it's all worth it.
"The Forest Fire," by Piero di Cosimo. (Image source here.)
...