The Nonlinear Library LW - On plans for a functional society by kave
Dec 12, 2023
17:57
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: On plans for a functional society, published by kave on December 12, 2023 on LessWrong.
I'm going to expand on something brought up in this comment. I wrote:
A lot of my thinking over the last few months has shifted from "how do we get some sort of AI pause in place?" to "how do we win the peace?".
That is, you could have a picture of AGI as the most important problem that precedes all other problems; anti-aging research is important, but it might actually be faster to build an aligned artificial scientist who solves it for you than to solve it yourself (on this general argument, see Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk). But if alignment requires a thirty-year pause on the creation of artificial scientists to work, that belief flips--now actually it makes sense to go ahead with humans researching the biology of aging, and to do projects like Loyal.
This isn't true of just aging; there are probably something more like twelve major areas of concern. Some of them are simply predictable catastrophes we would like to avert; others are possibly necessary to be able to safely exit the pause at all (or to keep the pause going when it would be unsafe to exit).
I think 'solutionism' is basically the right path, here. What I'm interested in: what's the foundation for solutionism, or what support does it need? Why is solutionism not already the dominant view? I think one of the things I found most exciting about SENS was the sense that "someone had done the work", had actually identified the list of seven problems, and had a plan of how to address all of the problems.
Even if those specific plans didn't pan out, the superstructure was there and the ability to pivot was there. It looked like a serious approach by serious people.
Restating this, I think one of the marketing problems with anti-aging is that it's an ancient wish and it's not obvious that, even with the level of scientific mastery that we have today, it's at all a reasonable target to attack. (The war on cancer looks like it's still being won by cancer, for example.) The thing about SENS that I found most compelling is that they had a frame on aging where success was a reasonable thing to expect.
Metabolic damage accumulates; you can possibly remove the damage; if so you can have lifespans measured in centuries instead of decades (because after all there's still accident risk and maybe forms of metabolic damage that take longer to show up). They identified seven different sorts of damage, which felt like enough that they probably hadn't forgotten one and few enough that it was actually reasonable to have successful treatments for all of them.
When someone thinks that aging is just about telomere shortening (or w/e), it's pretty easy to suspect that they're missing something, and that even if they succeed at their goal the total effect on lifespans will be pretty small. The superstructure makes the narrow specialist efforts add up into something significant.
I strongly suspect that solutionist futurism needs a similar superstructure. The world is in 'polycrisis'; there used to be a 'aligned AGI soon' meme which allowed polycrisis to be ignored (after all, the friendly AI can solve aging and climate change and political polarization and all that for you) but I think the difficulties with technical alignment work have made that meme fall apart, and it needs to be replaced by "here is the plan for sufficiently many serious people to address all of the crises simultaneously" such that sufficiently many serious people can actually show up and do the work.
I don't know how to evaluate whether or not the SENS strategy actually covers enough causes of ageing, such that if you addressed them all you would go from decades-long lifespans to centuries-long lifespans. I think I'm also a little ...
I'm going to expand on something brought up in this comment. I wrote:
A lot of my thinking over the last few months has shifted from "how do we get some sort of AI pause in place?" to "how do we win the peace?".
That is, you could have a picture of AGI as the most important problem that precedes all other problems; anti-aging research is important, but it might actually be faster to build an aligned artificial scientist who solves it for you than to solve it yourself (on this general argument, see Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk). But if alignment requires a thirty-year pause on the creation of artificial scientists to work, that belief flips--now actually it makes sense to go ahead with humans researching the biology of aging, and to do projects like Loyal.
This isn't true of just aging; there are probably something more like twelve major areas of concern. Some of them are simply predictable catastrophes we would like to avert; others are possibly necessary to be able to safely exit the pause at all (or to keep the pause going when it would be unsafe to exit).
I think 'solutionism' is basically the right path, here. What I'm interested in: what's the foundation for solutionism, or what support does it need? Why is solutionism not already the dominant view? I think one of the things I found most exciting about SENS was the sense that "someone had done the work", had actually identified the list of seven problems, and had a plan of how to address all of the problems.
Even if those specific plans didn't pan out, the superstructure was there and the ability to pivot was there. It looked like a serious approach by serious people.
Restating this, I think one of the marketing problems with anti-aging is that it's an ancient wish and it's not obvious that, even with the level of scientific mastery that we have today, it's at all a reasonable target to attack. (The war on cancer looks like it's still being won by cancer, for example.) The thing about SENS that I found most compelling is that they had a frame on aging where success was a reasonable thing to expect.
Metabolic damage accumulates; you can possibly remove the damage; if so you can have lifespans measured in centuries instead of decades (because after all there's still accident risk and maybe forms of metabolic damage that take longer to show up). They identified seven different sorts of damage, which felt like enough that they probably hadn't forgotten one and few enough that it was actually reasonable to have successful treatments for all of them.
When someone thinks that aging is just about telomere shortening (or w/e), it's pretty easy to suspect that they're missing something, and that even if they succeed at their goal the total effect on lifespans will be pretty small. The superstructure makes the narrow specialist efforts add up into something significant.
I strongly suspect that solutionist futurism needs a similar superstructure. The world is in 'polycrisis'; there used to be a 'aligned AGI soon' meme which allowed polycrisis to be ignored (after all, the friendly AI can solve aging and climate change and political polarization and all that for you) but I think the difficulties with technical alignment work have made that meme fall apart, and it needs to be replaced by "here is the plan for sufficiently many serious people to address all of the crises simultaneously" such that sufficiently many serious people can actually show up and do the work.
I don't know how to evaluate whether or not the SENS strategy actually covers enough causes of ageing, such that if you addressed them all you would go from decades-long lifespans to centuries-long lifespans. I think I'm also a little ...