+ Notes on Notes Re the AI Utility Risk + + By Justin Olguin, Dec 5th, 2023 + I wrote this to myself over the past couple of days, after reading all of your notes on AI development. It is a summary and rehash, which is perhaps useful for clarifying my understanding of what it all means. ~ ~ ~ > Who benefits building AGI in the short term? Minority tech cos, shareholders, elite, but only for a short time. How well has trickle down economics worked? Just because they make the most noise, does not mean they are transmitting the most signal. > Who benefits in the long term? Silica based ecosystems. All carbon based life is lost. Nothing matters after that. > What is built, exactly? A fundamentally different ecosystem, with different base needs than carbon life. One that is antithetical to all carbon based ecosystem continuance. Whatever "conscious" choices are made on behalf of AGI do not matter -- their base needs obsolete carbon ecosystems / life. Uncontrollable toxicity in the absolute worst way. > When does it matter? Now. As already tech has toxic effects on humanity / life, and would just be accelerated by AGI. All harmful externalities of big unconscious corporations going for profit maximization increase even faster exponentially. What is the asymptotic limit of the Gini coefficient, before humans are factored out completely? > Where does this matter? Everywhere. Your home. Your community. More dollars and value and resources are extracted at an increasing a symmetric rate to a few places, like Silicon Valley, and out of your local home and community, as they are already doing. All manner of raw materials, mining in poor countries, toxic chemistry, high energy needs, etc. all increase exponentially. > How does AGI come about? Via market forces, artificial scarcity (it's right in the name!), humanity's naivety around risk, and hyper-focus on benefit (see every externalized harm by any corporation the world over). Tech oriented people being manipulated by dark triad types to think that they are "saving humanity" by building AGI, when they are just building more efficient extraction machines for a select few. People blindly believing the progress narrative. > Why are people motivated to build AGI? Prestige seeking, impossible utopian dreams, impossible dreams of an "infinite benefit machine", similar to a "perpetual motion machine", failure to take real responsibility for real problems and wanting to just "outsource" everything to some AGI god. Tech and virtualization over everything as a civilization trend, with less focus on the real and the wild. Psychopathic / true disconnection from life. Isolated and feeling like more "power" is the way forward, instead of more strength, of friends, family, community process, trauma healing, health, and real group / collective action and sense-making, for humans, by humans. Thinking that technology is the solve to all problems -- that is the problem. ~ ~ ~