On the last day of the year, I am taking a few minutes to linger on this. At face value, most would agree with this, myself included. But I think we can dive one layer deeper. There are different schools of thoughts whether mankind is inherently good or evil. Over the years, I have become pretty firm believer that every person has the innate capacity for both good and evil, and the outcome is determined by both character and circumstances. Solzhenitsyn famously wrote (quote by Gemini):
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."
If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.
I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.
We are also lucky a miscalculation didn’t occur during the Cold War resulting in millions of nuked folks. But, not sure what the alternative is. Best idea I’ve heard is for everyone to stop reproducing.
I totally understand the need for weapons. It is just makes me sad.
And I think Solzhenitsyn is wrong. There are psychopathic people that have no good in their hearts. Sure, with the right upbringing that could be kind and good but at a given moment they are what they are... psychopaths.
More to the point, "technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral, it just exists". Ultimately all tools can be used for good or bad purposes and what matters is the people who wield them.
This is separate from the argument over whether MAD is philosophically good. MAD is not an argument about technology. "Peace through strength" does indeed require the occasional display of strength, to maintain deterrence. Good and bad (morals) are not the right frame to understand deterrence, rather emotions: fear, confidence, and security.
Solzhenitsyn can be read as either a humanist or an ethicist: either the bridgehead of good is sufficient to redeem everyone from war and morality demands pacifism, or all military doctrines must be submitted to independent review to check that we do not give the "unuprooted small corner of evil" oxygen. Crucially, these are both judgements about ourselves and not about the foes who seek to destroy us, who indeed consider themselves to have "the best of all hearts". In this sense, Solzhenitsyn contributes to the cycle of violence: if both sides are ethicists, and their ethical councils have different conclusions, the result is not just fundamentalism but a fundamentalism justified by ethical review.
Fear, anger, disgust are the ultimate drivers of conflict. Can we conquer them? Of course not, they are the base emotions, part of being human. But can there be a better way of handling them in geopolitics? Yes - if leaders are focused on helping not just themselves feel safe, but their enemies as well. This is the higher level beyond MAD - not mutual fear, but mutual security. This is why USAID was great foreign policy and cheap for its benefits. This is why weapons are sold to allies despite the fact that their interests may not be fully aligned with ours. Weapons are fundamental to security, which at the end of the day is a feeling and not a guarantee against attack or repercussions from an attack, and these feelings of security are what reduces the incidence and frequence of war.
I am getting tired of participating in this community for many reasons, but this specific reason is one of the most tiring ones.
But there's seemingly nowhere else to go, but maybe small Discord servers where you can meet people and share honest opinions that are real and agree to disagree without penalty.
Everyone should feel free to express harmless opinions.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me for this comment is proving my point.
Edit (for adastra22): I'm not sure that me providing a list of specific modifications to Rust syntax is meaningful to anyone anyway. I'm just a nobody. And it should be OK for people to express personal opinions that hint towards something being wrong without also being required to solve the problem. That's just life.
> This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it.
What about "Alligator Alcatraz", that has been called "concentration camp" [1] (so comparable with a gulag), or where the Korean detainees from the raid on the Hyundai/LG plant ended up, alleging utterly horrible conditions [2]? And there's bound to be more places like the latter, that was most likely just the tip of the iceberg and we only know about the conditions there because the South Korean government raised a huge stink and got the workers out of there.
Okay, Alcatraz 2.0 did get suspended in August to my knowledge, but that's only temporary. It's bound to get the legal issues cleaned up and then be re-opened - or the case makes its way through to the Supreme Court with the same result to be expected.
I do not agree with that. In some cases it is acceptable to detain non-citizens for immigration-related offenses, but only if they receive due process to establish that they indeed should be detained.
Any denial of due process to any person is a gross violation of our most important right. Without the guarantee of due process to everyone, no one has any rights because those in power can violate rights at a whim.
There have been reported cases where ICE just ignored people's legal residence status or that they also snatched up citizens who didn't have paperwork on them just for "walking while black".
ICE doesn't reliably make any distinction, not since they hired thugs off of the streets and issued arrest quotas. Doesn't matter if the arrested have to be released later on.
And it is already trending down today, I wonder how long it will stay up and how long it will take the average investor to figure out NVDA isn't buying INTC on the open market and driving up the price.
It was intel culture at one time - when I started, everyone got a card to wear with your badge with intel values, there were only 6 and ‘customer orientation’ was one. It definitely influenced my personal development, but was clearly not adopted equally across the company.
> Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values
I am in the early phases of collecting my thoughts on this topic so bear with me, but it this a bad thing?
AI models will have a world view. I think I prefer them having a western world view, as that has built our modern society and has proven to be most successful in making the lives of people better.
At the very minimum I would want a model to document its world view, and be aligned to it so that it does not try to socially engineer me to surreptitiously change mine.
> I think I prefer them having a western world view,
What worries me is that the current "western world view" of America is not the same as the western world view we've shared with them since the cold war. The trend is towards the same kind of values and behaviour we see in the Islamic Republic and the Russian Federation. If that sort of "western world view" gets baked into the intelligent infrastructure, it may be very hard to change course in the future. For example dissidence and wrongthink is going to get harder and harder.
I think the worry is that there’s no fixed definitions here, so the executive can use this to exert partisan or ideological pressure on model providers.
Every four years the models get RLHF’d to switch between thinking guns are amazing vs thinking guns are terrible.
> Every four years the models get RLHF’d to switch between thinking guns are amazing vs thinking guns are terrible.
I may be naive, but on this specific case, I am hoping that an AI could lead us to a somewhat objective truth. There seems to be enough data points to make some conclusion here. For example, most/all counties in Europe have less gun violence than the US, but there are at least two EU counties with high gun ownership (Finland and Austria) that also have low gun violence. The gun ownership issue is so polarized these days, I don’t think we can trust most people to make reason based arguments about it. Maybe an AI could help us synthesize and interpret the data dispassionately.
Yeah I mean you'd want to take a look at the plan to get a bigger picture, it reflects a specific set of values which are not universally shared. This should led to the development of European models, but it feels inefficient to duplicate the work in each country/region just because open source models are planned to be used as trojan horses for values.
> I think I prefer them having a western world view, as that has built our modern society and has proven to be most successful in making the lives of people better.
Highly debatable, and most people anywhere would probably say the same thing about whatever world view they hold.
"Western" != "American": I grew up in a country where even the police are not, and do not wish to be, routinely armed.
Even then, there is an important difference between de-facto and de-jure rules. Fun fact: even North Korea has a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and the right vote*. They don't do these things as we would understand any of those words, but they have those things right there in the constitution.
So: does the USA, as it exists today, represent the values you want? Can you honestly say, hand on heart, that Alligator Alcatraz should be a thing your AI has been trained to support? Or that it's fine for Qatar to donate a 747 that becomes part of the library of the current president, not the office of the president, when his term in office comes to an end?
I won't list everything, this isn't the place for that, but even if we wind the clock back a few years, do you (/we) want an AI aligned with a political circus of kayfabe that distracts us from the real political machinations?
Of course, this is still USA-focused.
I'd say that what really made a difference to our quality of life wasn't even the American political system: there were massive improvements to human existence starting with the first industrial revolution in the UK in the 1760s, but the social and political nature of the world back then was so bleak that communism got invented a century later and introduced what was at the time controversial ideas like "women are not property" and "universal free education is good", and the USA's systems changed substantially several times since then (at a minimum Civil War, New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement).
The "meta system" that allows change can be considered good, but not uniquely so if you compare this to the Russian Revolution getting rid of the Tzars and a 40 years later they were in orbit (and this despite the Holodomor and WW2) and then threw off these shackles with Glasnost and the fall of the USSR (and note there that in Russia specifically, not all the former soviet countries but specifically Russia, the freedom gained failed to bring material improvements and the lives of those living through it were, in aggregate, made worse despite that freedom), and similar stories with the Chinese starting with dangerous incompetence (Four Pests campaign) and now in a position where "which is more powerful, them or the USA?" is a matter of which measure you use rather than it being obvious.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."
If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.
I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.
(edit: grammar, slight rewording)