I think the central challenge of robotics from an ethical perspective is similar to AI, in that the mundane reality is less actively wrong than the idealistic fantasy. Robotics, even more than most forms of automation, is explicitly about replacing human labor with a machine, and the advantages that machine has over people are largely due to it not having moral weight. Like, you could pay a human worker the same amount of money that electricity to run a robot would cost, it would just be evil to do that. You could work your human workforce as close to 24/7 as possible outside of designated breaks for maintenance, but it would be evil to treat a person that way. At the same time, the fantasy of “hard AI” is explicitly about creating a machine that, within relevant parameters, is indistinguishable from a human being, and as the relevant parameters expand the question of whether that machine ought to be treated as a person, with the same ethical weight as a human being should become harder. If we create Data from TNG he should probably have rights, but the main reason why anyone would be willing to invest in building Data is to have someone with all the capabilities of a person but without the moral (or legal) weight. This creates a paradox of the heap; clearly there is some point at which a reproduction of human cognition deserves moral consideration, and it hasn’t been (to my knowledge) conclusively been proven impossible to reach. But the current state of the field obviously doesn’t have enough of an internal sense of self to merit that consideration, and I don’t know exactly where that line should be drawn. If the AGI crowd took their ideas seriously this would be a point of great concern, but of course they’re a derivative neofascist collection of dunces so the moral weight of a human being is basically null to begin with, neatly sidestepping this problem.

But I also think you’re right that this problem is largely a result of applying ever-improved automation technologies to a dysfunctional and unjust economic system where any improvement in efficiency effectively creates a massive surplus in the labor market. This drives down the price (i.e. how well workers are treated) and contributes to the immiseration of the larger part of humanity rather than liberating them from the demands for time and energy placed on us by the need to eat food and stuff. If we can deal with the constructed system of economic and political power that surrounds this labor it could and should be liberatory.

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I feel like there’s both an underlying value judgement underlying the way these studies are designed that leads to yet another example of AI experiments spitting out the exact result they were told to. This was most obvious in the second experiment described in the article about generating ideas for research. The fact that both AI and human respondents had to fit a format to hide stylistic tells suggests that those tells don’t matter. Similarly these experiments are designed around the assumption that reddit posts are a meaningful illustration of empathy and that there’s no value in actually sharing space and attention with another person. While I’m sure they would phrase it as trying to control for extraneous factors (i.e. to make sure that the only difference perceivable is in the level of empathy), this presupposes that style, affect, mode of communication, etc. don’t actually have any value in showing empathy, creativity, or whatever, which is blatantly absurd to anyone who has actually interacted with a human person.

From a quick scan of some of the documents it looks like the meat of the claim here is that he didn’t use AI to do the exam for him, and the normal (terrible) AI detector didn’t flag it, but one of the reviewers was able to fine tune their prompt until it spat out something sufficiently similar to the suspect submission.

I don’t have enough data or expertise to weigh in on whether this claim is plausible or accurate, but in either case AI looks bad. Either it allowed Mr Yang to cheat on his PhD or else it allowed an overzealous bureaucrat to invent the evidence needed to make it look like he had cheated. It doesn’t take a lawyer to see how that possibility could be abused by bad-faith actors in any number of arenas.

Man, I’m so glad I checked out on that whole environment and always so so sad when anything from that group escapes containment. It’s such a reductive and myopic view of what science is and what people are capable of.

Super exponential progress is one thing, but what can it do to my OT levels? Is it run by one of the Enlightened Masters? Is it responsive to Auditing Tech?

Rationalist fashion: pretend there’s no difference between “can” and “should”

Ah yes, socialists. Famous for wearing only identical jumpsuits with their ID numbers on the back next to the picture of Lenin. Or something I don’t know what they think socialists believe anymore.