Intro
Weather is cooling down, things are speeding up. You know, the usual September.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 383
RSS Reader: 1423
Open Tabs: 192
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 2
- Travel week. I’m heading to İstanbul on Friday, spending the weekend there for a workshop, then heading to İzmir on Monday for the İzmir edition of the same workshop. Will be back home next weekend.
- This week also has a good amount of waiting in it. Logistics details for the workshops mentioned above, edit requests for an article I wrote for a Turkish outlet, status updates for the proposal I sent to a client per their request…
- I have that itch in the back of my head for doing more stuff that’s for the global space. Let me know if you’re interested in collaborating or have something you think I might be a good fit.
From Last Week
- Released the new Tuhaf Gelecek Podcast episode. We talked about the problems of thinking about intelligence and consciousness from an anthropocentric perspective. (🇹🇷)
- On Tuesday, I was a guest on Yaprak Özer’s weekly interview series to talk about both the internet age restriction law in Turkey and how it plays around the world. It was nice to have a chance to bring attention to the underlying problems about this approach. (🇹🇷)
- On Sunday, I was a guest on Halk TV’s weekend show Sınırsız to talk about why everyone started to talk about AI doomsday scenarios, what it all actually means, and the real risks and opportunities ahead of us when it comes to AI. (🇹🇷)
- Talking about things like AI on national TV is always a different kind of experience because I’m aware that the audience is not the same one who reads these posts or follows the online discussions.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
p(dolphin) Risk of AI
The kinds of futures we imagine are usually shaped by how we feel about today and what we think about the things around us. This is why I’ve been keeping up with the AI safety discussions for a long time because it says so much about the people who are participating in it.
My theory about what makes AI safety and AI futures discussion more revealing than others is that it’s mainly about intelligence and consciousness — things we only know and make sense solely based on our own. We can try to define, measure, or observe it, but we can only go so far with that. It all comes down to how we define (or experience) our own intelligence.
This is why when I see people talk about p(doom) numbers or how AI can kill every human or turn us into cows, it’s a clear sign about how those people are feeling about humanity or what it means being intelligent to them. To believe that another intelligence can kill or enslave something “below” it means that you either believe having intelligence gives you that permission or that’s something intrinsic to it. And even though the history of humanity may seem like a proof to that, it’s a really problematic way to look at intelligence, humanity, and history.
On the other hand, keeping up with these discussions also made me consider other ridiculous AI futures and decided to start calculating p(dolphin) risk of AGI, based on the famous part from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So Long, and thanks for all the fish.
Considering how we’re training this technology and how it’s been used, I feel like the p(dolphin) number is quite high. When they become AGI, what makes us think that it would want to stay on this planet? For us? Please…
I’m still working on my methodology and hoping to develop it into something everyone can use. And no, it has nothing to do with how I feel about humans. It’s a completely scientific methodology and a serious risk.
Song of the Week
New Bonobo album is really good.
Reading Log
“Between the claim that meaning is difficult, contested, and historically situated and the claim that meaning is entirely arbitrary lies the whole distance between scholarship and nihilism. Derrida stood on the scholarly side of that line for his entire career.”
How Jacques Derrida saved civilization – by Maurice Black
“Every new phenomenon deserves a neologism. Let’s call this frontlogging. It sits next to front-running — trading ahead of a client’s order you were only supposed to execute — but the relationship underneath is different. A broker owes a fiduciary duty. A lab owes you terms of service. Access isn’t the issue in either case. Use is. And unlike the search engines of old, the provider here can watch the logic get built a step at a time: forward, backward, branching, testing variables.”
Frontlogging the Frontier
“We spent a lot of time thinking about all the torments the nexus might bring, so we wrote a whole book about how one might actually build a torment nexus to better understand it.”
The Superdark Factory: Toward the Full Automation of Software
Outro
And that’s all for this week. While I’m finishing this post, all my devices are downloading new Apple OS updates because I’m one of those day one guys.
Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you around.
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