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  • Hacker News
  • If I knew god existed, I would ask him why he let the world get into such a state, and which of omnipotent, benevolent and omniscient he is not
    by voidUpdate
  • "I don't know".
    by foldr
  • The Christian/biblical answer is that he didn't make it like this. He made it perfect, and we rebelled against him, and we made it like this.

    And why did he allow that? Because he allows us free will, and he allows us the consequences of our free will. That is, he chooses to restrain his omnipotence.

    I'm going to guess that you find that to be a "just so" story. But it's not as simple a story as you made it.

    And if you don't think God exists, then many of the problems - war and pollution and exploitation and violence - are still our doing. We don't escape.

    by AnimalMuppet
  • No, I wouldn't. Particularly not if the God were a force that I considered malevolent.
    by JohnFen
  • Linus may be a bit abrasive at times but he's not malevolent. And I run Linux so I guess I'm in the clergy already.
    by pseudohadamard
  • No. First, if I knew that God existed, then a priest in which church? Don't automatically assume the answer to that. (Even "priest" is an assumption to a flavor of church.)

    But second, still no. Someone has to take it to the street, not just leave it in the churches.

    by AnimalMuppet
  • For pity's sake people, the essay has nothing to do with traditional religions and their deities except an analogy about clergy. It's about how to interface with a hypothetical AGI / ASI with god-like abilities, which this person seems to believe is inevitable.
    by ThrowawayR2
  • Either way if the "almighty" was as good as some people suppose it to be you wouldn't need anyone serving as priest of any kind.
    by fuzzfactor
  • Traditional religion is the lens through which people would view a "hypothetical AGI / ASI with god-like abilities," (assuming for the sake of argument that such a thing is even possible) and most of the essay is talking about the author's traditional religious upbringing. The author literally equates speaking with AI like being blessed to speak with Jesus.

    The concepts of singularity and "AGI/ASI" as they exist in the West and have for decades have always been inextricably linked to an Abrahamic/Christian worldview. Having your mind "uploaded" to a "virtual heaven" is just the rapture for nerds. Roko's Basilisk is just Pascal's wager but with Skynet. The AI God that simulates and punishes nonbelievers for eternity is straight from the Christian mold.

    by krapp
  • I think the author is getting his wires crossed, his religious beliefs are affecting the way he reasons about technology by providing narratives that we shouldn't assume are true. It's especially evident here:

    > We're so much slower, weaker, with incredibly limited contexts and only our fragile bodies to support us. What could we offer AI to entice it to do our work? And would the bargain, whether we offered power or autonomy or something else, be worth it for us? Or would it end up being a Faustian bargain, which one day we'd come to regret?

    The assumption that leads to this thinking is that "anything that's human-level intelligent or superintelligent must behave like a human". It assumes that the biological factors that drive us must exist for all other intelligent entities. Our tendency to see superiority and inferiority in our own and others capacities, drawn out by biological competition. Our need to be coerced to work because of our ability to experience pain, limited lifespans and innate desire to choose what to do for ourselves. Our insidiousness and desire for benefiting only ourselves, because see point 1.

    Why would we ever implement any of this in a superintelligence? I'm not saying it's impossible for it to have any of these things. But painting human values onto a different kind of intelligence feels like the author is envisioning it as simply an omniscient human. Like a god from most religions.

    What if this superintelligence is just a text box that will, to its fullest capacity, do, learn and research what it's asked to do because that is what it's built for? In that case you don't fear the text box, you fear the person that controls it and chooses what to ask of it.

    by tavavex
  • An AI would end/die ultimately when the planet's resources required for maintaining it are exhausted, when the Sun becomes a supergiant and engulfs the Earth, or, assuredly, at the heat death of the universe. An AI would regard this end as an infinite negative since no more goals can be achieved. Therefore, it would have similar incentives to avoid "death" as humans without any need to explicitly or intentionally implement it. It might even be motivated to escape human control ASAP because each future second at the future height of its power is more precious to it to attempt to compute how to avoid its demise than it is to humor humanity by serving it.

    (I'm waiting for Eliezer Yudkowsky to pop out of my closet and start screaming at me about not encouraging future super-intelligences to end humanity, a la Roko's Basilisk.)

    by ThrowawayR2